Hope married life is terrific!

Love, G’ma

Its interesting how the same thing can be read in such opposite ways. I don’t totally disagree with you either, I can see where you’re coming from (read your whole post). I guess what is the key difference for me is that in GTA or Mass Effect, for example, there are doors you can’t open. People you can’t talk to, holes you can’t dig etc. In Minecraft, everything that seems possible is possible. There isn’t very much variety in the world, but its all so immediately available to the player to shape and change and interact with. To me, that’s a different kind of world entirely. That world seems to care much more about the player than the worlds that are ‘mechanically indifferent’ to the player’s attempts at interactions.

On that last point, about being ‘played out’ I think that its more a symptom of the player than the game. I think most players are very much consumers, despite what creative tools they are given for self-expression. Minecraft is exactly a toolbox, but we’re not all carpenters.

I think there are two parts of what you’ve written here that I wanted to response to. The first being the idea of player as god or demi-god in Minecraft. My experience has been quite the opposite – a lot of the time playing the game I’ve marveled specifically at just how mundane my existence is in the game. It’s true that the mechanic of block addition/removal has a degree of magic to it, but I regard it as more of a convenient version of what humans commonly do in reality – reshape the world one little bit at a time. After all, most (all?) of what we do in Minecraft isn’t really a stretch in terms of possibility. And thus, I cherish the idea that we are specifically *not* gods in the game – unlike all those endless blockbusters in which the universe pauses and waits for us to perform the significant action that will save the world.

Second, it’s interesting that you raise this idea of Minecraft being learnable and ultimately diminished by that learning. I agree that this is a phenomenon that we see in games over and over – three hours in Mass Effect 2 I found myself realising that I’d pretty much played the game out by then and was only continuing for its (repeated) form of entertainment.

I think Minecraft is slightly different in that it’s a provider of tools and potentials rather than a set experience – you choose much more what your attitude to the world is, largely *because* there isn’t an overarching narrative or system of valuation. So I’m not entirely sure I agree that Minecraft suffers in the same way, or at least to the same degree, from this idea of being easily played out, though I agree that the experiences possibly probably do begin to resemble one another after a while.

Anyway, nice post – look forward to seeing what you write next.

To be honest, and you’re fair enough in calling me out on this though I don’t feel ‘guilty’ because of it: this is a really personal bit of writing. I think that tone is inspired a lot by Bissell’s book, which I had only just finished reading prior to playing Gears. His writing and this piece, are much more like ruminations/reflections by the likes of Hunter S Thompson (if I dare to make such a comparison) than carefully considered and clinically researched criticism.