2009 - Minecraft

My thoughts while playing the game for the first time

• I had tried the free edition of Minecraft a few different times for a few minutes each time, but each time I found it kind of boring and stopped playing.
• On 2016.08.06 I finally got far enough that I felt "the hook".
  • It reminds me of when I spent an evening watching the first few episodes of "Lost", and it wasn't immediately addictive, but after a while I really got hooked.
  • It also reminds me the descriptions people give of smoking: it isn't fun the first time (or first few times) you do it.
• The following are thoughts from 2016.08.06/07:
  • You really need to use a guide to get started, or have a friend walk you through the basics.
    • I was totally stuck at the beginning because it was not clear to me that the orientation of items in a crafting box would make a difference when crafting, and there were no written instructions on how to do it.
    • I found it unpleasant that I need to kill the sheep / pigs. I wouldn't have normally done that.
    • This guide was enough to get me far enough to start to feel addicted: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Your_first_ten_minutes
  • This game really starts to get addictive once you understand how to make weapons, torches, the crafting table, and the furnace-thing.
    • I really remember getting a rush of pleasure when I dug a 3x3x3 hole, put down a crafting table, a furnace, cooked some meat, and put up a torch. I got this warm feeling of "Oooh, I'm home".
  • The game does a brilliant job of hiding its full complexity to new users.
    • When I would play the game in the past, I would just see the surface-level stuff and think "ugh this is boring", but when I started browsing the Minecraft wiki I was blown away at the complexity that I hadn't yet seen.
    • All the different block types, the various monsters at deeper levels of the game, etc.
  • Things that weren't immediately clear to me:
    • You should hold down the left mouse button to break things rather than clicking a bunch of times.
    • You can chop down wood with your bare hands.
    • It wasn't intuitive to me that you are supposed to kill the sheep / pigs, but you are not supposed to kill the cats. I was starving at one point and thought I could eat the cats.
  • Shortcuts the game takes that don't matter: (similar to shortcuts that Spielberg takes that moviegoers don't care about)
    • Gravity doesn't affect blocks. You can chop down the middle of a tree and the rest of it will remain standing. And it doesn't matter to players!
  • So, what's the appeal of the game that I'm feeling?
    • I have fairly fine control over the difficulty of the game.
      • If I want a challenge, I can dig deep into the earth and try to fight monsters.
      • If I don't want a challenge, I can just sleep through the nights and make stuff during the day.
    • The exploration is wonderful.
      • It captures a piece of the DF experience of feeling like you're in a huge world.
      • The mining / tunneling reminds me of the fun I had with the Red Faction demo many years ago, blowing holes into the wall to create a path up to the ceiling.
    • Mining for minerals feels very, very much like playing a slot machine.
      • There's even a tingly noise when you get the minerals, just like with a slot machine.
  • Misc cool stuff:
    • Water flows down if you break open a new path for it.
    • Sand falls down.
    • The game world's variety is extremely dense compared to something like OFP, and even OFP has fairly dense variety compared to the real world.
  • Frustrating stuff:
    • The free version of the game lagged like crazy for me when I got close to the jungle parts. To the point where I had to stop playing.
      • But this also made me realize how smoothly the rest of the game was running. Very, very important. Starcraft was also good at this.
  • Now that I've started actually mining into the ground, I'm getting heavy de-ja-vu from Spelunky. It really is like a more-immersive, easier version of Spelunky. It's like if Spelunky and Wurm Online and Candy Crush had a baby.