(no subject)
Some words on Minecraft, and why I keep playing it (instead of doing, literally, anything else most of the time.)
I... Play a lot of games, for various reasons. Fun, Escapism, good story, boredom, ADHD fulfillment, challenge, and cooperative adventure with friends. And by a lot of games, I mean a lot of time in those games. Can you conceive of how much time you have ever spent playing a videogame? More than that, probably to some exponent.
So, like most with some personal conceit, I like to think myself to be a bit of a passive expert on games of the electronic type; What makes them work, what causes a game to be more of a burden than a distraction, that sort.
And therein I found a bit of difficulty when it came to explaining why I like Minecraft so much, and why I have possibly spent more time playing it than any other game, or series of games, combined. Until recently, I couldn't really detail to another human being what it was about, why it was fun, or even how it qualified as a game. And if you've spent close to two thousand hours (an estimate I just came up with), and you can't convey those things, it's probably time to evaluate what you're doing.
So, I did.
Now, Minecraft is one of those things I put down and pick up again. I get really into a working on something in it, then get to the point where I want to use tools outside the game to do more with the world, which is where I lose interest, because when you break it down, Minecraft is all about moving blocks from one place to another in some creative fashion, and making new blocks out of various combinations of those ones you have laying around you. Which makes it sound like a puzzle game, but it's not. Not strictly, anyway.
When it gets to the point that I want to start using external tools to play the game, I realize the game itself is defeated, and so is the fun.
here's the breakdown, for those of you who haven't played it before: The meat of the game (called survival mode), opens, with no narration or direction, with you in some random spot on a randomly generated, completely alterable world roughly three times the area of the surface of the earth, all made of blocks that represent dirt, stone, lava, wood, water, and so on, which all have different uses, behaviors and properties. If it is your first time playing, and someone just sat you there in front of the screen, you might find yourself lost, both physically and objectively, as there are no instructions telling you what to do. This is a good cue for the rest of your experience with Minecraft, as there is very little prompted of you by the game itself. Minimalism is the deceptive credo of this particular digital experience.
Now, you might find yourself in the middle of a desert, at the edge of a vast ocean or under the shade of one of thousands of blocky trees surrounding you. A single, stubby arm extends in front of you, seemingly directing you toward your inevitable journey. A row of empty boxes, red hearts and ham shanks line the bottom of your screen. There is a blue sky above you, and the skin of the earth beneath your feet. The square sun slowly arcs over your head. However odd it may seem, the broader view is invariably familiar if you've very been outside your own home.
With the movement of the mouse, the, perhaps, accidental pressing of its buttons, or that of the keyboard, you will discover that you can look and move about the world, and interact with it by clicking on the blocky world around you, as cracks crawl across the surface and you break your first piece of the pie and slide quickly downhill from there.
I could detail the whole experience from there, but, I just wanted to give you the initial taste. The direction from there is open. You could wait for night and fight against the monsters that emerge there. You could build an abode and make it touch the sky. You can go mining to the bottom of the world and discover the many minerals and perils found there. Or you could wander to the ends of the earth and beyond.
You will never, ever, be prompted to do any of this. It is all a matter of your interest and particular curiosities. And therein lies the point, and the game itself.
Compare it to another common time sink, World of Warcraft. WOW has very particular goals, courses, and roles. You pick a job class, train a few skills, get a quest, complete that quest, level up your character and your gear, and go find the next quest. Repeat as desired until either playing all the way to the last quest of the most current expansion, or until you lose interest in doing the same thing over and over again, all the while, though, doing as you are told. There are millions of people playing alongside you at any give point in time, and there are two sides to the world which constantly combat each other for fun and profit.
Minecraft has none of this, save the ability to play with other people. You are left to your own devices by the game. The only thing which will truly motivate you as a prompt is your character's hunger level, which is a facet added late in development (and represented by the aforementioned ham shanks.) every action and reaction in the game uses some energy, and eventually begins to deplete your hunger level (which, admittedly, sounds a bit backward.). This, in turn, affects your ability to regenerate health if you have been hurt, and if left unchecked, will begin to deplete your health all by itself.
