Gamer's Log - Minecraft

The best game to feature tree-punching mechanics.

Minecraft, where do I begin? Minecraft is the most talked about game right now, it seems no one can escape its 16x16 pixel grasp. I had heard whispers of what the game involved and viewed quite hilarious videos involving various structures being unintentionally razed but it wasn't until I heard my friends talking to each other about all the insane contraptions and structures they had built and planned on building in the future that I decided I must buy it. This seems to have been the way Minecraft has gathered ninety percent of its popularity; friends tell friends who tell other friends and so and so forth until we have over one million registered players. Oh yes, and I forgot to mention the game is still in Alpha.

So why is this game so damn good? The first thing I noticed is the way it doesn't force you to think a certain way or throw you into a pre-conceived universe. You begin the game in the middle of a procedurally generated environment made up of cubes coloured with a 16 pixel by 16 pixel texture map, with nothing but a block hand sticking out in front of the screen. What you do from this point on is entirely up to you, the only constant being that at night time there will be monsters and they will try to kill you. The addition of monsters to the game add a welcomed necessity factor to the already enjoyable and addicting building mechanic. During the first night you'll probably only have enough time to dig out a stone dwelling in the side of a cliff with a couple of torches scattered around but by the fifth or sixth night you could possibly have a multi-layered castle fitted with mechanised doors and a moat running along the perimeter.

The brilliance of Minecraft, in my opinion is only unleashed once you're playing on a server with a group of your friends, working together to create a land of wonder and mystery. On the current server I play on for example, I've created the aptly named "Ben Island" which is a hidden underground labyrinth, guarded by giant cobblestone walls and furious cacti.

I'm feeling more of a need to write about all of my creations other than the game itself and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's this kind of creativity and social interactivity that has made this game such a phenomenon and is absolutely a wake-up call for all game designers out there. Minecraft is a video game, can only be a video game and will ever only be a video game. Markus Persson (the creator of Minecraft) has fully embraced the medium he's working in and is being rewarded for it.