#oneaday Day 633: Your Mine!

Been playing some more Minecraft, and I noticed something interesting. It’s possible to play it in all sorts of different ways, depending on your own personal take on what it’s all about.

You can play it as a survival sim — foraging for food, fending off the unpleasant beasties who would like nothing more than to fill you with holes, poison, fire or gunpowder.

You can play it as a creative canvas on which you create blocky 3D models of whatever you desire.

In multiplayer, you can play it as a crazy sort of real-time variant on Catan, staking your claim to areas of the map that are rich in a particular type of resource and collaborating with your friends to ensure everyone has access to what they need.

You can play it as a city-building sim, only instead of raising money from taxes to pay for new structures, you have to locate or create the resources you need to put together facilities yourself.

Or you can play it as a role-playing game — and by that I don’t mean “battle through a storyline until facing a final boss, levelling up in the process”, though a (currently useless and occasionally game-breaking) level-up system was added in the last major patch. Rather, I mean play it with a “character” in mind — or at least a concept for what you want to build. Do you want to play a hermit who lives in the woods in a tiny little cabin with an extensive and terrifying network of tunnels beneath his abode? Do you want to play the ostentatious Duke who lords it over the rest of the kingdom from his mountaintop palace? Do you want to play the adventurer, charting the world as he goes, staking his claim to various locales with some well-placed signs? Do you want to play the terrorist, building vast quantities of TNT and then setting them off in a chain reaction that lays waste to the nearby landscape?

The more I play Minecraft, despite being aware of the fact that it’s still fairly pointless as there’s no way to “win”, the more I like it. When you’re not being accosted by monsters, it’s a relaxing game to play — harvesting enough stone to put together your next big structure, for example, is a repetitive task that somehow manages to be fun, as you find yourself naturally carving out shapes in the rock, creating corridors and chambers underground until you realise you’ve actually built a rather extensive dungeon into which you could easily lure some unsuspecting adventurers.

Mojang has hit on to a winning formula. By combining the joy of exploring uncharted, randomly-generated worlds (there’s a lot of “Ooh! That looks cool, I’ll run towards it” in Minecraft) with the joy of constructing things and seeing the world change according to your actions — for better or worse — they’ve put together something really rather special. And for those who want to take matters further, there’s the frightening-sounding Nether and The End realms to explore, too — and eventually there’ll be a dragon to contend with, too.

Notch and his team claim they’re going to stop adding new stuff to the game on October 18, then make sure everything works properly prior to the “official” release in November. Beyond that, the game will likely continue to change and evolve — and I’m certainly very interested and excited to see what the future holds. Notch is a developer who loves his work, loves playing with interactivity and cool new “toys”, then sharing them with his community — and not being too proud to take things that don’t work away again. A lot of big-name professional developers and publishers could learn a lot from the way Mojang is doing things — but, despite the ludicrous amount of money Minecraft has drawn in so far, I doubt they will.