Minecraft Blues

One of the accusations I often face as a COD player from those unfamiliar with first person shooters is that I must enjoy it only as an escapist fantasy. A boy (too old to be doing this now) playing soldiers and losing himself in the persona of an easily transferable template of a special forces operative. Either that or that I’m just a blood-thirsty manic with a lust for violence and a walking reason to BAN ALL VIDEO GAMES NOW.

I always try to refute these mischaracterisations and present the truth that we all know, to misquote, James Carville, “It’s the gameplay, stupid”. Yet I know that this is not the whole truth. Yes, it’s the challenge of the FPS that keeps me coming back day-after-day, but there’s a part of me, especially during the campaign (from COD4 forward), that does revel in the fantasy. In COD you can do things impossible in real life: rappel forward down a cliff and silently assassinate an unwitting enemy (See! See! bloodthirsty maniac), ride a snow mobile at 100 miles per hour firing a machine pistol as I go, or pilot an Apache gunship into Hanoi. In reality, I can never do any of these things...which is why Minecraft is so depressing.

Minecraft offers you a chance to be the man you always wanted to be but are just too damn lazy to become. Use an axe, make things out of wood, mine for ore, build a house, a boat, a bow and arrow. All of these things are available to me in real life, to all of us. I could go out next weekend and start digging, or at least try to make something useful, but chances are I won’t. That’s the allure and the sting in the Minecraft fantasy, it’s a life of manly creativity, just out of our grasp, albeit one rendered in 8-bit and accessed through a keyboard and mouse.

Minecraft is almost a life-simulator, only – a simpler, more satisfying life than we could ever imagine. In this way, Minecraft offers something different to games like The Sims Heavy Rain or even Animal Crossing. It’s simple craftsmanship, largely performed alone and mostly in silence, offering the sanctity and peace that real construction might offer, if only we could be bothered. Building a door in real life might take days, in Minecraft, just a few seconds, but you get a taste of what it might be like to build something for real.

And therein lies the problem. You know you’re only getting a glimpse of a shadow of the real thing, and you start to think of the real satisfaction available to you if only you’d get up and take it, “If only life was a simple as it is in Minecraft!”… But then you remember the zombies trying to kill you and think better of it.

Links
Minecraft Wiki
Watch Seananners excellent Minecraft walk-through
Markus "Notch" Persson's Minecraft blog (Minecraft developer)