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the_sun_is_upYesterday, after a lot of waffling, I bought Minecraft.
I am never going to get any homework done ever again.
Actually I should back up a bit: I am not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and as far as I can recall, Minecraft is the first time I've ever spent money on a video game. Previously all I ever played were free online flash games and games that came included with our family's various computers, like Bugdom and Cro-Mag Rally and Nanosaur. However, my interest was piqued by some videos on That Guy With The Glasses that showed what it looked like to run around inside the game world, and it looked fucking awesome. So I downloaded it and discovered it to be exactly as advertised: really fun and alarmingly addictive.
Here's an indication of how addictive it is: last night, the dorm's dining hall was going to close soon and I knew I needed to go eat dinner, but instead I kept playing because I was trying to figure out how to eat dinner in the game. That's how you know you have a problem, when you put off eating real food in order to eat virtual food.
Seriously though, it took me forever to figure out how to eat. I kept picking up things that looked like they should be edible — sugarcane, sugar, pumpkins, pumpkin seeds, eggs, mushrooms, cactus. I even figured out that I could cook the cactus in my furnace and produce something called "cactus green" that also looked pretty edible. But the game wouldn't let me eat any of these things! Finally I gave in and killed some of the pigs and sheep milling around, which made me feel kind of bad, although I was amused to note how the pigs spontaneously transform into pork chops when killed. Then I figured out that if I stuck a pink pork chop into the furnace, it would turn into a tan pork chop which I could at long last eat. I also love how eating in the Minecraft universe is an extremely messy and flamboyant affair.
Speaking of the pigs, I love how this world is inhabited by herds of domestic animals. It's like there was a very recent apocalyptic calamity that wiped out all the people and houses but left all their livestock unharmed. And I love how if I open my workbench when there are animals around, they'll just walk up to me while I'm working and stare at me like they're curious to know what I'm doing. Sometimes they even bump into me when I'm at my workbench! And they make such cute noises; honestly I try to kill them as rarely as possible just because I'd much rather have them around to keep me company.
I think the main annoyance I've had with the game is how easy it is to die. Sometimes it's because of those kamikaze shrubs or the red-eyed spiders or the zombie things, although I figured out that staying underwater is a good way of avoiding those guys at night, but other times I'd die just because I fell or jumped down a cliff that turned out to be too tall! And there were a few occasions where I got attacked by something and I didn't even have a chance to find out what the heck it was — this happened when I fell down into an abandoned mine shaft. I still don't know what that thing was, and I had no interest in sticking around to find out.
Part of the game's appeal is how huge and varied the sandbox world is, although this provided another frustration for me; my biggest problem so far, even worse than my embarrassing habit of falling off cliffs and dying, is getting lost. I can't tell you how many times I'd set up camp and then go exploring and be unable to find my way back. Eventually I realized that I needed to put a moratorium on exploring until I could gather the resources to make a map. Which I did, after several hours of falling in lava while trying to get some redstone.
Another big source of appeal is the element of discovery: you have to figure out how to build things, how and where to get the raw materials, etc., and while I did resort to checking the Minecraft Wiki quite a bit, I tried to figure things out on my own as much as possible which made the experience more rewarding.
Actually I think that's Minecraft's big strength: the element of challenge. It takes so much time and effort to mine resources, manufacture tools, and smelt metals — each block of metal takes several seconds to smelt, which really adds up if you're trying to build something — and all of this makes it that much more satisfying when you finally achieve something. For example: to make stairs, you first have to dig up a bunch of cobblestone, then smelt it all into smooth stone, then go to your workbench and form the stone into brick blocks, and then form those into stairs. It's a lengthy process, but I cannot overstate my glee when I finished a batch of them and went skipping down my mineshaft, kitting it out with real stairs. Real stairs! Not the ones you have to jump on! Yaaaay! Another example: the Minecraft universe experiences a sped up version of the day-night cycle, and during nighttime (which is when all the monsters come out and try to eat/explode you) it is dark as fuck. Especially if you're hiding in a hole from the monsters, you can't see shit! It makes you feel a lot more powerless and jumpy, especially with the creepy noises the monsters make. So with that in mind, possibly my most triumphant moment in the game was when I got together the resources to make torches. Oh praise Jesus! Let there be torches! They may be nothing more complicated than a wooden stick and a lump of coal, but I can't tell you how reassuring it is to have torches during nighttime in Minecraft. I felt like I was getting a hint of what it was like when the first Cro-Magnon figured out how to make fire.
Let's see, what else:
-I think it's pretty cool how the different tools actually do have different effects: like if you use the shears on greenery, you get to keep the greenery instead of just knocking it down, and if you use the shovel on snow, it makes a snowball.
-When I finally got my hands on some diamonds, I was pretty disappointed, because those have got to be the fugliest damn diamonds in creation. They're this awful lurid sea green color, and while I made myself a diamond pickaxe because I figured it'd be super durable, I might go back to using iron pickaxes because I just can't stand looking at that fugly aqua pickaxe all day long.
-The sheep in this game are freakishly agile. They can hop up and down those steep mountains even as I go tumbling down and breaking my neck, and sometimes I even see them standing on top of trees. ??!?
