Revolution is Coming
[Lost content: a promotional poster for our Vancouver Film School Game Design final project, GRAVITOS. It was a stylized, round spacecraft spraypainted in green on a concrete wall, with a movie poster-like layout.]
[Lost content: likely an image of a structure I built in Minecraft, captioned 18 hours of toil beneath the earth.]
Minecraft is an independent project by Markus Persson, a.k.a Notch.
It is the best gaming experience I’ve had since the first time I experienced LAN DOOM back in ’93, over 17 years ago. While DOOM and Minecraft share certain characteristics, Minecraft does things that no other digital interaction has ever really done for me, or done this well.
Where to begin? A quick synopsis of the game: Minecraft is a first-person sandbox game where the player mines for resources, combines raw materials in an elegant way similar to Diablo 2’s Horadric cube, and then builds using a simple Lego-like system.
The graphics are extremely basic. This is where a lot of the DOOM-ish nostalgia comes in for me as I can’t help but think of the graphical tone of DOOM’s corridors. But where DOOM was all carefully designed levels and bases, Minecraft is a procedurally generated world. Markus’s code creates a plane with a surface area 4 times that of the planet Earth, allowing for limitless exploration.
That’s the overview, and I’d love to give more details but if you haven’t yet experienced this game anything I say could ruin potentially genre- and experience-busting wow moments. It’s not for everyone, but if you enjoy the ability to craft your own world and want a breath of fresh air, I can’t recommend this enough.
It’s also on a special Alpha sale right now. Yes, that’s correct, this isn’t a completed project. I hesitate to even call Minecraft a game; but as an exercise in emergent gameplay I’ve consistently amused myself for over 12 hours straight, something that even the most polished of recent large-studio efforts have failed to do.
Huge caveat there as well: if you’re currently in a time-sensitive endeavour of your own, DO NOT START PLAYING MINECRAFT. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the hours slipping away and the sun rising as you strive to pierce just one more chamber deep in the earth, or add that extra parapet to your ever-towering fortress…
P.S. It might spoil it for some, but the Minecraft Wiki crafting section was invaluable for getting me fully invested in the game.
2010.08.01 – 2010.08.30