![]() ![]() It’s not gameplay informed by knowledge, it’s informed by blindness. ![]() This wasn’t about having “more freedom”, it was about being tightly restricted and trying to guess what the designer was thinking. Or dialogue in early RPGs where you had to guess the word that would trigger a new block of text and obtain some important info or progress. Instead for me the recipe-guessing was like a leap back to the age of textual adventures, when you had to try commands over and over until you found something that worked and made you progress to the next room. You have friends guiding and helping you, so that you move at a brisk pace. The learning process, and recipe guessing, isn’t like mine, where you are alone in front of the game. Or, they’ve seen their friends playing it, and playing together in multiplayer. In the age of youtube and everything else, they probably have seen Minecraft being played tons of times before putting their hands on it. It is different why? Because most of those kids don’t come to Minecraft like I did. …But Minecraft is hugely popular, lots of kids play it. (All I’m writing here is not “personal” ramblings, as always I analyze my own reactions because they eventually build a point. The rest of the game seems shallow and there are tons of other that offer more depth. I don’t care about building pretty houses, it feels trivial and meaningless. It’s not that Minecraft actually stops here, but the lack of clear goals (and “demands”) mean that every time I tried playing the game and reached this stage, I got bored. Why? Because once you have infinite food, a magical object that makes you skip the night, and infinite torches and tools… The “survival” pressure is over. Then settle, start a crop farm, dig down. To skip the overworld monsters you need a bed. Since the yields are always greater than the uses, food is infinite, problem solved. If you don’t want to slaughter random animals, you can start a crop farm early on. But the survival itself is caused by the active pressure of monsters during the night, and food. Once you know the intended progress the survival aspects only last about half an hour: you get some tools, crafting table, start digging a hole until you find coal, coal leads to torches, so more subterranean expansion, looking for iron. Something that could be found immediately at random, could have required someone else half an hour. You had to look up things on some guide, or just trying random arrangements to find a recipe. And when it became the real Minecraft it still was bad for me. The moment I broke a block and saw the remaining still floating in the air, with no physics, left me a sour taste. The early tech demo didn’t convince me at all. But for me, personally, Minecraft has always been disappointing. Interesting because it started as some Dwarf Fortress-like, a project only known in certain tiny circles. It’s all very vague in my memory, but I remember I tried an early tech demo with blocks when there wasn’t even a world generation, and then something resembling current Minecraft some time later. Thanks to Q23, I’ve known Minecraft since it’s pre-beginning. This was a long time coming (and I wrote a slightly shorter version on some forum a while ago). ![]()
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