Just Do Whatever!

With Minecraft due to be released tomorrow it seems like a good time to reflect on my experiences with this extremely open ended game. Minecraft is one of if not the most open ended game available; it simply drops the player without instructions, quests, or goals, into a world where they can gather resources, make tools, explore, build structures, and construct machines (I have seen videos of people who have built simple CPUs in Minecraft, so technically it would be possible to write code for these very rather slow computers and play a video game within the video game). The freedom to build whatever you feel like has seen some very impressive projects undertaken and even resulted in the invention of a new sport called Spleef.

I originally purchased Minecraft back when it was still in alpha after hearing someone in the card shop excitedly talking about having found redstone, I had heard of the game before this but hadn't been motivated enough to check it out. Before downloading the game I watched a couple of videos on YouTube so I already had a basic idea of what to do during your first day, but still decided to venture outside with painful results.

The first structure I built was a sandcastle, I had to use dirt inside to hold the roof up. In the basement of the castle was my mineshaft, furnace, workbench, and a path to an underwater observatory; later following the update to 1.2.0 I added a Nether portal. The only big problem with the sandcastle was spiders would make their way onto the roof, and in the event of a creeper explosion half the structure would cave in.

Deciding I needed something to look at from the parapets I built a small village on the other side of the water; this village had one house, a farm, a mine, and a lighthouse. I then built a nether portal and used it to get as far away from spawn as possible. At this new location I build a giant fire pit using netherrack (I ended up having to put it out as it made the game unstable) and a glass pyramid, before making the long trek back to spawn. It seems odd to admit that there was a feeling of excitement and 'I'm home' when the village lighthouse came into view.

I then started playing on an online server with some friends; in order to encourage building we started out with the game world set to peaceful. I built a small house, a shop, and a mine with a secret entrance under the town jetty. The structures being built by the other players were much more impressive, so I began to experiment with red stone circuits and pixel art. Then the sever crashed and the world corrupted.

This forced us to start a new game world, this time we included monsters. Once again I built a store, played with red stone (note blocks had now been added so music was played as people entered the main village), and did some pixel art. Unfortunately, due to forces beyond our control the server died during an earthquake induced power cut, again corrupting the world. Having learnt our lesson from the last time, we had a backup but as it was several days old we decided to once again shift to a new world.

With the move to the next world my interest in the game started to wane, I felt like I was just rebuilding the same things over and over and that eventually we would again have to shift and anything I made would be lost. However, now with the full release of Minecraft due I am once again enthused, and am looking forward to again playing in an online server.