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Sarah and I attended Minecon and the official release of Minecraft recently. Held at Mandala Bay in Las Vegas, Minecon was a 4,500 attendee sold out event.

I can’t imagine an event where you would find more parents and their teenage children having fun together.

I’ve never been much of a gamer. Not sure why. (Maybe more on that in another post.) But Minecraft is a game that captured my attention like few video games ever have. Back in April of this year, my brother told me about it. His boys had been playing it for awhile. I downloaded it and thought, “What’s the fuss about?” The game is written in Java, not the language of choice for most game designers. The graphics are low-tech, 8 bit looking, and the object of the game was not instantly obvious.

But the game grew on me quickly. Why? Because Minecraft is like life, it is what you make it. It doesn’t have one single objective and it has endless possibilities. The model for the game is somewhat unique. You don’t buy the game, you buy your character. Then, with your character you can play single player or log onto numerous servers where you can play multiplayer.

Notch, the alias for Markus Perrson, is the man behind the game. He’s an indie game designer from Sweden, not associated with the major game companies. With more than than 17 million registered users and over 4 million people that have bought the game. At roughly $20 a pop, that makes him a multimillionaire. You do the math.

He started a company, Mojang. And now has a team of talented people working on Minecraft, as well as two additional games, Cobalt and Scrolls.

The game was in beta since December of last year until it’s launch at Minecon. Notch used an interesting concept to promote and improve the game. He sold accounts at a discount during the beta stage, to encourage the community to grow and embrace the game. Since it was beta, problems in the game could be blamed on bugs and unfinished mechanics. The advantage of this model is that early adopters had a steady stream of new features to continually explore. Watching the game play improve and mature over the space of a couple of years is one of the things that drew interest in the game.

Game Play

So, what can you do in Minecraft? I’ve already said that what I like about Minecraft is that it’s like life, it’s what you make of it. But that is very nonspecific. That doesn’t answer the question. A better answer would be that Minecraft is a sandbox game. It’s open ended and limited only by one’s imagination.

The premise of the game is that you come to life, with nothing in your possession except a full health and hunger bar in a flat world made up of different types of one meter square blocks. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to not just survive the night when monsters (called mobs) come out, but to thrive by mining, building, and doing the things you might do in the real world. Collecting and utilizing various resources is an important part of the game. For example: the first thing that most people do when they spawn into the world is to “punch a tree”, which will score you logs that can be crafted into planks, stick, swords, axes and so on.

Minecraft offers something for nearly everyone. Some people like mining. There is nothing quite like finding a diamond block for the first time. Some people like to build. It’s possible to build anything for dumpy shacks to jaw dropping castles. For the sake of brevity here is a list of verbs that show some of the things you can do in Minecraft: mine, build, plant, harvest, fight, walk, run, swim, smelt, craft, fall, die, fly, kill, eat, dig, jump, punch, clip, ride, row, sink, chop, hoe, sleep, play, break, bury, throw, gather, sneak, open, close, dye, make, grow, hide, find, shoot…

Modding

Here is one of the keys to the success of the game…modding…or creating modifications. Since Minecraft was written in Java, I was dubious about whether it could really be a serious game. But the fact that it was written in Java gave it one huge advantage that I didn’t realize at the time. It could be modded more easily than ‘traditional’ games. Modders (people that create mods) with just a little programming experience under there belt, and the help a very supportive community, can change the game in nearly any way that they can imagine. For example: if you are not satisfied with a limited number of animals provided by the vanilla game (cows, pigs, sheep, wolves, chickens, squid), install Mo’ Creatures, and now you have foxes, bears, cats, sharks, dolphins, birds…the list goes on.

It’s up to the user to decide what he wants his world to be like. He can mix and match mods to his hearts content. And if he is ever bored, go looking for another mod to fill the gap in his world. Installing mods can sometimes be a little bit of a headache, but those problems are getting better too. Hopefully it won’t be long before mods are officially supported and can be loaded and unloaded within the game. Until then, there is a very supportive community that can help.

Multiplayer

One more sweat spot of the game is Survival multiplayer mode (SMP). Join a Minecraft server and interact with your friends or with people all over the world. If meeting new people is your thing, there are a multitude of Minecraft servers out there to join. If you are more comfortable playing with just a few select friends, create a server yourself. It’s relatively easy.

For my birthday this year, I had a Minecraft birthday party. My Family, my brother and some of his kids and a couple of friends all gathered together in my virtual house in Minecraft. Samantha, my daughter crafted a Minecraft cake out of sugar, wheat, milk and coco beans. We all gathered around the cake, that occupied a place of honor in the middle of the table. We all jumped around the room, on the table, on the cake, typing frantically.

And then suddenly the cake was gone. My brother asked, “Who ate the cake! I didn’t get any!” Suddenly everyone one else was echoing his words. “I didn’t get any either” I would like to note here that to consume a cake in Minecraft all you had to do it click on it and a 5th of the cake disappears and you received a little nourishment to you health bar. Sarah, my lovely wife, not knowing these small details of the game, clicked on it multiple times. It’s a fun story and a wonderful memory about how I had a Minecraft birthday and Sarah ate all the cake.

But there is so much more to community play on Minecraft than jumping around and eating cake. Adventure awaits those who like to explore. And the safety in numbers helps when fighting mobs. Building is more rewarding when done as a team effort. Even the dark side of humanity can come out when people are dishonest, jealous or just mean. All of this can lead to situations for teach and learning.

The Ender

There is so much to learn and do in Minecraft. I’ve only broken the surface in this post. It’s a long way down to bedrock. (That’s a  Minecraft metaphor).

The game even has an end…sort of. After making your way to “The End”, a special real filled with Endermen, you must slay the Ender Dragon, which opens a portal back your own land.

What then? The game isn’t over. It’s never really over. It’s only the beginning. Go punch a tree.