Dear god this is a long post. ffffff
I am never going to get any homework done ever again.
Actually I should back up a bit: I am not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and as far as I can recall, Minecraft is the first time I've ever spent money on a video game. Previously all I ever played were free online flash games and games that came included with our family's various computers, like Bugdom and Cro-Mag Rally and Nanosaur. However, my interest was piqued by some videos on That Guy With The Glasses that showed what it looked like to run around inside the game world, and it looked fucking awesome. So I downloaded it and discovered it to be exactly as advertised: really fun and alarmingly addictive.
Here's an indication of how addictive it is: last night, the dorm's dining hall was going to close soon and I knew I needed to go eat dinner, but instead I kept playing because I was trying to figure out how to eat dinner in the game. That's how you know you have a problem, when you put off eating real food in order to eat virtual food.
Seriously though, it took me forever to figure out how to eat. I kept picking up things that looked like they should be edible — sugarcane, sugar, pumpkins, pumpkin seeds, eggs, mushrooms, cactus. I even figured out that I could cook the cactus in my furnace and produce something called "cactus green" that also looked pretty edible. But the game wouldn't let me eat any of these things! Finally I gave in and killed some of the pigs and sheep milling around, which made me feel kind of bad, although I was amused to note how the pigs spontaneously transform into pork chops when killed. Then I figured out that if I stuck a pink pork chop into the furnace, it would turn into a tan pork chop which I could at long last eat. I also love how eating in the Minecraft universe is an extremely messy and flamboyant affair.
Speaking of the pigs, I love how this world is inhabited by herds of domestic animals. It's like there was a very recent apocalyptic calamity that wiped out all the people and houses but left all their livestock unharmed. And I love how if I open my workbench when there are animals around, they'll just walk up to me while I'm working and stare at me like they're curious to know what I'm doing. Sometimes they even bump into me when I'm at my workbench! And they make such cute noises; honestly I try to kill them as rarely as possible just because I'd much rather have them around to keep me company.
I think the main annoyance I've had with the game is how easy it is to die. Sometimes it's because of those kamikaze shrubs or the red-eyed spiders or the zombie things, although I figured out that staying underwater is a good way of avoiding those guys at night, but other times I'd die just because I fell or jumped down a cliff that turned out to be too tall! And there were a few occasions where I got attacked by something and I didn't even have a chance to find out what the heck it was — this happened when I fell down into an abandoned mine shaft. I still don't know what that thing was, and I had no interest in sticking around to find out.
Part of the game's appeal is how huge and varied the sandbox world is, although this provided another frustration for me; my biggest problem so far, even worse than my embarrassing habit of falling off cliffs and dying, is getting lost. I can't tell you how many times I'd set up camp and then go exploring and be unable to find my way back. Eventually I realized that I needed to put a moratorium on exploring until I could gather the resources to make a map. Which I did, after several hours of falling in lava while trying to get some redstone.
Another big source of appeal is the element of discovery: you have to figure out how to build things, how and where to get the raw materials, etc., and while I did resort to checking the Minecraft Wiki quite a bit, I tried to figure things out on my own as much as possible which made the experience more rewarding.
Actually I think that's Minecraft's big strength: the element of challenge. It takes so much time and effort to mine resources, manufacture tools, and smelt metals — each block of metal takes several seconds to smelt, which really adds up if you're trying to build something — and all of this makes it that much more satisfying when you finally achieve something. For example: to make stairs, you first have to dig up a bunch of cobblestone, then smelt it all into smooth stone, then go to your workbench and form the stone into brick blocks, and then form those into stairs. It's a lengthy process, but I cannot overstate my glee when I finished a batch of them and went skipping down my mineshaft, kitting it out with real stairs. Real stairs! Not the ones you have to jump on! Yaaaay! Another example: the Minecraft universe experiences a sped up version of the day-night cycle, and during nighttime (which is when all the monsters come out and try to eat/explode you) it is dark as fuck. Especially if you're hiding in a hole from the monsters, you can't see shit! It makes you feel a lot more powerless and jumpy, especially with the creepy noises the monsters make. So with that in mind, possibly my most triumphant moment in the game was when I got together the resources to make torches. Oh praise Jesus! Let there be torches! They may be nothing more complicated than a wooden stick and a lump of coal, but I can't tell you how reassuring it is to have torches during nighttime in Minecraft. I felt like I was getting a hint of what it was like when the first Cro-Magnon figured out how to make fire.
Let's see, what else:
-I think it's pretty cool how the different tools actually do have different effects: like if you use the shears on greenery, you get to keep the greenery instead of just knocking it down, and if you use the shovel on snow, it makes a snowball.
-When I finally got my hands on some diamonds, I was pretty disappointed, because those have got to be the fugliest damn diamonds in creation. They're this awful lurid sea green color, and while I made myself a diamond pickaxe because I figured it'd be super durable, I might go back to using iron pickaxes because I just can't stand looking at that fugly aqua pickaxe all day long.
-The sheep in this game are freakishly agile. They can hop up and down those steep mountains even as I go tumbling down and breaking my neck, and sometimes I even see them standing on top of trees. ??!?
Dear god this is a long post. ffffff
