I’ve fallen down a mineshaft and can’t get up!
Recently I started playing Minecraft… a game that has sold nearly 1,000,000 "pre-orders" and won PC Gamer "Game of the Year" while it was still in Alpha test stage. (It only recently entered Beta and is scheduled for "release" late 2011.) It's a game about exploring a 3D world while breaking and building stuff with the blocks the world is made of.
I had played Minecraft Classic with my son on a multiplayer server ("multiplayer" = the two of us), and while it was pretty fun for awhile, I tired of it after only a couple of weeks. It was pure exploration and building. After awhile, the exploration got dull… it's a neat, randomly generated world, but it's all scenery. There's nothing to do but break up the scenery and build stuff. Once you've dug down to the bedrock (the lower boundary of the world), built a tower to the cloud ceiling with your infinite supply of blocks, found (and swam in) lava, and flooded a cave with infinitely-multiplying water, there's not much else to explore. You can find some neat "natural" caves, but those tire after awhile because they're just scenery. If you don't like building structures with a digital form of LEGO bricks (except you never run out or have trouble finding that one brick you need), there's not much else to do.
So I didn't have much interest in the newer, pay-for version. It had minecarts and track, and apparently had monsters, but that didn't sound like it was worth spending $15 to get more of what I'd already grown bored with. But my son insisted that he needed to try the new version (confusingly known as Minecraft Alpha, but now it's Minecraft Beta, etc… I guess the names are properly "Minecraft Classic" and "Minecraft") and spent nearly three weeks allowance on it after Christmas. And since he was playing it, I bought it and set up a multiplayer server to play with him again.
Wow… what a difference a few little changes make. First, you have no infinite supply of building material. You start the game on a beach, empty handed. It's just past dawn, and there's a day/night cycle that lasts only twenty minutes. That means you have only ten minutes before the sun starts to set… and when it gets dark, monsters come out. And it gets really dark. And empty-handed, you're no match for all the monsters that are going to come pouring down on your head. (They aren't called "mobs" for nothing.)
So the first order of business is to build a monster-proof shelter, and ideally get a light-source so you don't have to wait out the ten minutes of night in idle darkness. That means chopping down a tree and forming it into planks with your bare hands! Then you just need to build yourself a workbench, craft a wooden pickaxe, and go mine some coal to make torches. All before it gets dark.
The fruitless search for coal has led to many an adventurer's early demise. But that's okay, you'll be reborn on the beach where you started. In the dark. Surrounded by monsters. You're not going to do anything useful until morning, and you might as well get used to dying now.
Fortunately, when the sun comes out, half the monster types catch fire in the rays of the sun. The other half are a pain in the butt. One sneaks up on you and explodes. Took me a week of play to learn to recognize the sounds it makes when approaching… it sounds a lot like the player walking on dirt, and I thought those noises were me, or were noises the spider made while walking around. Nope, that's the Creeper, and he is my bane and nemesis. Especially because he likes to explode near my shelter and blow up the cool stuff I've built and make me waste time filling in holes in my defensive wall. Bah.
So there I've covered all the changes that turned a ho-hum "not quite a game" into something I can't tear myself away from. Day/night cycle, with night being dangerous, means you can't just build, build, build outdoors for hours. If you want to build an impressive stone bridge across the bay, you're doing it ten minutes at a time, keeping one eye on the sun and one eye watching for Creepers that have managed to survive. Forced to retreat to the safety of shelter for the night, you mine for limited resources… coal, iron, gold, diamonds. But you have to keep an eye out for the natural caves… monsters spawn in darkness, so it's likely that any caves you find will be full of monsters. So you craft weapons and armor out of the resources you've collected, including a bow and arrows made from the silk of giant spiders you've slain, in close combat I might add.
The game still doesn't quite have a goal yet… it's not finished. (Nearly a million sales and multiple awards and it's not even finished.) But even so, I find creating simple shelter and then turning it into a fortress, then a "livable home" (mine has a sun room, a sheltered patio with fire pits, and I'm working on building a swimming pool with underwater lighting), while searching for limited resources, exploring caves and fighting off monsters rather compelling.
It's fun in multi-player. You deal with supply shortages, have to coordinate activities ("We're short on pickaxes, you go chop some wood while I mine this iron ore."), explore caves ("Wow, check this out, I think it goes down forever. Hey, don't push me!"), and fight monsters together ("Lookout, Zombie!"). Or my son runs away from monsters while I fight them. Except Creepers. We both run from Creepers and fill them full of arrows from a distance.
Good times, man. Good times.