Minecraft: Claustrophobia on the Frontier

(This post originally appeared on the Mudlark company blog. Screenshot taken from render of the Idle Thumbs Minecraft world, by forum user ysbreker)

This morning I was staring out the window of my train to work, listening to music. At the exact moment it was passing a nature reserve, my phone shuffled to a piece of music from Minecraft. Not a single human built thing in sight outside the coach window, just tree flecked scrub and lakes whizzing by; I wanted to plant and build more of them. I wanted a pickaxe in my hand. I wanted to go and explore, deep underground then return to build towering constructs and landscaped pools. Not many games have ever got under my skin like that, but Minecraft is definitely one of the few.

A couple of us at Mudlark have been playing it for the past few weeks, and we were very surprised at just how addictive it is. If I were to write a (very) scant genealogy of it, the major features would be just two games: Dwarf Fortress, and Farmville. The pair make for a very peculiar contrast, and really wouldn't be put in the same basket by many; perhaps this is one of the reasons that Minecraft has done so well. Historically, being a hardcore console and PC gamer, thinking of Minecraft this way makes it feel like pop music I can listen to in public.

Nearly all of the mining part of Minecraft reminds me of Facebook game mechanics: Upgrading tools, searching for that elusive reward, the excitement of finding obsidian and diamonds, going deeper to find better ores, the near miss of mining something valuable then seeing lava pour out unexpectedly and obliterate it. Always, when digging exploratory tunnels, the thought is "Just one more block. Maybe there's iron behind that one, or the next one".

As well as that, finding and exploring dark caves underground is decidedly more atmospheric than screenshots would suggest. There's this place full of mystery, possibly hostile creatures and maybe diamonds, and noone else has ever been there. Scattering sweet, sweet rewards and monsters through the bedrock of an infinitely generated map, beneath beautiful terrain, makes for some compulsive exploration.

Mining is a fearsome addiction, and a quiet, lonely pursuit, which again makes my closest comparisons in terms of UX Farmville and Packrat. Had I been suckered into playing Skinner Box game design, something I usually swear to avoid, simply by the aesthetics and theme of the game? Someone got to the comparison before me, and after hopping onto an established multiplayer server and seeing the amazing things people had built, the comparison to Farmville art had occurred to me too. Still though, there was definitely something more to Minecraft. Why did a prolonged session with Minecraft leave me content, where the same time spent with Facebook games would leave me feeling hollowed out?

Notch has said a major inspiration for Minecraft was wondering what an accessible game in the vein of Dwarf Fortress would be like. Having familiarised myself just a little with the ridiculously complex and silly narrative machinations of Dwarf Fortress (by reading and hearing stories, not playing), Facebook style addiction was absolutely not what I was expecting from Minecraft. If you're unfamiliar with Dwarf Fortress, here is a good summary, and you can find excellent dramatised fortress reports in the form of comics recounting the stories of Bronzemurder and Oilfurnace. It's an insanely complex and obtuse game, designed so that no matter how perfectly your fortress is built or run, something catastrophic will happen. Magma will flood your lower levels, a giant creature will massacre your dwarves, Elves will declare war, the fortress will burn down, one of your generals will go mad or get drunk and order one half of the militia to kill the other. Paraphrased quote from the Idle Thumbs Forums on it: "Playing Dwarf Fortress is just like riding a bike... but the bike has many, many buttons".

With some of this in its roots, Minecraft is far more than a 3D Facebook game. Notch is visibly working from a different design manifesto to Zynga. There are awkward things already in the game design, such as water and lava both flooding mines. There are monsters that will eat you, shoot you or blow you up. Going by the announced Halloween update and what Notch has elaborated on, he understands a great deal about risk and reward, and is capable of both punishing a player and giving them overwhelming challenges. At the same time, he seems to be implementing major changes without interfering with the core of the game.

What really pushes Minecraft to transcend the Facebook games I've played though is the creative mode. It's not just a first person sandbox sculpting package, it's a rudimentary sculpting package with constrained resources and the ability to expend time to get more. The creative potential of this turns it into a machine that generates elaborate and funny things, and that aspect really comes into its own in multiplayer.

Entire gaming communities can express their nature through building in this. Here's a slightly blurred render of some of what we've done so far on an Idle Thumbs server. Every time I log in, people have built something new. As well as the towers, pyramids and castles you might expect, there are complexes built with the ambition to plan them like a Disney ride, giant easter island heads, cathedrals, artificial lakes and waterfalls, flying islands, gardens growing down near the bedrock, the first dungeon from Zelda, sculptures of videogame characters. Every quirk of the system is being explored: hacking fast travel and elevators out of water; finding out how to make perfectly still, deep lakes; infinite water and lava generators; casting obsidian structures in place using dirt scaffold, lava and water.

The sheer freedom of building stuff makes the mining feel all the more claustrophobic; over and over again the game gives me the feeling of going away from half of the game world, and emerging back into it. That's pretty sublime for a seamless system, rather than a loading screen sat between two differently implemented locations. I suspect Notch is a much better game designer than anyone realises. In games, Minecraft is functionally the closest thing I've seen to actual Lego; the closest to my childhood experiences of building things with friends. More than that though, it lacks a grand narrative, but through systemic consistency can generate deeply personal ones. Minecraft is at present still in alpha, and has the promise of being Lego with night terrors and death, a perpetually expanding frontier in which players can rip parts of the world to bits then rebuild them with meaning, safety and beauty.