Minecraft accessible for voiceover users

I wrote this out before I realized how old this post was, but screw it, I poured my heart into it. Here goes.

As someone who played Minecraft for 6 years of my life, I want to say that I would love, love, love this to happen. It's my favorite game of all time because of what it's done for me. Long story short, I owe my technical skills, personality, and romantic relationship to Minecraft. It is an incredible game which has brought incalculable benefits to my life. That's why it breaks my heart to say that, no, we will likely never get to play this game without sight. First, I must add that I have not played Minecraft in over 3 years due to my vision, so my knowledge of the game will likely be laughably out of date. Basically, I'm a Minecraft boomer, but the base game probably hasn't changed too much. Second, this is a long post. I'm doing my best to condense a game with near-infinite potential into a few paragraphs of text. Minecraft's scope is far, far, far wider than most other games. It's not my intention to come across as passive-aggressive or hostile. I ask a lot of questions to try and communicate the breadth, depth, and variety of everything this game has to offer. Minecraft is not your typical FPS, RPG, RTS, or survival horror, or what have you. This game is so much more than that. Minecraft blurs the line between videogame and creativity tool. It is a three-dimensional canvas where the only limits are your imagination and your CPU. seriously, this thing is more resource-intensive than Chrome. If you don't want to read on, imagine Minecraft as a world built out of Lego blocks. You can arrange them however you like. You have as many blocks to play with as you could ever possibly want. You can defy gravity and physics. You can build simple circuits to push blocks around. You can construct automated storage systems and simple, functional calculators, if you like. Like I said, the possibilities are endless, and Microsoft is constantly updating the game with more and more and more content.

At its core, Minecraft is a 3D voxel sandbox. The world is built out of cubes which are grouped in chunks that are 16 blocks square and (when I last played), 256 blocks high. Most of that height is empty air with ground level at around layer 64. When I played, there were hundreds of blocks: grass, dirt, farmland, mycelium, smooth stone, cobblestone, mossy cobblestone, water, lava, multiple types of wood, chests, doors, fences, fence gates, pressure plates, levers, redstone to create circuits with Boolean logic, stairs which could be placed in almost any orientation and connect with adjacent stair blocks, half blocks which could be put towards the bottom or towards the top of a block space, crafting tables to create tools and weapons, furnaces to smelt ore and cook food, cauldrons to hold water, hoppers to feed items into chests or furnaces or other interactable blocks, brewing stands for potion making. That's not even considering passive and aggressive creatures. Imagine our world but made from giant, 1-meter, blocks. With enough patience, I have no doubt that a Minecraft world could be made accessible, but there are two huge hurdles: worlds are both procedurally generated and dynamic.

Every Minecraft world, single player and multi-player, is completely unique and unlike any other. Yes, people do create custom adventure maps, but these are almost always made by tiny teams, or even one single person. Most of the time, you won't be playing these. You'll probably be in a world on your own, with friends, or on a public server. Unless someone in your group is an MCedit wizard, that world will be procedurally generated from a hash. When you spawn, you might be on a beach, or in a forest, or in a swamp, or on a mountain. It's impossible to say which and even more impossible to say just how dense that forest is, how narrow or curved that beach is, or how tall or snowy that mountain might be. Start walking around, and you'll soon find yourself in a savannah, a desert, or a swamp. There are even ocean biomes. That's not even getting into there being multiple worlds, each with their own completely unique aesthetic and block types. This means that there would be absurd amounts of content that the game would have to describe. What block is your cursor pointed at? What blocks are around it? Perhaps you'd like to know the position of the sun or moon overhead to know when it will get dark or light out. Monsters spawn at night, which makes it dangerous to be out. Do you want the vista described? How does one describe a blocky hill with some blocky trees without overloading the player while still providing enough information to get around and not fall off a ledge? How about a subterranean ravine with waterfalls, narrow pathways way above, and pools of lava? Many of these are not laid out to follow the grid of the world and instead run diagonally, making the walls quite jagged and chunky. Perhaps there is a smooth floor with a single block missing. It would be really annoying to fall into that 1-block-deep hole and have to jump out. What if there's a coal ore block on the nearby? Does the player want to know about it? Maybe they're loaded to the brim with coal already? Perhaps they're coal-starved and looking for any scrap of fuel. How does one describe the vein of coal behind that block once mined? How does one communicate that there's a lake of lava directly above, and that you absolutely should not mine the ceiling, lest you want a quick death? How does one accurately describe the size, shape, and slope of a dark cave? A cave which has tiny passages that lead to other caves? Passages so small that sighted players must add markers or risk being stuck underground forever? What if you mine a wall and cause a chunk of gravel to come falling down? Gravel blocks have gravity. You can even get stuck underneath them in a cave-in and suffocate.