This addition added some urgency to the play, because whatever else you decide to do, you will need to find food of some kind. To do that effectively, you will need some tools. And to acquire those tools, you're going to need to start breaking some things.
Herein we find the 'craft' part of Minecraft. While you can certainly choose not to, the likelihood is that you will be gathering all manner of resources and utilizing them in various ways to build all manner of contraptions to suit your need. The need to make tools means you will be needing wood and stone. Keeping a light going at night means needing coal, which will likely involve cave exploration. Getting food will mean hunting animals, gathering plants, and likely making a furnace to cook it with. All of these things lead to other discoveries, and that's where the story comes from.
You are the story.
Without being led by the nose, you will naturally come up with your own objectives and reach your own goals. the fun is in being not told what to do and yet still coming up with very clear problems to solve, and having the means to solve them all around you and in your own two hands. Every problem has a solution, and none of them you find here in Minecraft are scripted with a known outcome.
With the addition of extra realms accessible by different kinds of portals, an effective end to the game was also designed (call 'The End'), which, if you can defeat the challenge found there, you have probably exhausted the other, more vague challenges of the game, and so thus might find yourself bored with the world you've been playing in to that point. This feeling is easily solved by just starting a new world which will present a new set of circumstances and challenges, or joining into a multiplayer server.
Multiplayer adds a whole other set of facets to things. A plain server with no trimmings will add the social element of needing to get along with, or perhaps defeat, other intelligent, thinking people with a direction similar to your own.
If you're playing on a server like the one I now frequent, things like a working economy and levelable skillsets might be pasted on, adding new things to do.
And if you're playing with other people you know or get along with, you may have whole teams dedicated to particular tasks. You might go on an excavation that falls upon a horde of monsters to fight your way out of. You might plan out and build a whole city. The possibilities are endless.
So many times, those words have been uttered. Endless possibilities. Here, to me anyway, that finally seems to hold true. And it keeps being fun
I... Play a lot of games, for various reasons. Fun, Escapism, good story, boredom, ADHD fulfillment, challenge, and cooperative adventure with friends. And by a lot of games, I mean a lot of time in those games. Can you conceive of how much time you have ever spent playing a videogame? More than that, probably to some exponent.
So, like most with some personal conceit, I like to think myself to be a bit of a passive expert on games of the electronic type; What makes them work, what causes a game to be more of a burden than a distraction, that sort.
And therein I found a bit of difficulty when it came to explaining why I like Minecraft so much, and why I have possibly spent more time playing it than any other game, or series of games, combined. Until recently, I couldn't really detail to another human being what it was about, why it was fun, or even how it qualified as a game. And if you've spent close to two thousand hours (an estimate I just came up with), and you can't convey those things, it's probably time to evaluate what you're doing.
So, I did.
Now, Minecraft is one of those things I put down and pick up again. I get really into a working on something in it, then get to the point where I want to use tools outside the game to do more with the world, which is where I lose interest, because when you break it down, Minecraft is all about moving blocks from one place to another in some creative fashion, and making new blocks out of various combinations of those ones you have laying around you. Which makes it sound like a puzzle game, but it's not. Not strictly, anyway.
When it gets to the point that I want to start using external tools to play the game, I realize the game itself is defeated, and so is the fun.
here's the breakdown, for those of you who haven't played it before: The meat of the game (called survival mode), opens, with no narration or direction, with you in some random spot on a randomly generated, completely alterable world roughly three times the area of the surface of the earth, all made of blocks that represent dirt, stone, lava, wood, water, and so on, which all have different uses, behaviors and properties. If it is your first time playing, and someone just sat you there in front of the screen, you might find yourself lost, both physically and objectively, as there are no instructions telling you what to do. This is a good cue for the rest of your experience with Minecraft, as there is very little prompted of you by the game itself. Minimalism is the deceptive credo of this particular digital experience.
