5 Things Minecraft Shows us about Ourselves

A quick glance at where Minecraft was when I first picked it up one year ago

Compared to where it is now...

Images Courtesy Pucklovesgames / minecraftdl

Only kidding about this last one, or am I?

Shows you how fast one compelling piece of software can advance in a matter of months, even when the graphic upgrades are almost all fan-created. Sure, Mojang has pushed out some impressive updates, things that make the UI and the content richer and more user-friendly (aka they forever silenced our complaints by giving us cats), but they haven't messed with the original big-block graphics.

Why haven't they? Because it would break the game, causing enraged gamers to birth actual kittens, and those kittens would storm the infamous Mojang Castle. 

Which brings me to my point: Minecraft is the first large-scale game of it's type, and like every truly groundbreaking game, it lets us do something we've always wanted to do, but couldn't do before now:

Play with the fundamental building blocks of an entire world in easy-to-stack-and-count cube form.

I think that by filling a new need, it highlights a number of things about our species, such as...

#5. We love maximum freedom within firm constraints, not total freedom.

This one seems a gimme, but it isn't always clear to game designers, or anyone else for that matter. Parents need to set strict boundaries that simultaneously allow enough room to foster their child's imagination and creativity. As parents of "problem children" know, It's no easy task to know where the lines need to be drawn.

Picture a kid whose parents don't give a crap, and then one with parents that enforce the strictest of lock-down environments. Those are the two extremes when it comes to game design too, and they provide equally shitty results. 

Gamers hate being locked into boringly or too rigidly forced structure in games (worst of all when those rules are used to make us shell out money just to play with full features), and second only to that, we despise not being told exactly what we can and cannot do.

You said you wanted a cat. Enjoy.

We love choice, but we need to know our choices have consequences, and what those are, precisely.

Often, the best places to find inspiration for what rules work nicely is to begin with a rough analog of how things work in nature.

Bonus Hint: Parents, look to baboon troops.

Minecraft took that concept and used it to ask one great question: "Hey, how would the world work if instead of tiny atoms as building blocks we used actual giant fucking building blocks?"

It sounds kind of "hurr", and too obvious, but then don't all the greatest inventions, in hindsight?

It's the best possible place to begin, when exploring the freedom of an analogue to our own very complex universe. Start small. Baby steps.

You might be thinking of cocky examples of games right now that bust this rule somehow, but I assure you smugly that there are no such things, or none that are successful.

When you get the rules right, the product will feel right too.

That's why Minecraft can get away with rude graphics that insult your video card with primitively grunted proto-cusses.

Moo-f*#*-ooooo

You see, this is exactly how a world that asks that one great question above should look.

How does Minecraft play? Why, precisely like it should, given its natural rules; Chunky, blocky, rude, cute, stupidly easy, yet containing the ingredients and tools to let you be as unbelievably complex and imaginative as your mind can manage.

Sound like any world you know, writ small?

To-scale representation of how subtle I am

They've gone on to ask what different dimensions would look like too, such as hell and a weird sort of purgatory you get to visit as "The End", which coincidentally tells you what the designers think about having an end-game in the first place. These variations are adventurous, but the same basic concept. You have a world with set laws of physics and interaction that behaves sort of like ours, so it looks sort of like ours, but not any more or less than it should.

As I said, it fills a specific need that nothing else quite does yet, but there are contenders coming close. Soon, it could be overshadowed by something that is as easy and natural to use, fills the the same need, but does it with more realism, polish, and with even more world-manipulation options.

Until such time, Minecraft is king, and while it is, it will be endlessly tinkered with by astute and talented people who clamor forth in a great glittering horde whenever a new need is filled. It's pretty much the same thing as tinkering with cars or computers, because...

#4. If you create something that fills a need, fans will make it their own.

As if we didn't fear Miatas before.

When true needs are met by something, people will fall in love with that something. When people love something they will try to make it their own creation.

The most basic examples are food, sleep, sex, and transportation, but we modify and ritualize everything we love, to the point where we feel comfortable with it being an actual part of our self.

Minecraft lets us do this to the appearance of the game, with simplified function always bleeding through to the form, but even so, the results of love are surprising and awe-inspiring.

Images courtesy Gamefront / Surviving Minecraft

What about the interior of the game though, the nuts and bolts that make us stay in a blocky Matrix and spend countless hours fretting and chiseling away like mad dwarves?

