Minecraft
Creativity games are nothing new. In fact certain individuals made considerably cushy livings off the likes of The Sims, Sim City, Spore, and various Tycoon games, most of which cast players in the role of an omnipotent power micromanaging the details of nuclear families or amusement parks, and everything in between. However the one thing these games never had was that sense of genuine accomplishment. When you built a house in The Sims, you didn't actually "build" the house - you just traced out walls and selected the trimmings. When you built a city in Sim City, you just marked off the various zones and districts while the passage of time took care of everything for you. All things considered, in theses games that sense of accomplishment is a very superficial and fleeting sensation.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/KennyCraft.png
Minecraft changes everything. What is done in that game can be fairly attributed to the efforts of the player. When you built a house in Minecraft, you actually had to fashion the tools and gather the materials. You had to mark out the land and you had to build it brick by brick. It took a lot of work and a lot of man hours, but goddamn was it well worth it.
For the uninitiated, Minecraft is an indie game created by the enigmatic Swedish developer Markus "Notch" Persson and both sold and played through www.Minecraft.net [http://www.minecraft.net/] for roughly $30CND. It has no objectives, no rules, and aside from the limits of ceiling and bedrock, no restrictions. All you have is your imagination and a wide open world full of mountains, fields, oceans, deserts, and tundra, in which to build pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Essentially, it's digital Lego in infinite supply. It's also damn well brilliant.
When you first crack open Minecraft, you're plopped into a sea of possibility. Endless swathes of land roll out in every direction begging to be explored; gentle hills littered with trees to the east, jagged mountains to the west, snowy expanses to the north, and barren deserts to the south (to illustrate a quick example). Maps are randomly generated and I'm quite confident that you can walk for hours in a straight line in any given direction and never run out of things to see. And should you ever tire of the surface, there's an exciting world to be discovered underground as cave networks twist and turn through the earth, skirting along bedrock and winding around flows of water and lava.
Of course it's one wonderful thing to have a massive world to explore, but it's something else entirely to have that very world at the mercy of your imagination. Except for air and bedrock, everything in Minecraft can be harvested and rearranged, allowing for incredible feats of amateur engineering. With a little industry, the world can be manipulated as you see fit, one block at a time.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/Trees.png
Yet while Minecraft's biggest strength is arguably its minimal amount of interference with the desires of the player, such lack of input and direction may also prove to be a bit discouraging. Minecraft has no tutorial or instructions beyond disclosing its inputs under the "options" menu, which makes the first steps into the world far more challenging than is rightly reasonable. It doesn't tell you how to go about doing anything at all, gambling that the player will be patient enough to either work things out on their own, or seek necessary assistance from outside sources. Neither of these expectations strike me as being entirely acceptable. I spent the first hour or so trying to figure things out for my self, and the furthest I got was turning wood I chopped with my bare hands into multiple wooden planks and tunneling into crude hidey-holes to survive the night (more on this later).
I wasn't having fun and I was certain that I wasn't playing the game properly, so I sought out the infinitely helpful Minecraft Wiki. To get things started, here's what I had to do: chop trees for wood, turn wood into panels, turn panels into a workbench and sticks, turn sticks and panels into wooden pickaxe with workbench, use wooden pickaxe to mine stone, fashion stone pickaxe on workbench, mine coal with stone pickaxe, create torches by combining coal and sticks, build a lit shelter, pray that I survive the night, repeat. This is, quite frankly, an inexcusable amount of information to be withheld. These aren't obtuse or unnecessary ideas that are being cast aside for fear of over burdening the player with finicky details; these are core gameplay concepts that are crucial if the game is to have any measure of success.
