Dear Minecraft
You’re the wet dream of an indie developer come true.
You’re the mocking laugh in the face of the game industry whose biggest deity is better graphics.
You’re both the savior and the nemesis of the ultimate explorer. Your game frame is the size of a postcard, but your world is infinite. Your borders are only vertical, but you would generate horizontally forever given anyone had the space and time for it.
You’re the kind of game that turns the player into a creator, a constructor or perhaps just a stranded loner in a world gone Lego, Lego on acid as someone coined it.
Speaking of Lego
One of my course mates wrote a very poignant post about you called That Lego Game pt. 1, he says it so well. Quoting two paragraphs from his piece:
While talking to one of my close friends on Skype, who happens to work in the digital design apartment of LEGO, about my blogging exercises for the digital game theory course, he jokingly referred to Minecraft as “the great LEGO-game that LEGO never made”. In recent years the LEGO-corporation has, in collaboration with the British game studio Traveller’s Tales, published a number of successful video game licenses such as Lego Star Wars, Lego Batman, Lego Indiana Jones as well as Lego Harry Potter.
(By Extazify on Deviant Art)
While the LEGO-corporation so far has been largely unsuccessful in replicating the paidiac-nature of the original LEGO-block in a digital form, another video game was suddenly released back in 2009, which to a much greater extend mimicked the free-form play afforded by the original LEGO-brick. This small indie game was of course called Minecraft, and it was programmed, designed as well as released by the Swedish bedroom programmer Markus “Notch” Persson.
Mmmm, I love Lego… I’ll see you soon Minecraft.
