Minecraft
The the innernets have been blowing up about this indie game Mincraft for quite a while now. Even Penny Arcade is getting in on the action this week (yeah, I don’t get it either). I still haven’t had a chance to actually play it, but videos keep getting posted to reddit. Videos like where this guy accidentally sets fire to his house or where this guy finds a dungeon and starts a zombie dance party. I still don’t fully understand the object, if there even is one, but having a persistent open world in which to make and build things seems kinda fun.
Anyway, the game’s free for the weekend because his server went down. You can get it at minecraft.net and I think you just log in with a blank user and pass. Since the game is still in Alpha, I think you can actually buy it for $5 or $10 or something like that, depending on the exchange rate. If enough of you actually have interest in this, I think I’ll volunteer my bandwidth to run a little private server where we can all play.
Comments
Soooooo apparently you can build tree forts and roller coasters?
Whoa. Weird. I’mma check this out this week for sure.
I downloaded this the other night. It’s a dull, tedious game for lonely people that can’t bring themselves to build a sandcastle because they’re always compulsively washing their hands.
It’s like playing with an Etch-A-Sketch that’s five thousand feet tall, with dials that need to get punched a few dozen times whenever you want to draw a straight line. Sure, one’s autistic and unemployed shut-in friends might marvel one’s ability to painstakingly click and click and click together a crude, blocky castle … but this is basically like complaining that The Sims isn’t hardcore enough because it coddled you with nice graphics and the ability to create a wall of your Sim house by clicking and dragging. Or that Rollercoaster Tycoon took away all the fun by automatically drawing in the girders and underlying framework of the coaster, without giving you a chance to nervously spend a night at home pushing each pixel in place yourself. Now that I know what the game’s about, I’ll view every screencap of Minecraft with a dull pitiable ache for the waste, when the person could have spent the time learning how to use a professional program to render impressive and artistically creative things instead of building an impassive redoubt to shield themselves from the outside world.
And yet, it’s strangely satisfying to play. I’ve played a few hours here and there and slowly clearing out a cave and transforming it into a cool little building and Sam’s floating tree islands and various sky bridges and brilliant little mechanic water elevators… it’s the sort of thing I can start playing and not get up till the sun’s coming up.
I bet it’s absorbing for the right person… but the OCD repetition quickly felt boring and pointless. That’s why I’m not surprised it’s all over reddit these days (a place that’s like an obsessive and attention-hungry seven-year old telling you a story about two or three things that lasts for weeks at a time). I think it’s similar to my inability to enjoy a World of Warcraft type game. Open-ended timesinks with no feedback beyond showing off screencaps to strangers just atrophy the section of my brain that suppresses restlessness.
I’m pretty good when there’s a story or progressive batch of levels marching towards victory involved… but anything else in a videogame feels like just killing time at the expense of doing other stuff. This is why I never have an interest in turning on a computer and surfing the internet at night.
Sorry. I was just attempting to deconstruct how I feel.
Here’s an article that sums up why someone would LOVE Minecraft.
Oh, there’s definitely a part of me that feels very much like you do. I can’t help but feel like I’m completely wasting time when playing. But then I remind myself that that sort of thought process leads me to dark, workaholic-y places and I can afford a little time-wasting if it makes me happy. And somehow, the process of tearing down and building little blocks makes me incredibly happy — like opening a Sim City map, turning all the disasters on, and starting over.
Yeah, your default is to actually work really hard. My default is to sort of amble about, goofing off. The free time I’m worried about wasting is just spread across to other forms of recreation.
I need to create a videogame review site with the editorial slant of “Well, I’m clearly not going to spend 100 hours exhaustively going through all the content in this game… let me tell you the stuff I found interesting, the stuff I skipped altogether, and how I long I played it before I tossed it aside for the sake of some other random thing.”
I would totally read that site. Which reminds me of a slew of Scrabbled changes I need to finish bugtesting and publish.
T.S. Eliot once said, “Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time.”
That being said, I will probably never play this game. It has stripped video-gaming down to pure, no-graphics, OCD (as Sammy says) gameplay.
Because of this bare bones design, the once-hidden time-wasting is now the only thing apparent.
Justin said:I downloaded this the other night. It’s a dull, tedious game for lonely people that can’t bring themselves to build a sandcastle because they’re always compulsively washing their hands.
It’s like playing with an Etch-A-Sketch that’s five thousand feet tall, with dials that need to get punched a few dozen times whenever you want to draw a straight line. Sure, one’s autistic and unemployed shut-in friends might marvel one’s ability to painstakingly click and click and click together a crude, blocky castle … but this is basically like complaining that The Sims isn’t hardcore enough because it coddled you with nice graphics and the ability to create a wall of your Sim house by clicking and dragging. Or that Rollercoaster Tycoon took away all the fun by automatically drawing in the girders and underlying framework of the coaster, without giving you a chance to nervously spend a night at home pushing each pixel in place yourself. Now that I know what the game’s about, I’ll view every screencap of Minecraft with a dull pitiable ache for the waste, when the person could have spent the time learning how to use a professional program to render impressive and artistically creative things instead of building an impassive redoubt to shield themselves from the outside world.
I was up until 12:45 playing Minecraft last night, starting immediately after dinner (roughly 7 PM). Same thing the night before, but I stayed up until 2.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=86929
Hell yeah, more animals! Lions, Ogres and Bears!
You still haven’t joined our server. You have to at least come see Sam’s giant Spongebob. Just ping johnhutch.dyn-o-saur.com to get the IP and connect.
I still haven’t bought the game yet, I have three projects due in the next two weeks and I don’t want minecraft to sidetrack me.
John said:You still haven’t joined our server. You have to at least come see Sam’s giant Spongebob. Just ping johnhutch.dyn-o-saur.com to get the IP and connect.
The Spongebob is very impressive.
Screencap?
Just sign on to the server and see for yourself!