Digital Dawn

First time I played Minecraft was with an early version of the pocket edition, very primitive. The world was very small and many items, actions and mobs weren’t yet implemented. I’m still playing the pocket edition, it’s the only edition I’ve played, but it’s come a very long way since then. Even back then it was enjoyable, but even more so now.

It’s a game of creation (everything from simple tools or decorative items to the contruction of enormous buildings or even entire cities), of reshaping the environment by building (or erasing) mountains or lakes or what not, of exploration, of collecting raw materials, of mining, of managing resources, of escaping from or killing monsters, of farming, and much more. There’s a sense of adventure and imagination, and it’s a simulation of sorts. You can draw more paralleles between this game and real life than between most other games and real life. It’s a lot more open world than most games described that way. Not only will you decide your own goals (and they’re more truly your own than, say, if you have a bunch of designed quests or missions to choose from), but also how to achieve them, and you can reconsider at any moment. No two people are going to play the same game.

It has its set of animate and inanimate objects and it has its causal laws you need to obey, but within that framework you can do whatever you want. There are no pre-decided missions or points, and although what you do will fall inside of a few broad categories like creating, crafting and exploring there is a lot you can do within these. There’s so much you can create, so many possibilites. Youtube has tons of videos with impressive creations, but even doing small things like creating a little cottage and securing the area from monsters using fences can be strangely satisfying.

So some introspection is required; you need to discover how you want to play in order to make it fun. I’ve hit a few crises the required me to start playing it differently in order to make it fun again. Luckily I didn’t just give up during any of these crises, and that’s because it always seemed like a game I should be able to enjoy, and I was right, but managing my motivation still became an issue.

One thing I need to keep my motivation going is one or several long term purposes so that my actions, though haphazard, add up to something, a sense of steady, if slow, progress, but I also need to balance that out with some flexibility and follow my emotions in the moment, or the long term goals start feeling like chores in which case boredom sets it before long. Too much of either ruins the fun, not unlike real life, and I’ve also written about that in regard to Just Cause 2.

And then there’s esthetics. There is no way around being practical in the game if you want to get anything done at all, or even just to survive, but being esthetic is a choice, and a pretty good one, to make the game more meaningful and fun. My first structures may not have been very pretty, just throwing blocks of different kinds together to get some protection from monsters at night, but eventually as I had more resources and basic protection I rebuilt much of it into something more pleasing to the eye, and in the process making it more practical too.

And then there’s the problem-solving aspect of the game, and the problems will depend on what you choose to do and hence will be different depending on who’s playing and what they set out to achieve. Recently I wanted to explore by going further from my home, but I was afraid I wouldn’t find my way home again since it’s a huge world. My first solution was to build a huge tower at the highest point near my home. However, that isn’t enough because the tower disappears into the misty horizon pretty soon as I walk in any direction. I’ve considered building more towers within sight of each other, but I think I’m going to just leave a trail of torches. But in any case there are always different ways to achieve some goal, in addition to being able to choose many different goals — open world indeed.

There are always problems to be solved. The need to figure out what to do and the best way to do it. If the game had more realistic physics there would have been engineering problems as well. Right now you can remove the support from any building and the parts will still be there hoovering in the air without support.

Looking back at what I’ve done so far it doesn’t seem like much given all the hours I’ve put into it, I mustn’t be a very efficient player. I suppose much time has went into “drudgery” — grinding –like gathering resources which isn’t necessarily something you’d remember but it’s still something that feels meaningful in the context of the game. I’ve explored a few very big caves and done some serious mining in each, and I wouldn’t be surprised if several hours went into those endeavors alone. Mostly though I’ve been manipulating and improving the area where I have my main headquarters. I built my main house in a forest in a valley surrounded by big mountains. It’s a simple but nice house and I’ve done various improvements in the surrounding area like putting torches everywhere to prevent monsters from spawning (plus it’s pretty in the night) and I’ve put up some fences and I also built a waterfall nearby because it’s pretty, and for a little while (or more like a couple of hours) I tried to raze a nearby mountain to the ground. It was really time-consuming and boring and I decided i wanted to keep the HQ surrounded by mountains anyway. It’s a smaller mountain now but that’s okay, maybe I’ll rebuild it later.

I have a lot of farm animals in the area, because they can enter the area but not as easily leave, the way it’s naturally set up. But I was getting annoyed with running into them all the time so I built a “trap”, a fenced area they can enter but not leave. So eventually over time, hours, more and more animals got trapped and now most are in that area. Another problem solved, high-five.

And then there’s the tower I mentioned, it’s pretty ugly at the moment, except for the torches glowing in the night, and I want to make it bigger and prettier, and I tamed a bunch of dogs and grew some food (wheat) and many others little things.

And… yeah, I guess that’s it for now.