#oneaday Day 711: The Ancient Craft of Mining

Andie and I may have inadvertently spent pretty much the whole day playing Minecraft. I’ve spoken at length on the virtues of this game on several occasions on this blog, but every time I play it I find something new to appreciate, a new way to play or a new way to look at the game.

This, of course, is the central beauty of Minecraft as a game. No-one is telling you how to play it. The Achievements which were added a few updates ago give you a nudge in several possible directions — enough to get you started, anyway — but beyond that, it’s entirely up to you what to do.

On the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, we’ve had a number of discussions on the subject of games that plonk you down into the game world and simply invite you to “get on with it”. Traditional RPGs followed this format, though often had a questline to follow. Bethesda RPGs, too, follow this approach after a linear introductory sequence. But none do it quite like Minecraft, which is refreshingly old-school in its approach.

Minecraft doesn’t have a story. At least, not an explicit one. Nowhere is it made clear exactly why you’ve been thrown into this blocky landscape with nothing to your name but your wits. Nowhere is there an introduction describing how and why the monsters that plague the landscape after dark came to be. And not once are you told what your “goal” is.

In some senses, this is a return to gaming’s roots, when all the information you needed to know about the game’s plot and setting could be fit on the back of the box. Minecraft‘s retro aesthetic would certainly seem to fit with that theory, but the complexity, depth and freedom that the game offers is something that simply wouldn’t have been possible with older systems.

I do most of my playing on a small private multiplayer server which is in “survival” mode. This is fundamentally identical to the single player mode, where you’re tasked with surviving against the elements (or, indeed, monsters) with only your wits and what you can scavenge. You start playing in a very small area, gathering resources and building materials near where you started in an attempt to create a convincing shelter before the sun sets and the monsters come out to play. As time goes on, however, you spread your wings and start to explore the randomly-generated landscape. In single player, you’ll find yourself discovering a variety of different natural biomes — forests, swamps, mountains — but it’s in multiplayer that the world of Minecraft truly comes alive.

Round a corner of a mountain, you might find a mysterious door set into the hillside. Entering, you might find some chests containing tools, food and building materials — along with a sternly-worded sign informing you that this stuff is not yours.

The beauty of it, though, is that if you want to be a complete git about it, you could just take all that stuff and run. The facility to leave signs with your own custom wording on them, too, means that it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to, say, nick someone’s hoard of diamonds, bury them in a chest somewhere in the depths of the desert and leave them a trail of clues to reclaim them. I hasten to add that I haven’t done this, but it is enormously tempting to do so.

A multiplayer Minecraft server becomes something of a community. How active that community is depends largely on how many other players there are and how often they play. On a big, busy server, you’ll find impressive structures all over the place as players attempt to outdo each other with outlandish construction projects. On a small, private server such as ours, the world will change gradually, evolving piece by piece as each player stakes out their claim to their own piece of territory. It’s fascinating to watch — the fact that the world is persistent so can be changed by other players when you’re not online means that there’s often something new and player-made to take a look at when you next log in. It also means that eventually you’ll have to start either competing for the finite resources that there are, or travelling further afield to locate the items you’ll need to survive and/or complete your latest building project.

There are so many ways to play Minecraft, and the situations I’ve described here barely scratch the surface. It’s whatever you want it to be, and it’s for that reason that I believe that outlets “reviewing” the game when it finally reached Version 1.0 is an utterly futile gesture. For one, everyone’s experience with the game is somewhat different — some are switched off by the lack of direction and give up in frustration; some “powergame” by building the bare minimum they need to survive and progress, attempting to reach the newly-added endgame; some take their time to build impressive structures; some roleplay in their mind, casting themselves in the role of a town planner, laying out buildings and imagining what each might be used for; some do everything they can to make life hell for other players. Not one of those ways to play is “wrong” — even the griefer — and that’s why the game is such a work of genius, despite its glitches and flaws, of which there are still many.

Minecraft will continue to develop over time, though now it’s emerged from beta and its creators are working on other projects, new versions will be released at a slower rate. There’s still an enormous amount of potential there, though, and it’s exciting to imagine what might come next. By putting the creation of the game world and its character in the players’ hands, the team at Mojang have created one (or indeed many) of the most compelling game worlds ever seen in interactive entertainment. There really is nothing like strolling down a street you’ve built yourself, defending it from monsters who want nothing more to 1) kill you and 2) blast big holes in your hard work.

If you’re yet to try Minecraft, then get yourself over here and join the 4.3 million people — yes, wow — that have bought the game to date.