The Minecraft Duality

Full disclosure: Minecraft is one of my favourite discoveries (and favourite games) of the last few years. There is every possibility the following text may come across as more of an impassioned lovefest than the kind of surgically detached analysis I assume this blog is known across the seven internet seas for.

I very rarely play the same game twice in vastly different ways. Sure, I’ll play Mass Effect through a few times, once as FemShep, once as that default out-of-the-box guy (who barely counts, so far from the real Shepard is he), once as a badass Renegade Adept, once as a lame Paragon Infiltrator. I have a fairly different experience doing each time, yet its still the same game, played in the same way. Following the story, clinging to the universe and its offered reality, and playing much as I imagine the game is supposed to be played – you take on missions, slaughter countless aliens/organic robots/occasional human, and talk the ears off every npc you can find.

Not so in Minecraft (although if the NPC’s could talk, that part would probably stay the same). By now it’s general concepts and many virtues have been discussed elsewhere more articulately or more hilariously than I’m capable of, so I’m going to assume some knowledge and skip straight to talking about the perfect balance between multiple totally different games that exists within its code (there could be more, if the totally original idea for a timed-setup tower defence mod I just thought of gets off the ground. Or already exists.)

Stunningly, its a perfectly balanced combination of adventure game and sandbox ‘creation space’ – its exploration more engrossing than the most beautifully rendered modern epics, its creation possibilities the envy of every ‘sim’ game ever made. The primary thing that differentiates it from anything else is the ability to switch seamlessly between playing it as a ‘game’ (via exploration for its own sake, battling skeletons, spiders and zombies for fun, and collecting rare and precious minerals for the challenge and the sake of acquisition) and playing it as a pure creation engine (hours and hours spent planning, building and rebuilding the perfect sky fortress/undersea fortress/treetop fortress, purely for the sake of building it).

That mountain is just begging for a foolhardy monument to man's inhumanity to man

This sort of thing is certainly possible in other games – one glance at youtube will tell you there are plenty of people who spent more time lining up trick shots with the bow and arrow than they did exploring Skyrim’s snowy wonderland. I know thats there, but I’ve never felt compelled in a ‘real’ game to fool around in the engine, to organise my library of books alphabetically, or fill my house with literally thousands of individual items and then shout at them. The relentless pressure of quests, the story, or some other pastime in keeping with how I role play within the world means I don’t get bored enough, and if I did, those kinds of activities tend to break the fourth wall, and ruin the main experience for me. I certainly can’t switch back and forth according to my mood, or based on how much time I have free, which is so easy in Minecraft that I find it happening organically. A quick jaunt down the mine in the middle of building some ridiculous monument to folly might turn into a lengthy, tense exploration if I strike an unknown cave, or spy diamonds off in the distance. Equally, my most committed resource foraging expeditions have been derailed because I noticed a natural mountain face that looked enough like a skull to warrant many hours carving it into perfection.

Interestingly, while the multiplayer appeal of most games is in the ‘adventure’ elements, here its much stronger on the creation side.

There are few other multiplayer games with a persistent, sharable world that evolves over time whose purpose isn’t defined by conflict (I refuse to count FarmVille, for obvious reasons). Fewer still allow just a small group of people to privately build, evolve and destroy their own world, on their own terms. Those that do, tend to focus on the quick-and-brutal framework of a time or kill-based game limit, after which the board and teams are reset, the slate wiped clean. Minecraft allows for as permanent a world as is interesting to the participants, and as shared or disparate goals as is interesting to them. In my time on one multiplayer server, we had shared quests to procure diamonds or rallying together to fend off skeletons or zombies investigating a gap in the wall (inadvertently created by overzealous renovations) but also spent hours apart on separate pet projects, whether that was marking our individual territories with 60 cube high initials for each player, or connecting all these fiefdoms with a shared, roller coaster-esque minecart track for easy transit.

My fondest Minecraft memory is of the time a few of us were playing on a multiplayer server we’d set up, a world in which the host had wiled away many hours building a geographically and architecturally significant fortress. After a lengthy time adding parapets, skywalks and totally unnecessary sub-basement diamond mines, he disappeared temporarily from the game (no doubt to do something constructive in the real world). Seconds before he’d logged off, the three of us had discovered a vein of pure obsidian, deep below the foundations of the castle. As soon as he was gone, we remaining realised we had only one choice: to immediately mine the obsidian and secretly build a portal to hell/the netherworld. Immediately between the front door of our host’s castle, and an extremely convincing fake copy of the front door we would construct directly behind it.

The point, of course, was to see if we could set up a situation where our friend would unknowingly walk through his front door and be immediately transported to a hellish otherworld of flames and freakish monsters. For the 40 minutes or so it took to mine, ascend to the surface and build the door, you’ve never heard such childish giggling. It wasn’t dignified, but dammit, it was fun.

It didn’t work out in the end – we later discovered that particular beta didn’t have the netherworld working in multiplayer, but it didn’t matter. The point was the building, not the end result, and these kinds of experiences are par for the course here – the rule, rather than the exception.

Which brings me to what could generously be called the ‘point’ of this post. Most of my time with Minecraft was around this time last year, and finished before the official ‘1.0’ game came out. I’ve been very keen since then to get back and investigate how it plays with the massive potentially game changing additions this included. One thing concerns me though – does the much expanded sense of purpose, ultimate end goal and addition of a number of traditional ‘game’ elements detract from the total freedom earlier versions made so easy? Once an ultimate goal and a scoring system (of sorts, via achievement and levelling) is present, will I feel compelled to pursue defined ‘success’, even if doing so detracts from my overall enjoyment of the experience? In adding more content and more scope to the game, have Mojang ultimately made a whole that is less than the sum of its parts?

Only one way to find out.