Blog Entry#9 Minecraft

The last time you've heard anything about minecraft was probably 5 years ago. I'm in that same boat. So sit down buckle in and today we're gonna talk about a stupidly simplistic sandbox became my favorite game. Minecraft came out for the Xbox 360 on May 9th, 2012. Coincidentally, that was the day 12 year old me found his new favorite game. Remember bionicles? Yeah I had more than you did, so naturally a game where you could build whatever you wanted was right up my alley.

 

    The Xbox 360 release of minecraft was a barebones version of a already barebones game. It was charmingly simple, dropping you into a world with no instructions or goals. There wasn't much you could do, but thing you could do they nailed perfectly. Combat was straight forward and fun, building stuff was almost therapeutic, and the quiet time spent mining in preparation for what was to come. That space to organize your thoughts and plan out your next move, all the while being serenaded by those faint piano melodies in the background. That was the icing on the cake. I was in love with this game.  It let me be creative, adventurous. 

You could do with everything around you what you pleased. There was only one world I played on. I wanted to be the only of my friends that played on two, so I crammed as much cool stuff on there as I could. I built minecarts, Mob traps, I exploited this duplication glitch and built a diamond house out of diamond blocks. Listen. I was a perfectionist. And this world had to be perfect. Or else all I would have been doing was wasting away in front of a TV every day. But even after the countless hours I pumped into minecraft, I was still pretty bad at building. So I started watching other people play to figure out what I could do or build to make my world a little better. And as a result, I found an entire new avenue of the game. I was never a huge fan of lets plays. My introduction to the genre was...well…loud. Even back then was a screaming contest. And even though I was twelve, that kind of stuff just didn’t sit well with me. I felt myself gravitating towards more reserved and laid back youtubers like Monkeyfarm, who in the let’s play space was a breath of fresh air. 

    He took a very methodical approach to building, and his videos were more about that process rather than about him. And as I watched more videos, I eventually found my way into modded Minecraft through these two guys, Sips_ and Shin_. They were the quieter side of the Yogscast, and even though they both sucked at the game, it was hilariously fun to watch them dick around and trying to figure things out. These boys were the perfect lets play combo, and their SipsCo series where they automate the process of dirt collection is single handedly responsible for my foray into Tekkit. Tekkit was a different beast altogether. A collection of technology-oriented mods that looked like minecraft, but offered an entirely new way to play the game. If you didn’t like mining, you didn’t have to do it. You could build one of these things and it’d dig for you. If you didn’t like building, well guess what. Anything you wanted to do could be done with the right machines, and it led to some pretty incredible stuff. Tekkit’s charm wore off quickly, though. After the sipsco series ended, I found myself getting bored with mods, and gradually, I made my way back to vanilla, but the charm was gone there too. The game had grown up just as I had. 

    Why was everything getting so complicated? I loved minecraft for its simplicity same reason a lot of other loved the game but with the addition of not only new block and materials, but new mobs, and goals... Minecraft didn't feel like minecraft any more to me. That being said these new updates roll in not only a plethora of new player, but all the old ones as well that came back to see what was new and for the nostalgia of playing the game. To me it's not minecraft until that music starts fading in, and i'm pulled back into a world where nothing really mattered, where everything was easy, and when, well, I was happy.