At any rate, after the needlessly arcane and challenging first moments are endured and the player understands that they'll be constantly referring back to the Minecraft Wiki in order to make any sort of progress, the fun of Minecraft can finally be had. Hours can be spent collecting and quarrying materials for the building of marvellous monuments, and hours more when it actually comes time to craft them. And, to be entirely honest, that's all you'll be doing. The adventure is in overturning the world and hazarding the risks for the good stuff, while the reward is that single sweet moment when you take a step back and gaze upon the fruits of your labour. It's a very real sense of accomplishment to experience your brilliance and understand what it took to create it in the exact same moment. No other game achieves such a feat on the same scale as Minecraft. I hollowed out a mountain, drained a lake, levelled the land, and created my masterpiece block by meticulously placed block. And goddamn, does it ever feel good to see all that effort payoff.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/City.png
Still, Minecraft wouldn't be much of a game if there were no consequences beyond the havoc wreaked on the landscape. You have a character (made of blocks, naturally) with a health bar, and enemies come out at night to deter you from executing your blueprints. You can die, by being killed by the mobs, by falling into lava or from great heights, by drowning, or by suffocating. Far from being an omnipotent power with the natural world at your fingertips, you're actually a rather fragile and vulnerable character being constantly reminded that just because it's your world to change, it doesn't automatically mean that it's your world. Think of it as the difference between watching a life being experienced and actually experiencing a life. Or to put it more simply, you have the benefits of a god in a god game without actually being a god.
Of course perhaps the idea of living in an arcane world that's also going to spend half of your time within it trying to kill you isn't appealing, and you'd rather just tool around in a sandbox making neat things without the fear of some exploding monster coming to blow it up at night. Minecraft has that covered, since you can easily toggle the difficulty to a setting where there is no risk of dying and no enemies. I haven't tried this mode because I like the risk and challenge, but it's there nonetheless to cater to those who don't.
Speaking of game modes, Minecraft also features multiplayer, which is excellent fun because it increases player involvement through both cooperative exploration and competitive crafting at the same time. In fact I'd argue that Minecraft is best played with others because it mitigates the feelings of isolation and ultimate futility that come with lonely old single player. Play by yourself and there's no one around to admire your hard work and appreciate your efforts, whereas if you play with others, there's no shortage of inspiration and applause. And besides that, a multiplayer server just feels alive with the energies of everyone working the land with you, and is infinitely more vibrant with the colour and ideas of your peers.
<img_inline width="428" height= "240" caption="'That's what she sa-' *ahem*
A friend admires a slime on my house" align="right">http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/SphereSlime-1.png
Yet having said all this, Minecraft will only go as far as the player's imagination and investment allows. It rewards hard work and can be a massive time sink with the determination to see an exceptional build through to its completion. And this is exactly where I'm stuck: I've finished my grand project, and now I don't know what I should to with myself. Do I embark on another build or just explore the world for goodies? Having spent a not at all insignificant time doing both things, neither option seems appealing. As a game, this is Minecraft's fatal flaw. A game is supposed to give you something to do. In Minecraft this responsibility falls to you as well. So to say that your mileage will vary with Minecraft is a bit of an understatement - some will find no shortage of things to do, while others won't even be bothered to try.
Nevertheless, if I had to think of one word to describe Minecraft, it would be "addictive." Not the sort of subconscious or benign sense of addictive, but rather addictive in the way that the average smoker is addicted to cigarettes: conscious of their vice and more than ready to admit it's something they really shouldn't do, but completely unable to do anything about it. Sure, the buzz may be a bit different. After all, when people finish a cigarette, they feel relaxed and at ease (presumably - I'm not a smoker). When I finish a brilliant monument to my own ego in Minecraft, I feel like I achieved a genuine accomplishment worth bragging about: behold my doom fortress resting on ancient impenetrable bedrock miles underground, with a moat of molten lava and bastard trees that grow without sunlight! It took 20 hours to excavate and an entire hollowed out mountain range to accommodate it, but so long as the other 11 people in the server praise it, then I suppose it was time well spent.
Now if only I could tear them away from their own floating superstructures and giant recreations of Pokemon to come and visit my humble abode in the centre of the earth...
In the end, Minecraft is worth a shot, if only just to see whether or not you're the type of person that the game can sink its teeth into. Just make sure you set enough time aside for yourself just in case it does. You'll be amazed at how much of your time can be lost to it.
For this review and others like it, please visit Confederate Wing
Maet's Minecraft Tip: Aside from gentle short ambient tunes that occur sparingly and the auxiliary sounds of blocks being mined and placed (as well as rain and flowing water and the groans of mobs), Minecraft is a very empty game in the audio department. This makes it perfect for listening to podcasts and music in the background, since you can effectively devote enough attention to both to enjoy each simultaneously.
