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Jim Cote
United States
Maine
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Minecraft is a video game that I have never played, and I think everyone needs to know about it. Since playing Fallout 3, it has become very clear to me that a game doesn't have to provide purpose to the player in order for a player to feel purpose or to get an incredible amount of enjoyment from it. Minecraft, in fact, provides no game-driven purpose whatsoever except that which you take in with you.
On the surface, it is a simple sandbox game. A world is generated. The player may explore it, mine, build, and craft. You may walk/swim essentially infinitely without ever reaching an edge (although there is a hard-coded bottom and top of the world, far below the surface and far above the clouds, respectively). The game generates new terrain as you approach the explored edges. According to the developer, the file limit would be a world 8 times larger than the surface of the Earth.
The terrain itself is built from one-meter cubes (the player figure is 2 blocks tall) in three dimensions. It looks quite a bit like a retro Lego-style model, but has an amazing charm and beauty to it. On the surface, there are mountains, cliffs, lakes, trees, etc. Below the surface are caves, dungeons, lava, and veins of different types of ore in various degrees of rarity. There are dozens of different natural block types including sand, gravel, dirt, stone, wood, clay, sandstone, cobblestone, and several types of ore blocks.
So what can a player do in the game?
Explore: The simplest thing is just walking around. You can have quite a bit of fun just checking out all the amazing terrain that the program generates. There will also be many natural caves that you can venture into if you aren't afraid of the things that come out in the dark. You can also dig your way through terrain. This is a combination of exploring and mining since you collect the blocks as you dig them.
Craft: Making stuff is very important if you want to do anything beyond walking around. You have an inventory area with a 2x2 crafting section. Place the right resources into it in the right pattern and out comes some crafted item. Work benches have 3x3 crafting areas that let you make even larger items. On your first day, for example, you may grab a block of wood (from a tree, with your bare hands), craft the wood into planks, craft 4 planks into a workbench and some more planks into sticks, craft sticks and planks into a wooden pick, dig some coal, craft sticks and coal into torches, dig some stone, craft a furnace, dig some iron ore, smelt the iron ore into iron, and craft an iron sword. You get the idea. There are over 100 things that can be crafted: chest, brick, axe, shovel, bucket, compass, clock, fishing rod, bow, armor, ladder, rails, boat, door, stew, bread, sign, book, etc.
Mine: You can pretty much mine any block. The object you use to dig with determines how much time is required, and the substance you dig determines how much damage the object takes. Digging sand with your bare hands is not bad, but it is impossible to dig obsidian without a diamond pickaxe. Mining goes hand-in-hand with exploring since you will often want to "make stairs" to go over something (you can only "jump" up one block), or dig down into the ground to find new caves and ore veins.
Build: Creating structures, especially in groups on multi-player servers, is extremely popular. In fact, if you are playing on other than peaceful mode, you will need to either hide in safe caves or build a shelter for yourself just to survive. Of course, devoted fans have taken building to a whole new level. There's a life-sized model of the USS Enterprise (from Star Trek). There are huge cities filled with various buildings and other structures. I've seen Orthanc made entirely of obsidian (which is insane). And because one of the craft items acts like a logic inverter, you can construct logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, LATCH, FLIP-FLIP, CLOCK-GEN, etc.) which allows you to make crazy circuits to control things with switches, pressure plates, and buttons. Someone even designed an entire CPU.
Produce: Once you get safely established in the game, you will want to be able to efficiently collect blocks and food. Some resources can be grown: trees make wood, reed makes paper, grain makes wheat. Some basic resources can be crafted: wood makes coal, gravel may produce flint, water plus lava makes obsidian, etc. You can slaughter animals: chickens for feathers, pigs for pork, cows for leather. Players have set up elaborate mining operations with numerous well-lit shafts with automated mining carts that take huge quantities or ore back to the surface for building projects.
Fight: In addition to battling the defenseless farm animals, you will like have to fight the creatures of the dark. They spawn everywhere at night as well as all the time underground. The only way to prevent spawning is to light up an area, and that requires lots of torches or other creative solutions. Creatures include zombies, skeletons, spiders, and creepers. Each has its own properties and items.
It might sound like Minecraft is kind of a fantasy RPG, but I think the developer is making sure the game doesn't end up going that way. It's really just a generic fictional land that you can play with.
Minecraft has significant cross-genre appeal. For boardgamers, there's the elements of development: farm, mine, craft, upgrade (eg Agricola). For RPG'ers, there's a smack of that as well: weapons, armor, combat, hit points, dungeons, treasure.
Some of the special touches that really put the game over the top for me are:
Ore: I love how the various mineral ores have varying rarity and locations. Although terrain generation is semi-random, experienced players know to find the ores they need. I also appreciate the tool/damage model. As the ore blocks get physically harder, the longer it takes to mine, and the tools that mine them become more damaged. Do you really want to waste that diamond shovel on sand?
Biomes: The surface terrain changes from place to place to cater to the attributes of a handful of biomes: forest, swamp, savanna, desert, plains, tundra, etc. Each biome has its own distribution of vegetation, temperature, etc. In cold areas, you can walk across (partially) frozen water, and snow covers many blocks. In the desert, there is no dirt so trees will not grow unless you haul in your own dirt and saplings.
Nether World: If you make a standing 4x5 frame out of obsidian and light a fire in the hollow center with a tinderbox, it opens a spiraling purple portal to the Nether World. Stepping through reveals an entirely new world filled with lava, strange red soil, and floating ghost creatures that shoot fireballs.
Day and Night: The sun rises slowly in the sky, turning black to gray to dark blue to light blue. The stars fade. Zombies and skeletons that are caught in the light burst into flame. It's not the fact that it's daytime, but the sun's rays hitting them. If they are behind a tree, they are safe until they move away. In other words, there's a real light model here, and not just for shading the terrain. Sunrises and sunsets look awesome. And as the moon rises (yes, the moon is always up at night in Minecraft), the stars and the nasties come out. It gets dark. Really dark. If you are caught outside with no shelter (non-peaceful mode), you will be afraid for your life. If you have lit up your home, you can see it at night from a mile away or more. Very cool.
Clouds: All day and night, there are tetris-shaped clouds slowly moving across the sky. In many games, the sky is just a distant back-drop. In Minecraft, you can build above the clouds. If you are standing at cloud level, they will pass right through you (or below you) obscuring your vision. This is just a wonderful touch.
I've seen such cool and humorous things in the videos I've watched. One guy was trying to show how you could create an infinitely burning fireplace by burying a chunk of wood in his stone floor and setting it on fire, when the cinders started a blaze that ran up the wall. He desperately ran back and forth to a chest with buckets of water trying to put the fire out, but it spread faster than he could manage. The last scene was him outside at night watching his place burn down. Unlike most blocks, sand doesn't float when you remove blocks from under it. If you are underground and you dig straight up into sand, you can get buried in it. Likewise, if you dig straight down, you could find yourself falling 50 meters into a pit of lava. And sometimes a pig just gives you that look.
Minecraft is only in its beta stage, and there are already over 1.2 million paid supporters. When I stumbled onto it last week, I started watching a YouTube video series called "Man vs Minecraft" where the player imposed on himself some very strict rules about exploration, building, mining, tools, weapons, food, water, etc. His goal is to survive for 14 days and nights. I am watching it like I would a favorite TV show--complete with popcorn--eagerly awaiting the next episode.
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Epic!