Now, you might find yourself in the middle of a desert, at the edge of a vast ocean or under the shade of one of thousands of blocky trees surrounding you. A single, stubby arm extends in front of you, seemingly directing you toward your inevitable journey. A row of empty boxes, red hearts and ham shanks line the bottom of your screen. There is a blue sky above you, and the skin of the earth beneath your feet. The square sun slowly arcs over your head. However odd it may seem, the broader view is invariably familiar if you've very been outside your own home.
With the movement of the mouse, the, perhaps, accidental pressing of its buttons, or that of the keyboard, you will discover that you can look and move about the world, and interact with it by clicking on the blocky world around you, as cracks crawl across the surface and you break your first piece of the pie and slide quickly downhill from there.
I could detail the whole experience from there, but, I just wanted to give you the initial taste. The direction from there is open. You could wait for night and fight against the monsters that emerge there. You could build an abode and make it touch the sky. You can go mining to the bottom of the world and discover the many minerals and perils found there. Or you could wander to the ends of the earth and beyond.
You will never, ever, be prompted to do any of this. It is all a matter of your interest and particular curiosities. And therein lies the point, and the game itself.
Compare it to another common time sink, World of Warcraft. WOW has very particular goals, courses, and roles. You pick a job class, train a few skills, get a quest, complete that quest, level up your character and your gear, and go find the next quest. Repeat as desired until either playing all the way to the last quest of the most current expansion, or until you lose interest in doing the same thing over and over again, all the while, though, doing as you are told. There are millions of people playing alongside you at any give point in time, and there are two sides to the world which constantly combat each other for fun and profit.
Minecraft has none of this, save the ability to play with other people. You are left to your own devices by the game. The only thing which will truly motivate you as a prompt is your character's hunger level, which is a facet added late in development (and represented by the aforementioned ham shanks.) every action and reaction in the game uses some energy, and eventually begins to deplete your hunger level (which, admittedly, sounds a bit backward.). This, in turn, affects your ability to regenerate health if you have been hurt, and if left unchecked, will begin to deplete your health all by itself.
This addition added some urgency to the play, because whatever else you decide to do, you will need to find food of some kind. To do that effectively, you will need some tools. And to acquire those tools, you're going to need to start breaking some things.
Herein we find the 'craft' part of Minecraft. While you can certainly choose not to, the likelihood is that you will be gathering all manner of resources and utilizing them in various ways to build all manner of contraptions to suit your need. The need to make tools means you will be needing wood and stone. Keeping a light going at night means needing coal, which will likely involve cave exploration. Getting food will mean hunting animals, gathering plants, and likely making a furnace to cook it with. All of these things lead to other discoveries, and that's where the story comes from.
You are the story.
Without being led by the nose, you will naturally come up with your own objectives and reach your own goals. the fun is in being not told what to do and yet still coming up with very clear problems to solve, and having the means to solve them all around you and in your own two hands. Every problem has a solution, and none of them you find here in Minecraft are scripted with a known outcome.
With the addition of extra realms accessible by different kinds of portals, an effective end to the game was also designed (call 'The End'), which, if you can defeat the challenge found there, you have probably exhausted the other, more vague challenges of the game, and so thus might find yourself bored with the world you've been playing in to that point. This feeling is easily solved by just starting a new world which will present a new set of circumstances and challenges, or joining into a multiplayer server.
Multiplayer adds a whole other set of facets to things. A plain server with no trimmings will add the social element of needing to get along with, or perhaps defeat, other intelligent, thinking people with a direction similar to your own.
If you're playing on a server like the one I now frequent, things like a working economy and levelable skillsets might be pasted on, adding new things to do.
And if you're playing with other people you know or get along with, you may have whole teams dedicated to particular tasks. You might go on an excavation that falls upon a horde of monsters to fight your way out of. You might plan out and build a whole city. The possibilities are endless.
So many times, those words have been uttered. Endless possibilities. Here, to me anyway, that finally seems to hold true. And it keeps being fun