Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, or are a hermetic monk seeking spiritual enlightenment, you no doubt have had least heard about Minecraft; I’ve referred to it in a few of my previous posts. What exactly is it?

Well, It’s a game. That much should be clear. But the question should really be “what makes it worth mention”? Well, That’s a loaded question, since naturally opinions differ. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; others think it’s nothing more then a child’s plaything, like lego. I fall neatly between these two.

The basic idea is that there is:

• No story
• No Objective
• No Boundaries

Anything you can think of doing, you usually can do. The nice thing is that it appeals to several different game players, who would normally seek different genres; you have the ability to explore and adventure through caves and find dungeons, and fight several types of enemies. Seeking treasures and materials; or adventure above-ground to find scenic locations or certain rare above-ground material deposits. Another “segment” is that if you can think of it, you can build it (as long as your idea fits within the game engine). For example, if you want to build a brick house, you can. But you will need to adventure and look for clay deposits, and then fire that clay into bricks, and then fashion the bricks into Brick “Blocks” which you can build with. It tries to balance the various things. Of course, that last bit is a taste of the concept of “crafting” which adds the “craft” to “minecraft”.

Basically, you can arrange various materials in a grid, and then that can create a new item that has a new use; For example, you can create axes, which make it easier to chop wood; shovels, which make digging dirt,sand, clay, and gravel easier; pickaxes, which are a necessary staple for underground exploration, swords to help inflict damage, armor, and various other tools and implements. Some people say that it’s the “procedurally generated world” that makes it worthwhile; I have to correct them, however, since although the world is “procedurally generated” that is no different then random maps on age of empires or Command & conquer; that is, the maps are generated procedurally. The appropriate term might be dynamically generated worlds- as you enter new areas, the game will randomly generate those new areas It’s not really so much “random” as it is “random with cues” that is, it doesn’t just randomly place blocks in a complete noise distribution, it randomly generates terrain and caves to look “natural”. This makes the replay value infinite; since even on the same file you could practically indefinitely go in a single direction and never run out of areas to explore. This brings about what I feel is sort of a bad point, though; while everything is generated randomly, the game has a habit of making things look pretty similar; in many ways, once you’ve seen one minecraft desert, you’ve pretty well seen them all. Of course occasionally the generator tosses in some unique landmarks or strange landforms, such as perhaps a dungeon lying right underneath sand so that the sand creates a small “dip” with exposed cobblestone, or perhaps grass covered mountains of trees in the center of a vast desert, etc.

This doesn’t so much detract from the game as much as it makes it easier to get lost. Thankfully, it usually throws enough unique landforms in that you can recognize them; “ahh, I remember, my main base was north of that mountain with the giant cave near the top”. The caves can sometimes be immense; having to light up every crevice to prevent monsters from spawning can get repetitive and boring, as you constantly find that the paths branch out in a handful of directions, and you find yourself getting lost near the bedrock with no torches, or something (which is more a result of being unprepared and reckless then of a particular problem with the game).

In a followup post I will discuss several “clone” games that are attempting to siphon off of Minecraft’s success, and even bring the game to new platforms.