About two weeks ago today I was itching for a new game to play. This happens far too often, much to the chagrin of my wife. Even worse was the fact that I was tempted to renew a subscription to World Of Warcraft, something that I have played on previous occasions and given up entirely on. The prospect of paying $30 to $50 for a new game only to abandon it scant weeks later was something that neither of us liked.
I was tempted by World of Warcraft because I enjoy exploring in games, often to the exception of most other things. Massively multiplayer games, of course, often have enormous worlds with many things to see, and I’ve always thought it a damn shame that I really do not care for the gameplay in any of the MMOs I’ve tried. But, since I do admire Azeroth’s side and have enjoyed the expansive vistas I’ve seen in that game (and I’m sure I’ve not seen anything yet, since I never even passed level 20 in the game), I was sorely tempted to resubscribe and slog through the gameplay to see some new, interesting things.
Fortunately, my friends came to my rescue. Knowing my penchant to waste money on things I never play, or play only briefly, they were quick to reccomend Minecraft. This game, they told me, was something amazing. The world is procedurally generated as you play, so there is basically limitless potential for exploring. Not only that, but the principal mode of the game, Survival, is geared entirely around building a fortress and, to say nothing more, surviving. There are numerous creatures of the night that will assault you, the most heinous of which is the hedge creeper, a green zombie-like thing that is completely silent aside from the telltale hissing sound it makes right before it explodes and ruins whatever it is you were working on. The game even includes an amazingly intuitive crafting system for making various mining tools and even decorative items. As my other obsession is survival-based games, this was amazing to me.
After perusing some of the creations people had made in the game, I visited the website. Five minutes of deliberation (and realization that Survival mode is only available to paying customers) culminated in me purchasing the game, which is currently in Alpha, for the simple reason of “It’s $15, if I end up not liking it at least I only spent $15.” This would prove to be a fantastic decision.
My first foray into the game was before consulting any of the extensive documentation that players had created for it. I spawned on a coastline, as I learned you often do in this game, and hopped around a little bit. My first world culminated in me punching a pig and a cow to death, and then quitting, deciding I needed to learn a bit more about how to play before I attempted any more.
My second world was one where I immediately learned how annoying it can be to die far away from your spawn point. You’re only given one spawn point in the game, and although editors can change where you spawn, often times you may find yourself carrying a load of precious ore back to your camp when you are attacked by a skeleton and murdered out in the wilderness with no way of knowing where you died, because you didn’t leave any sort of trail back to where you were. Perhaps that’s just me, though.
Regardless of this setback, however, I was dedicated to making some sort of a home for myself. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t read enough about the game to learn how to many any kind of wood or stone construction, so my first home was a dirt fort, leading underground to my underground lair. This world was also quickly abandoned.
The third world, however, would prove to be something else, and I learned that a great part of this game is the co-operative gameplay it inspires, despite the entirety of the gameplay being me and a friend switching off on the single world file on my computer. I had learned a great deal in the time between these two worlds, and soon quickly (and before night fell, I learned) built a wooden home for myself to hold off the encroaching monster hordes. This home was soon expanded to include an underground basement and, when I let my friend play, a maze of catacombs and underground water pool. For himself, he built a sky-house and, after dying several times to creepers and spiders in the dead of night and not being able to find his way back, a road leading straight to it.
Despite this, however, we were still dissatisfied. The world we inhabited was still a bit dull, unfortunately. There were no interesting mountains and formations to be found, just low hills and sandy beaches. While this would satisfy anyone who wished to live a life of quiet solitude, we were playing the game to explore, and, more importantly, build interesting structures, the layout of our land did not seem to afford us either.
The fourth (and current) world we are playing has proven to be the most interesting so far. After looking at five potential worlds, each more interesting than the last, we decided on a snowy world that had some interesting rock formations a short distance from the start point. Seeing what looked to be a massive stone outcropping very close to the spawn point, I decided that this would be where my house was.
Actually playing the world, I discovered that what I thought to be a simple outcropping was in fact an arch, with a small backyard-type area behind it. This made me even more eager to start building, and after some time, I had constructed a very nice looking three-story wooden house in the middle of the arch. I cannot say how many trees died in the making of this home, suffice to say that the numbers were many, and I was very appreciative of their sacrifice for my shelter.
Some time later I decided to go excavating, in the hopes of finding iron, or even better, gold. Sadly, the cave behind my house proved to be perilously dull, with only a small amount of charcoal in it. After salvaging what I could, I sealed off the entrance with a sign noting that this mine was dangerously boring. Satisfied with building a very nice home for myself, I called it a night.
The next day, I picked up my friend from his apartment after dropping my wife off at work and we proceeded back to play some Minecraft. We would switch off on different times to let the other play and make some progress on what they wanted to do. He had told me he wanted to build an ice fortress, and I had remebered to craft him as many ice blocks as I could stand to do so he wouldn’t have to spend too long gathering them for himself. His fortress was built on a flat area near mine, and we connected it with a small bridge.
Wood was plentiful, as the world we inhabited had trees growing everywhere. Unfortunately, resources like iron or charcoal were hard to find. We decided to set out exploring. We had a sand tower built as a landmark, one that could hopefully be seen from a good distance off. Our best bet, we decided, was to load ourselves down with weapons and mining tools, pick a direction and start walking. We soon learned this was a poor idea after dying several times with useful items in tow. Particularly difficult for my friend was when we died with several buckets in our inventory – he is well aware of how useful buckets can be during construction of various things.