That's not even to mention all the creatures, or mobs as they're called. Some of them make plenty of noise like zombies. Others, like skeletons, stay at a far distance and snipe you with arrows. There's also the creeper, bane of every single survival player, which stays completely silent until it's too late. Creepers hiss for a bit and then blow up. There's a good chance they'll take your buildings, and your life, along with themselves. These mobs also leave behind items for you to pick up. Mining blocks also does this. You must get close enough to suck them up in your inventory. Should the game add audio beacons for dropped items? What if you died and left behind an inventory-full of stuff? That's going to be awfully loud and cacophonous. Maybe there's a wall or some blocks between you and the items. How best to go about communicating this and suggesting a viable path to get to said items? Oh yes, what about mobs like Endermen? Tall, slender, pitch-black creatures that are whipped into a rage simply because your crosshairs fall upon them. Oh, and they teleport and can pick up and move blocks. You're not the only one who can modify the world. Imagine you come across an abandoned mineshaft or stronghold? Perhaps, since these are pregenerated structures, they could be described with audio. What about when you decide to set up your base of operations in a stronghold? How is the game to know that the antechamber to the portal to "the end" world is now your dining room?

Speaking of player-created objects, how would the game be able to tell that a series of fence posts with wooden pressure plates stuck on top and some wooden stair blocks around it are meant to represent a table? Perhaps someone would like to add doors behind each stair block to make high-back chairs. I played, and later administrated, in a very popular Minecraft server. We had a custom, curated world that was designed to recreate the world of a popular cartoon? Maybe data can be added to naturally generated structures in a procedurally generated world so that the game can give basic descriptions of what you're looking at, but what about a world built from scratch by a human? The game won't be able to tell a mountain from a motorway. Creative mode can eliminate the problems of resource collection and hostile monsters, but that still leaves world description to tackle.

I haven't even talked about chat. Yes, text-to-speech can read out messages from other players, but keep in mind that that same text-to-speech is also being used to describe the world around you. This might be okay on a small server with a few friends, but what if you go on a popular server? What if the server has dozens or hundreds of players all vying for chat space? What if that server also has plugins which add roleplaying features such as classes, levels, and skills? Those messages could get completely lost in the sea of chatter. You would never know that you just leveled up or unlocked some crazy magic that would seriously help you out.

These are all serious hurdles to making Minecraft accessible. Could it be done in some rudimentary form? Maybe, if you simplified the maps, nerfed the mobs, and made other concessions and compromises. This could work for a while, but what if you decide to build a house and add furniture? What if you transform a cave into a house? What if you want to recreate a structure from another videogame? How will the game know that the collection of clay, iron blocks, glass, iron bars, and polished stone is supposed to represent a vault or a dungeon or a laboratory? What if your friend builds something and doesn't tell you about it? What happens if another player destroys your build and turns your house into something more akin to flaming Swiss cheese? If we simplify and simply instruct the game to list what materials are in front and near the player, then we end up with a list of items that has absolutely no meaning and will be outdated in a matter of seconds as the player walks or sprints around. That doesn't sound like fun at all to me. I didn't even mention mods, but the base game is so overstuffed with content that it's not even worth addressing the topic. Maybe limiting the player to a static, bird's-eye view of blocks could make it accessible, but you've now taken a world that is literal millions of cubic kilometers and forced it to become a 2.5D or even simply 2D plane of tiles on a touchscreen

Minecraft has done so much for me. I would not have discovered my true self, found a career path, or met a loving partner without it. Truthfully, I do not think I would be alive without Minecraft. I want nothing more than to play it again, but I just can't imagine a way we could experience it without sight. Nothing would bring me more joy than for Microsoft, Mojang, or a modder to prove me wrong and make it accessible. Hell, I'll take the Bedrock version. It doesn't need to be Java.