Tag: notch

#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.

#oneaday Day 99: Mein Kraft

Yes, I have discovered Minecraft. Minecraft, despite being an indie game and therefore something I should technically automatically be championing, going by past experience, is something which I’ve always had something of a curious resistance to. It hasn’t been by choice, though—the reason I haven’t been playing Minecraft is not the same as the reason I’m not playing Call of Duty, for example.

In fact, if anything, it’s more to do with the fact that when I finally gave in to peer pressure and bought a copy a number of months back, I only had my netbook with me and it ran like ass on there. And then it ran like ass under OS X on my Mac at home, too. For literally months and months I’d been saying to myself “I should really install it on the Windows partition of my Mac and try it properly…”

Well now I have. And what do you know? It’s rather good, though it’s the kind of game that appears to—at least in its current beta stage—be very much “what you make of it”.

If you’re one of the few people who hasn’t contributed to developer Notch’s millions so far, here’s a brief rundown. You are dropped into a randomly-generated world made entirely of blocks of various materials. You have nothing to your name except a punching fist that can knock down trees. It’s up to you to survive, because every night, the nasties come out and will do their best to kill you.

That’s about it—but the main appeal of the game in its present state comes from the fact that once you’ve built yourself a secure shelter, it’s time to start exploring the world and building stuff. You can create structures either by hollowing out existing terrain or by collecting resources and stacking them to build things—kind of like pixelated Lego blocks.

Then there’s the “craft” part of the title—you can make items. The daunting part of the game for new players is the fact that no help is given when you start the game—without looking at sites such as the excellent Minecraft Wiki, you’d be expected to figure out how to make tools for yourself. And given that even making the simplest tools requires several steps (punch trees for wood, craft wood into planks, build workbench from planks, craft planks into sticks, combine sticks and planks in various arrangements to produce tools) it’s arguably something of a long shot to expect people to do this for themselves.

Or is it? Steven Johnson argues in Everything Bad is Good for You that the cognitive processes you go through when figuring out stuff like this for yourself are very beneficial—good “brain exercise”. You use past experience from previous games and other things you’ve done in the game you’re playing to draw conclusions for yourself about what to do next. And sure enough, I found that once I’d started playing a bit and got the basics down, I started naturally experimenting with different arrangements of materials to see what they produced. Some things worked, some things didn’t. If something doesn’t work, you don’t lose anything, either, so the game is set up to encourage exploration and experimentation.

There’s also an element of risk, though. Death isn’t permanent—but it does cause you to drop all your stuff and potentially lose it. If you’ve spent a long time collecting things, this can be a real pain, especially if you were exploring a long way from your home spot. Then there’s the fact that the game’s most notorious enemies, the “Creepers”, explode when they get near you. Not only does this cause significant damage to you, it also blows big holes in the things you’ve built.

But rather than being frustrating, most players simply take this as a sign that they need to defend their homes a little better. Perhaps they should make them harder to get to, or plant some cacti to put off enemies, or build some weapons and armour.

The possibilities are pretty extensive, and I’m looking forward to exploring the game further—and seeing where Notch takes it in the future. The game comes out of beta on the 11th of November this year, so if you want to pick it up for its current reduced price (25% off the full price) then get over there now.