Creativity games are nothing new. In fact certain individuals made considerably cushy livings off the likes of The Sims, Sim City, Spore, and various Tycoon games, most of which cast players in the role of an omnipotent power micromanaging the details of nuclear families or amusement parks, and everything in between. However the one thing these games never had was that sense of genuine accomplishment. When you built a house in The Sims, you didn't actually "build" the house - you just traced out walls and selected the trimmings. When you built a city in Sim City, you just marked off the various zones and districts while the passage of time took care of everything for you. All things considered, in theses games that sense of accomplishment is a very superficial and fleeting sensation.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/KennyCraft.png
Minecraft changes everything. What is done in that game can be fairly attributed to the efforts of the player. When you built a house in Minecraft, you actually had to fashion the tools and gather the materials. You had to mark out the land and you had to build it brick by brick. It took a lot of work and a lot of man hours, but goddamn was it well worth it.
For the uninitiated, Minecraft is an indie game created by the enigmatic Swedish developer Markus "Notch" Persson and both sold and played through www.Minecraft.net [http://www.minecraft.net/] for roughly $30CND. It has no objectives, no rules, and aside from the limits of ceiling and bedrock, no restrictions. All you have is your imagination and a wide open world full of mountains, fields, oceans, deserts, and tundra, in which to build pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Essentially, it's digital Lego in infinite supply. It's also damn well brilliant.
When you first crack open Minecraft, you're plopped into a sea of possibility. Endless swathes of land roll out in every direction begging to be explored; gentle hills littered with trees to the east, jagged mountains to the west, snowy expanses to the north, and barren deserts to the south (to illustrate a quick example). Maps are randomly generated and I'm quite confident that you can walk for hours in a straight line in any given direction and never run out of things to see. And should you ever tire of the surface, there's an exciting world to be discovered underground as cave networks twist and turn through the earth, skirting along bedrock and winding around flows of water and lava.
Of course it's one wonderful thing to have a massive world to explore, but it's something else entirely to have that very world at the mercy of your imagination. Except for air and bedrock, everything in Minecraft can be harvested and rearranged, allowing for incredible feats of amateur engineering. With a little industry, the world can be manipulated as you see fit, one block at a time.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/Trees.png
Yet while Minecraft's biggest strength is arguably its minimal amount of interference with the desires of the player, such lack of input and direction may also prove to be a bit discouraging. Minecraft has no tutorial or instructions beyond disclosing its inputs under the "options" menu, which makes the first steps into the world far more challenging than is rightly reasonable. It doesn't tell you how to go about doing anything at all, gambling that the player will be patient enough to either work things out on their own, or seek necessary assistance from outside sources. Neither of these expectations strike me as being entirely acceptable. I spent the first hour or so trying to figure things out for my self, and the furthest I got was turning wood I chopped with my bare hands into multiple wooden planks and tunneling into crude hidey-holes to survive the night (more on this later).
I wasn't having fun and I was certain that I wasn't playing the game properly, so I sought out the infinitely helpful Minecraft Wiki. To get things started, here's what I had to do: chop trees for wood, turn wood into panels, turn panels into a workbench and sticks, turn sticks and panels into wooden pickaxe with workbench, use wooden pickaxe to mine stone, fashion stone pickaxe on workbench, mine coal with stone pickaxe, create torches by combining coal and sticks, build a lit shelter, pray that I survive the night, repeat. This is, quite frankly, an inexcusable amount of information to be withheld. These aren't obtuse or unnecessary ideas that are being cast aside for fear of over burdening the player with finicky details; these are core gameplay concepts that are crucial if the game is to have any measure of success.
