On Walden Waterblock

Minecraft has spawned this huge community of people showing off these ridiculous things they’ve done and they’re accomplished through all kinds of means: plain old hard work, usually by a significant number of people pitching in together but sometimes the work of one industrious jobless person; the use of “creative” mode to allow things like flying through the air and having no scarcity of resources; the use of server admin commands to grant infinite amounts of resources; and even the ridiculous automated things people have done to convert various 2D and 3D imaging formats into Minecraft worlds. All of these things are totally amazing and worthy of the community of “holy shit look at this fucking thing” that has grown out of it, but speaking to my own time with the game I feel like it risks taking away almost all of the actual meaningful experience I can have with it.

I’m grateful for the the presence of the internet as a way to discover that there are people who are building entire cities in Minecraft and beating Super Mario Bros in four minutes, that I can share high score boards with my brother halfway across the country, that there can be a whole culture of people who are as obsessed as my friends and I are with shoddy translations and quirky games, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken away the ability to ever feel proud of what I do in a video game by making myself a part of that network. In terms of the amount of time I actually spend playing video games these days, I’m probably somewhere in the lower half among people who would consider video games a part of their identity, and when it comes to a lot of these kinds of accomplishments, putting the time into it is often a big factor.

That doesn’t always bother me— I can enjoy a lot of games just for the entertainment they bring to me or the challenge they present. But Minecraft isn’t a particularly challenging game, once you manage to make it over the initial learning hump, and I think that the rewards in Minecraft come from the pure accomplishments: building a new tool, building a structure of some practicality (which I would argue is essentially the same as building a new tool), discovering a new material, discovering a large source of some new material, or building a structure of no practical use.

Within the structure of the Minecraft community, the extremes to which people have taken the game got everyone over the first four of those accomplishments extremely quickly. I think it’s cool that people can work together to so quickly assemble an authoritative reference on a fictional world, but since there are just so many people and programming this sort of thing takes an intense amount of work, the people will always overwhelmingly “beat” the world-creators, even if Notch hires more employees. There will never be mysteries in the world of Minecraft, and I really want there to be.

I wish there existed a much harder difficulty curve to Minecraft— one that was far-reaching, not just the damage tweaking that happens in the Settings. Right now I think that in single player the game does a pretty good job of proving how insignificant you are within the scope of the world that exists, but I wish there were more things that could go wrong in such a way that the odds were stacked even more severely against you. Biomes should be bigger, so if you are in a snowy area there is a chance you will make it out of it but it will take some amount of fortitude and it’s difficult to make fire or you can’t move out in the open for too long without getting hypothermia or there is some sort of resource shortage that makes sense for that climate (other biomes would have different challenges). I wish that rather than just losing health from falling you could break an arm and maybe you wouldn’t be able to use tools as effectively for a while, or a leg and you’d walk more slowly; something that isn’t just a decrease on a health bar easily remedied with food.

The times that I feel most “immersed” in Minecraft are when I am overcoming some ultimately primitive obstacle: when I died and realized that I was carrying something valuable, so I spent two days wandering around looking for some familiar landmark and swearing to myself that I’d start leaving trails. In some ways, I ruined it for myself by browsing the wiki and the forums almost immediately after playing— if I had managed to figure out how to build something like a compass on my own, I think it would feel like one of the greatest accomplishments in gaming in my life.

If I had kept avoiding wikis and spoilers from friends, I could have kept the value in those first 4 accomplishments. I could have made it 12 months into the game before discovering portals. To tell the truth, with the game as it exists right now, I probably would never have discovered portals, because before portals there was little incentive to do arrangement of… things in the real world, just within the crafting pane. But I think that the game as developed into a beta and eventually a real final game could (and should) find ways to nudge you toward things— let you find half-assembled items that you can decompose into partial crafting patterns that you could complete, leave ruins of long-gone civilizations that could point you to the existence of items like stairs or portals or pressure plates… give you ways to not be quite as aimlessly left to your own devices, but still let you discover things at a slower pace, to make the day that you build a record player and put to use a record that you found on the second day you played and have been holding on to for months a day that you’re unlikely to ever forget.

—Casey

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   As much as I’ve been raving about it, I haven’t bought...yet. I suppose part

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