By Duncan Geere, Wired UK
Just before going to bed Sunday night, I downloaded a sandbox adventure game called Minecraft. An hour-and-a-half later, I was rubbing sleep-deprived eyes, desperately digging a moat around a sandcastle as the sun set, in the hope of staving off a nocturnal invasion of zombies and spiders.
The game’s single-player mode places you in a sandbox world and simply asks you to survive. You start with nothing but your bare hands, and it’s up to you to chop down trees, dig up piles of sand and dirt and arrange it all into a rudimentary shelter before night falls.
Because once night falls, you’re in trouble.
The pigs, sheep and cows that happily roam around the blocky landscape in the daytime are replaced by shambling zombies, skeletal bowmen, scuttling spiders and weird critters called Shamblers, which explode if they get too near you. On my first night, a Shambler took out half of the side of my beautiful house, and I spent the rest of the time until morning with a sliver of health left, frantically trying to rebuild, while staving off zombies by hitting them with a branch that I’d forgotten I’d picked up.
The next day, I created a wooden sword, some leather armor and made a door for my house, as well as digging the aforementioned moat, making the second night rather easier. Then, the following day, while digging out a basement for my increasingly impressive house, I fell through a hole into an underground cavern where gold veins glittered on the walls.
Minecraft is full of contradictions. Working out how to play is a little tricky, but everything works exactly how you’d expect it would. It doesn’t set any goals, but there are various things that are expected of the player if you don’t want to end up ripped apart by those aforementioned zombies.
It instills a tremendous sense of pride in your creation, too. But often that creation is minutes away from being spectacularly destroyed — either by a river of lava, marauding critters, a flood or a badly constructed fireplace.
It’s also a game of consequences. Only a few of the game’s resources are renewable, most notably wood. Despite what you might have learned from the three little piggies, it’s actually a pretty good building material and will serve you well. Be sure to plant new trees when you cut them down, though, or you’ll end up with a deforested lunar landscape where you have to trek for miles to get more raw materials, and you won’t be able to make it back before dark.
Over time, if the first few nights in your island hut don’t kill you, you’ll eventually become master of your kingdom. You’ll begin extensive terraforming projects, diverting rivers and flattening hills, building forts and castles, and libraries and churches on the surface, as well as rabbit warrens of tunnels below ground filled with flaming torches, railway tracks, mine carts and treasure chambers full of gold.
Along with all that construction will come the slow, creeping realization that in the process of creation, you’ve destroyed everything that you found enchanting about the game in the first place — the beautiful unspoiled mountains, the trees, the pigs and sheep. Purposeful or not, there’s a strong environmental message behind Minecraft, all about living sustainably with your environment.
I’d been consciously avoiding the game a little, due to all the media attention it’s been given lately. One hangover from my teenage indie-music snob days is that my default reaction to everyone telling me something’s brilliant is to avoid it like the plague. It’s an annoying tendency that deprived me of The Strokes’ incredible debut album for months, and it kicks in just as hard with indie games as it ever did with bands.
Don’t make the same mistake that I did. Minecraft is an astonishing achievement for one-man developer Markus Persson. Go get yourself a copy, marvel at its possibilities, create a massive kingdom, then wipe it all and start afresh.
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