Needing a better landmark (we had quickly learned in our journeys that the sand tower is nigh invisible at night), we took our single bucket of lava and poured it over the top, making a glowing, if somewhat phallic, monument to direct us back to our home. This would unfortunately not give us the edge we had hoped for in finding our way back home, as our expeditions took us so far out that even at night, our penis-esque tower was out of visible range. Still, we wouldn’t let that deter us. After finding an amazing natural lava waterfall, however, and dying while trying to mark its location.
We had been playing for many hours at this point, though, and were not about to let this get us down. Deciding to go out on another expedition (one that was in fact intended to recover our items lost on a previous expedition), we discovered an amazing network of caves. At first seeming to be a regular short cave, we somehow managed to find crevices that led us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.
At this point in the day, it was time for me to pick up my wife from work. We quickly jumped in my car and drove to her workplace, having to wait about an hour until she was done. We talked excitedly about what might be in the cave, other than the small deposits of iron and charcoal that we had discovered. Learning from our previous mistakes, we had crafted a chest and a crafting table near the entrance of the mine, and made frequent trips to the surface to drop off our goods, secure in the knowledge that at least if we died, we might someday find a chest in the wilderness filled with our treasures. As soon as we returned home with my wife, we went back into the game, with me apologizing profusely for our horrible nerdiness.
For the next two hours my wife got to listen to my friend and me excitedly talking about our finds. She heard our eager hollers when we caught first sight of gold – we had found some in a previous cave, but it was sadly lost when we mined it with a stone pick, not knowing that you needed at least an iron pick to actually harvest raw gold. She heard our amazed gasps when we reached the near bottom of the earth, a place where lava flowed freely and we were forced to tensely make bridges across if we wished to harvest the myriad of resources – redstone, gold, and iron – that we saw embedded in the walls. She heard our squealings of delight when we saw diamond in the walls – and shortly afterward, a waterfall of lava and water that created obsidian. All of this she endured while I continually came back to her to apologize profusely. We soon realized that Minecraft almost devolves us to the level of cavemen – grunting and shouting excitedly when we find shiny things, running away from scary things, and eating raw meat of animals to sustain ourselves.
Eventually, I became concerned. We had such a weath of items, more than we had ever dreamed of finding, but were unfortunately still deep under the earth. My wife, after hearing our excited jabbering for the past few hours, had become interested in playing. I urged my friend to tunnel to the surface, drop off the resources, and let her play, so she might actually understand what got us so excited. The thought of losing all the items we had worked so hard – and so long – to attain was horrifying, nearly more horrifying than death in any other game I’ve played. As we tried to make our escape, not knowing exactly what path we had taken to get there, we passed by numerous other mineral deposits. I had to demand that my friend ignore them in favor of escape. We were running low on picks, our health was perilously low, and we didn’t know what time it would be outside when we finally surfaced. If it was daytime, we were in the clear, if it was nighttime we would have to hope for the best.
After a nearly deadly encounter with a creeper, leaving us with a single health point, my friend agreed that we needed to escape. We began digging up furiously, and eventually beheld the surface once more – unfortunately, it was nighttime. We noted with a bit of irony the fact that we emerged on top of the lava fall we had worked so hard to find again earlier. Thankfully, we were actually able to find our way back to our chest and quickly fled back to our home base. We were nearly dead, but we had survived, and we had the loot to prove it.
As I write this, my wife is currently playing Minecraft, leveling off the top of a mountain to make room for a fortress she plans to build. I have helped her with these plans – tunneling through an entire hillside so her fortress will be visible from my mountain arch home, and building stairs up to where her fortress will one day be – and can’t help but be satisfied that she at least seems to understand now why my friend and I were so eager about this game. As she plays, I am currently planning an expedition of my own in the game when it is my turn to play. I am going to leave with many stone steps, torches, and signs, and scout out as many caves and geographical oddities I can find.
I almost find it difficult to say in words why I enjoy this game so much. Part of it is the ownership I feel over the creations you make – there is creative mode, where you have unlimited resources and can build whatever you like, but that means that whatever you create is easy to recreate. In Survival, there was a real sense of accomplishment for me when I finished my house – I knew I had cut down those trees, turned them into planks, and used those planks to make my house. The path to where my wife’s keep will be is something I did myself – I worked to take down the entire hill and place the stones that made the path.
The mere idea that I am planning to scout out this entirely fictional world, and leave signs marking potential places for exploration, flabbergasts me. In any other game, I wouldn’t dare do that. Minecraft, however, makes me feel like an explorer, and since I’m sharing this world with friends, like an actual contributor to the world. I discover these places so we might continue to expand our land area, and hopefully keep building new structures and discovering new things. People like to go on about gameplay elements created by the player, something that I always was in slight doubt of, but this game allows me that without question.
The fact that it can be played with other people, collaborating on a single world and making your own settlements and houses is something appealing as well. With Multiplayer Survival mode just released today (although in a rather bare-bones form), the potential for dozens of people working on a single world is something that excites me immensely. Finally, since the game is still technically only in Alpha, the fact that there is much, much more to come to flesh out the game even more is exciting.
I can say without hesitance that based on my experiences, Minecraft is certainly worth the money. If you have $15 to spare and are looking for a new thing to pass the time, buy Minecraft.