Reasons to Love: Minecraft

There's games with staying power, with infinite replay-ability, and even rarer for this day and age, games that you can own instead of rent. This one ticks all those boxes. It's also a game with few limits, where the player controls everything, and still has updates years and years after it's been released. As you might guess, it's Minecraft, and I've been playing it on and off since the InfDev days.

To give you an idea of how long that is, I've been playing since before redstone existed. Back when you had to build minecart boosters to make the thing keep moving. That's a long, long time for a game to exist.

And for a game where you frequently have to fight off zombies, skeletons, and spiders the size of a horse... it's remarkably chill and relaxing.

And yes, you can turn the monsters off if you want to play without having to fight anything.

Minecraft was the pioneer voxel game [for those unaware, a voxel is a cube that a player can use like a pixel to manipulate or build. Box plus Pixel plus IDEK] and as soon as it became popular, people made varying clones of the concept - like Terarria.

The basic gameplay cycle is: explore, gather, build. Make tools to get resources, make better tools... and so on. Until you either get bored or think of something else to do. The world you make is all yours to do with as you please. And that's the cool part.

Some players make machines. Some players make artwork - pixel art with voxels is usually one of the easier arts to do in Minecraft. Some make impressive megastructures. Some work on immense maps or games-within-the-game.

At least one person has made a computer with various redstone components. I'm pretty sure one of them made said computer play Minecraft. Which is the ultimate inception of concepts.

I don't think anyone successfully made a computer in the Minecraft they can play on the computer they made in Minecraft... that could also play Minecraft. I suspect someone's mad enough to try, but I also suspect you'd need a mondo beast in order to actually do that.

You have the option to just wander around and explore the world that the game has generated, or build things with an infinite supply of materials of your choice. It's all good.

In my rare spare hours, I've been working on creating a map of one of my fictional places in a survival world. Mostly because I find the process of chipping a mountain to pieces meditative. Same with using the pieces to make a thing.

I might be slightly mad. But that's okay.

I'm doing what I like and enjoying that.