Mine Blok Craft!

For the longest time I never understood the appeal of Minecraft.  You sit and hack away hoping to get enough rock stuff to make something.  Where is the fun?  Digging in the dirt?  Building with blocks?  I could do both of those things in the real world and actually get something done...But Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon, and all my friends can't be that terribly wrong.  So I checked it out.

I played the game some with my nephews, who knew a ton about how to craft, what to craft, and why to craft.  I saw that this was at minimum a very rudimentary introduction to programming of sorts (especially when you use something called "redstone" that can activate machines).  Great for kids, but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the time investment to learn how to do something that was, in the end, useless for me (ok...fun isn't useless, but this was getting close enough to learning a programming language that I would rather have spent the time learning how to program for Android).

Forcing myself to socialize I played regularly with some close friends on a shared server. I saw the insane creations that people were making and thought, I might as well too. My way of differentiating myself was to do the opposite of build.  I wanted to carve something out of a mountain.  My goal was a cathedral hidden behind a single door, with skylights and such.  It was going to be tricky because, as far as I know, you can't fake rock blocks.  They can only be leftover after you cut around them.  That was all fine and dandy, but then, when mining for materials to make another pick axe, I discovered a cave.

It turns out that in addition to randomly generated terrain, there is almost a randomly generated history for each world.  That history isn't written down, but something happened long before you arrived in this land and there are places to explore.  That is where I found the fun.  My favorite thing to find now are the zombie spawning dungeons which I hope someone will explain to me some day.  It is a crafted room filled with zombies.  You kill them all and what is left is a small caged zombie that is on fire (and subsequently spawns more zombies).  Kill that and you can get the treasure.  They really are creepy rooms because you can hear the zombies from far away while you mine.  There are no doors or windows, just zombies trapped as if they were buried in some ancient ritual.

I have to admit that part of the current attraction for me is that my kids really get into it.  They aren't jaded by the lack of a clear goal or the absence of story (which I think was my problem all along, solved now that I found out how to make the story and goal for myself).  They are scared by the zombies, feel triumph when I discover gold, and feel bad when they stick their head in front of the computer monitor and block my vision causing me to run into a hole and die in lava.  "A" now regularly asks to play Blokus (which I am trying to teach him is a different game, but that's what he calls Minecraft) and "G" likes to talk about how mommy will love all the sheep in the field (because of the wool we get...shameless plug http://hipstrings.etsy.com).

Again, I don't think it's a great game.  The art is fun, but basic.  The goals are nonexistant (especially in free mode).  But as with Legos and Lincoln Logs, the fun is in the simplicity and your own imagination.  Being able to do it with friends makes it even more so.  Add in a little bit of Oculus (which is compatible), and I think you will have a timeless classic.

Incidentally, I was wondering what I should do with the saddle I found in one of the zombie dungeons and "A" suggested that I put it on a sheep.  A quick Google search tells me that won't work, but I like where his brain is going.