Game and Dynamically Generated World
If you’re one of those people who quite likes computer games, but finds the endless mayhem and slaughter a bit unseemly, there is another option: putting imaginary things on top of other imaginary things. There are no scores, no obvious goals to aim for, no point at which you can punch the air and say that you’ve triumphed; you simply move around a randomly and dynamically generated world, collecting objects and building things. All at your leisure.
Does that sound sufficiently exciting? Well, Minecraft allows you to do just that; it may have been billed as the “coolest game you’ve never heard of”, says Senior Emily Marchese, but it has about as much in common with Call Of Duty or Angry Birds as hopscotch or basket weaving. It’s created by Markus “Notch” Persson, developed by a very small team, but has had more than 12 million people buy the 20 dollar game. But what exactly do you accomplish playing Minecraft?
Head over to YouTube, where home-produced videos of Minecraft creations litter the top 10 most popular videos each month, and you’ll find such delights as a 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise, roller-coasters, reconstructions of the Titanic and much else. FHS Alumni, Soham Roy gives us a few examples of what he thinks are his greatest accomplishments in Minecraft: “I have created a pyramid out of water, pushed Haroon Ahmad into a pit of lava, and tamed a gigantic pack of wolves to rip into the flesh of my enemi…
I mean, to cuddle and play fetch. ” How you make these structures is much like how you make things in real life. You need tools and resources. You use the wood from trees to make tools and then you mine underground and start looking through caves for resources. As you go deeper you’ll find rarer resources which you can upgrade your tools with or make structures with. And when you have the resources you need, like Legos, you start putting them all together and start making anything your heart desires.
You can also set up servers and create a massive world with your friends. Junior, Mike Salzarulo is one of the many students to own a minecraft server here at Freedom. “You can do anything you want. If you wanna be a nomad and travel the world you can do that. You can be like me and just set up camp and make a town with all your friends. I made a huge castle with them. ” The comparisons with Lego have provoked a debate over whether Minecraft is even a game at all; maybe it should be considered more as a lowly “toy”?
But when the sun sets over your Minecraft world every hour or so and darkness creeps in, monsters (or “mobs”) emerge – and if you’re not tucked up safely within your construction – your game may well be swiftly curtailed. The different types of mobs include spiders, zombies, and skeletons that are equipped with bows. The two most infamous mobs in the game are the endermen and the creepers. The endermen are passive and non-hostile and sometimes cute creatures that only attack you if you look directly at them.
And finally, the creepers are the most feared of all Minecraft mobs, because if you get too close they make a hissing sound and then explode. The explosion decimates everything around you. So be careful when you look out the window of your house made out of diamond, a creeper might be trying to creep on you. Minecraft is still being made and the full version will be out in November, but will then cost $30. If you buy the game now, not only will you be able save $10, but you’ll also be able to get your hands on the game that has everyone either sitting on their computer all day or designing buildings on graph paper.