At any rate, after the needlessly arcane and challenging first moments are endured and the player understands that they'll be constantly referring back to the Minecraft Wiki in order to make any sort of progress, the fun of Minecraft can finally be had. Hours can be spent collecting and quarrying materials for the building of marvellous monuments, and hours more when it actually comes time to craft them. And, to be entirely honest, that's all you'll be doing. The adventure is in overturning the world and hazarding the risks for the good stuff, while the reward is that single sweet moment when you take a step back and gaze upon the fruits of your labour. It's a very real sense of accomplishment to experience your brilliance and understand what it took to create it in the exact same moment. No other game achieves such a feat on the same scale as Minecraft. I hollowed out a mountain, drained a lake, levelled the land, and created my masterpiece block by meticulously placed block. And goddamn, does it ever feel good to see all that effort payoff.
http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/City.png
Still, Minecraft wouldn't be much of a game if there were no consequences beyond the havoc wreaked on the landscape. You have a character (made of blocks, naturally) with a health bar, and enemies come out at night to deter you from executing your blueprints. You can die, by being killed by the mobs, by falling into lava or from great heights, by drowning, or by suffocating. Far from being an omnipotent power with the natural world at your fingertips, you're actually a rather fragile and vulnerable character being constantly reminded that just because it's your world to change, it doesn't automatically mean that it's your world. Think of it as the difference between watching a life being experienced and actually experiencing a life. Or to put it more simply, you have the benefits of a god in a god game without actually being a god.
Of course perhaps the idea of living in an arcane world that's also going to spend half of your time within it trying to kill you isn't appealing, and you'd rather just tool around in a sandbox making neat things without the fear of some exploding monster coming to blow it up at night. Minecraft has that covered, since you can easily toggle the difficulty to a setting where there is no risk of dying and no enemies. I haven't tried this mode because I like the risk and challenge, but it's there nonetheless to cater to those who don't.
Speaking of game modes, Minecraft also features multiplayer, which is excellent fun because it increases player involvement through both cooperative exploration and competitive crafting at the same time. In fact I'd argue that Minecraft is best played with others because it mitigates the feelings of isolation and ultimate futility that come with lonely old single player. Play by yourself and there's no one around to admire your hard work and appreciate your efforts, whereas if you play with others, there's no shortage of inspiration and applause. And besides that, a multiplayer server just feels alive with the energies of everyone working the land with you, and is infinitely more vibrant with the colour and ideas of your peers.
<img_inline width="428" height= "240" caption="'That's what she sa-' *ahem*
A friend admires a slime on my house" align="right">http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac66/Maet32/Miscellany/SphereSlime-1.png
Yet having said all this, Minecraft will only go as far as the player's imagination and investment allows. It rewards hard work and can be a massive time sink with the determination to see an exceptional build through to its completion. And this is exactly where I'm stuck: I've finished my grand project, and now I don't know what I should to with myself. Do I embark on another build or just explore the world for goodies? Having spent a not at all insignificant time doing both things, neither option seems appealing. As a game, this is Minecraft's fatal flaw. A game is supposed to give you something to do. In Minecraft this responsibility falls to you as well. So to say that your mileage will vary with Minecraft is a bit of an understatement - some will find no shortage of things to do, while others won't even be bothered to try.
Nevertheless, if I had to think of one word to describe Minecraft, it would be "addictive." Not the sort of subconscious or benign sense of addictive, but rather addictive in the way that the average smoker is addicted to cigarettes: conscious of their vice and more than ready to admit it's something they really shouldn't do, but completely unable to do anything about it. Sure, the buzz may be a bit different. After all, when people finish a cigarette, they feel relaxed and at ease (presumably - I'm not a smoker). When I finish a brilliant monument to my own ego in Minecraft, I feel like I achieved a genuine accomplishment worth bragging about: behold my doom fortress resting on ancient impenetrable bedrock miles underground, with a moat of molten lava and bastard trees that grow without sunlight! It took 20 hours to excavate and an entire hollowed out mountain range to accommodate it, but so long as the other 11 people in the server praise it, then I suppose it was time well spent.
Now if only I could tear them away from their own floating superstructures and giant recreations of Pokemon to come and visit my humble abode in the centre of the earth...
In the end, Minecraft is worth a shot, if only just to see whether or not you're the type of person that the game can sink its teeth into. Just make sure you set enough time aside for yourself just in case it does. You'll be amazed at how much of your time can be lost to it.
For this review and others like it, please visit Confederate Wing
Maet's Minecraft Tip: Aside from gentle short ambient tunes that occur sparingly and the auxiliary sounds of blocks being mined and placed (as well as rain and flowing water and the groans of mobs), Minecraft is a very empty game in the audio department. This makes it perfect for listening to podcasts and music in the background, since you can effectively devote enough attention to both to enjoy each simultaneously.
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