Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Minecrafting

Wow I haven't been on this computing blog for quite some time. One reason why I've been remiss in posting is that I've been preoccupied with Minecraft. Discovered on one of my high school friend's Facebook walls, I've not been able to pry myself away from this game for about a month now.


I can't believe how much fun Minecraft can be. It's a cross between two of my all-time computer pastimes: computer aided design and SimCity.

I only play it single player, after seeing some of the mischief that takes place in multiplayer servers. It can get a little creepy and alienating at times playing by oneself, but I like it because it's like a meditative practice.

I enjoy being able to build in creative mode more than I do playing in survival mode. The creepers, zombies, and spiders actually gave me nightmares the first week or so. They used to just pop up out of nowhere, and I didn't know a lot of best practices yet as I had just begun playing. Don't even get me started about exploring mines, jeepers creepers!


After devouring consulting innumerable Wikis and YouTube videos, I've learned a lot from others' successes or failures. I enjoy watching super builders' work, like the crowd that built the entire world from Game of Thrones. I guess I'd heard of Minecraft before, but never really researched it or thought much about it. It's quite an amazing piece of software.

I feel that Minecraft is a great creative energy outlet for gamer, artistic, and engineering types. For example, gamers can PvP and raid other's bases, artistic folks can construct to their heart's desire, and engineering kinds can develop amazing compounds to secure their home base and create feats of engineering with redstone circuitry.

I honestly have been spending WAY too much time on Minecraft and on Minecraft YouTube channels. I deleted the program about five times already to try to wean off of it, yet I always end up reinstalling it and playing again. I kind of feel bad about all the cool construction and worlds I developed, and which ended up being deleted. I must have built and deleted over dozen worlds by now. Keeping old projects can be a great way to see how far along one has come in technique and strategy. You can check out my recent world's construction projects in the images embedded in this post.


It's definitely one of my all-time favorite computer games, up there with SimCity and online architecture programs that I enjoyed in my teens and early twenties.

Tangent: Speaking of SimCity, a new one is coming out this month w00t!

No comments:

Post a Comment