Learning the (Mine)craft

Normally we talk about finished games here, the ones that come off budgets of millions of pounds from massive game studios, and which more than likely are either shooters or sequels to something. Or both. In this case, there’s a game that’s categorically none of these things, and is all the better for it.

Minecraft is the brainchild of a single former game developer, who left his job to start developing a crazy world of his own (deciding to go by ‘Notch’ henceforth). To say Minecraft is an open-world, sandbox game is the understatement of year – Minecraft is THE open world sandbox. Your character most often starts in a virgin, pixelated landscape, where everything exists in block form. What starts as a simple romp around the environment becomes a race against time to build shelter from the monsters that come after you at night.

As per the name, however, just about everything can be mined to be used as a building material. Rock and stone can be refined to make walls, fire and torches can be grabbed as light sources, and the deeper you go, the better the raw ore you can get (while avoiding the zombies that live there). The better the ore, the better the tools you can make, and the better the tools, the more you can do. Players have built entire castles and kingdoms starting with nothing more than a pixelated hand.

But that open sandbox has given rise to a massive community of players who not only trade details on how to mine and craft items, but who’ve made entire mini-RPGs within the game, allowing players to explore the world they’ve made, and complete game objectives within it, following stories and characters they run themselves. The world is so flexible that it doesn’t take long to carve out your own fortress of awesomeness (or a giant wang of gold, if that’s your thing).

The game is still in beta and is constantly in revision, with several versions still floating around. Notch probably never counted on the kind of response he’s seen, but his hobby project now occupies more cultural headspace (and YouTube samples) than all the Gears of War games put together.

And if the internet is good for anything, it’s good for indie developers like this.