Here again, people want the freedom described above, with the right look, but mostly they want to get the job done. Minecraft players want what they were thinking about making to end up looking right, be satisfying to build, and involve logical methods to get from block A to block B.

In fact, people will quickly adapt to a logical step-unlock system if you make it clear and consistent, because...

#3. People will use anything as a tool, as long as it does the job.

Who woulda thought Smurfs would be so easy to skin?

Your job in Minecraft, nebulously, is as I said before: Making your own creations.

The history of all technology is the history of finding tools that make manipulation of our environment easier.

In Survival Mode you get to interact with the world as if it was a hostile land filled with bad guys, and you must survive your first night in the wilds by thinking fast, building faster, and hoping you don't get blown up by psychotic, dynamite-filled, armless Gumbies.

It's something like being a pioneer on a newly terraformed Mars with a bunch of flesh-starved aliens who thirst for your fluids.

In Hardcore Mode, survival hinges on one life alone. It's a stark ruleset, but fun if you're into that sort of realism.

Much like our world, the first thing people learn to use in either of these modes is their fists. You can assault a tree to pieces, which you can then immediately use to build a worktable, which you can then use to spew forth pickaxes, each of which has a limit to the block types it can give you to use in your mad fancies.

Clearly, at no point in the harvesting->crafting->building cycle does Minecraft closely resemble how the real world works. 

It all does work though, with incredible fluency between ideas, simply because the tools are as true as the blocks are to their counterparts, atoms. Which is to say that Minecraft tools are crude things that do roughly the same job as their real-world analog in a tiny fraction of the time, with magnified results, and with a perfect success rate.

How do you only test something that refuses to fail AND defies logic?
Image courtesy sexypimp.com (no, seriously).

Tools should let the gamer take #5 (freedom with rules), and mash it with #4 (wanting to make the world your very own) to the maximum limit of mashyness.

I'm IN Avatar!

This limit is where Mojang will have to smartly push Minecraft, further and further.

New tools (assembly plants?). New environments (deep sea diving?). Higher ceilings (to space, and beyond?), 

or tools that automatically generate cities, or even entire cultures?

Whatever else happens, the limits are going to change, as the users of the tools adapt and create new tools.

Signs of this sort of evolution of ideas is evident already in the current game community. There are so many man-hours being inputted to one end only: 

Creation.

And nothing makes creation easier than turning on God Mode, known as "Creative Mode" in the Parlance of the Mine.

But wait! That's cheating! (Says an annoying, high-pitched voice)

Not so. When it comes to realizing our dreams of making stuff, it turns out that what might pass for cheating on other games only makes this one better because...

#2. There is no cheating when you play Creator, only the art of creation.

That's it. Whether we talk about the GUI or the Gameplay, simulated realities only have to simulate enough of reality to make us happy in our creations, as we evolve ourselves through the mishmash of ideas pushing against constraints and changing them.

Bending the rules becomes the ground from which artwork and innovation bloom.

Creative Mode lets the Minecraft user have infinite resources of all types, flight, and the the ability to break blocks with a single karate chop. So there are still rules and steps, but they are much-abbreviated. What could possibly be better in a simulated analog reality where our very existence in the game is only to create and observe as we see fit?

That's right, Middle Earth, a goddamn entire world, is being made, block-by-block, to scale. 

We're visibly frothing for more. Not only are projects like this underway, there are other people creating new texture packs and new tools for Minecraft as you read this very sentence. It's evolving at a singularly rapid pace, and will do so unless replaced because...

...

#1. Simulated reality is our favorite distraction from actual reality, and will only become more so.

In simulated Earth you can play Governator and no one will laugh at you

What a surprise, right? That's it. Minecraft is only the beginning of our playing Bob the Buildergod in sandboxes that will look and act increasingly more lifelike and fantastic at the same time.

That trend will change the state of the genre over time, with the future holding virtual worlds that we can live and breathe in that let us achieve our wildest fantasies (Porncraft).

For now though we have Minecraft in its current flexing form. Soon enough though we'll be out of the primitive soup and flopping about on weird new lands while a James Horner soundtrack plays in the background.

It's cool, you won't need a neck where you're going!

But hey, you don't have to agree with me. Let's face it: No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood. Or something else condescending. Anyway, let me know what you think about Minecraft and what it means to you by leaving a comment or two.