Minecraft: Why You Should Be Playing

Recently it has come to my attention that there are still those in the gaming world who are unfamiliar to the game craze that is Minecraft. Minecraft itself is the creation of Markus €™Notch€™ Persson, now managed under his company Mojang. Written in Java the game can best be described as something of a sandbox building game. While technically it is still in the beta phase, with the game being updated to implement more items and to fix bugs. It€™s an indie game at heart, with a small team working on it, but since its creation in 2009 it has been gaining a massive following and as it stands the community for the game is huge. Initially I had no interest in the game, put off entirely by the appearance and frankly could not understand why people were so addicted to it. Finally I caved when I was bought a copy back in the alpha stage and haven€™t looked back since. While admittedly Minecraft looks rather simple, once you get past that you find yourself planning projects - though in order to build you must of course first collect your materials. Initially it comes down to punching a tree in order to get a log, this you can turn into planks and sticks, and from there you can make your first tools. It may seem a little more complicated than necessary but you get the hang of it, and if not then there are resources such as €˜cheat sheets€™ for the crafting recipes floating about the internet. The addictive quality of Minecraft, for me anyway, is the way it taps into natural human creativity, though admittedly it works for some more than others. Sure you can make a box with some windows, but what if you extended it, thought bigger. Any search into YouTube will lead you to some ridiculous creations, like a full scale model of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D for the Star Trek fans out there). With the various resources that have been implemented since its initial release some pretty amazing things can be seen. A recent addition of pistons allows for contraptions to be built with the aid of a little redstone wire, so that at the push of a button you can make secret rooms, traps, or simple things like bridges. It may not seem that exciting, but it€™s interesting nonetheless. The game also revolves around a day/night cycle, and depending on what €˜difficulty€™ you play on, hostile mobs may spawn, furthering the need for at least a box for the night. Looking at some of the things that have been created and posted on the net, I wouldn€™t be surprised if games like Minecraft led some to consider careers in things like architecture, but that might just be my wishful thinking. Personally speaking I have no knack for redstone wiring, and just build instead. In the beginning I had a thing for building elaborate tree houses, as you can see below my early attempts were not all that impressive. Since then I€™ve gone from tree houses to building a city, my current project on a server I play on involves carving out a building in the side of a mountain. In comparison I build incredibly simply and on a small scale, but any search will show you exactly what can be done with the game. As you can also see with the above picture various texture packs can be used to change the appearance of the game. In addition to this there is a large community dedicated to various in game mods, from everything from making sure those playing on your server behave themselves, to giving yourself the ability to look through walls, although this sort of mod is banned on a large number of servers simply to keep things fair. Minecraft has a lot to offer for a game that appears so simple. There is a free version available on their site to get a feel for the game, but if you wish to receive all the updates and new items you can buy a copy, and due to its beta form you can get it at a discount of the future full price and still be able to play the eventual finished product. If anything, it is worth a try.