Hardcore Minecraft: Day 1

Minecraft to the extreeeeeme! Last night I joined a friend's group on a "hardcore" Minecraft server, and it's been a lot of fun so far. This differs from normal Minecraft in a few ways, including a sort of economy, territorial control, and a few other things I don't fully understand yet. The biggest difference is that if you die, you get banned from the server for three days. Three days! So, I'd better not die.

Details and pictures (click to embiggen!) after the break.

Life is Too Short for Perfectionism

When it comes to writing, especially creative writing, the most common advice given to me is to just get something on the page. It doesn't matter if it's rubbish, because you can always edit and revise later. If you wait until it's perfect to put it on the page, you'll never start writing.

This is damn fine advice, though I've always struggled with putting it into practice. Recently, I've realized that the same is true for making games. It makes sense; game-making is a creative endeavor, just like writing. However, it's a more mechanical one than creative writing, and I'm finding that getting started on a game is giving me more trouble than getting a story started. I did not think that things could be more difficult than starting a story, mind you, unless said things involved space travel in some capacity.

Making Games With Friends

Recently, I've been looking into a lot of options for making games. This isn't really anything new, though it's the first time in a while I've been remotely serious about it. In high school, I made several table-top games by myself and with friends. We adapted RPG systems into new settings

My favorite memory of this was a homebrew White Wolf-derivative set in the Aliens universe but using some of the weird technology from the Final Fantasy movie. No, not Advent Children. The proper one with Donald Sutherland in it. Anyway, that ended with blowing the bottom out of an elevator and falling to (relative) safety as we exploded a hallway full of xenomorphs. You probably had to be there. There was also the Mech Game, which was basically a simplified Battletech and was the origin of Trusty Rusty, Copek's bizarre cowboy-robot.

I don't recall if that was before or after the Country Game, which was sort of the magnum opus of our group's game designing days. I forget who pitched the original concept, which was basically a giant multiplayer Civilization-type strategy game in a fantasy setting. This was around 2000, mind you, so it fit an empty gaming niche at the time, plus it was a fun experiment to see if we could come up with a functioning strategy game that could be played with only pencil and paper.

Eratosthenes of Minecraft

I wanted to recreate one of Eratosthenes' groundbreaking experiments in Minecraft - at least, as closely as I could. Minecraft's worlds aren't round, so I couldn't use the info gleaned from a deep well at noon to calculate the circumference of the world. Mostly, I was just curious if the sun in the game was the actual source of light, or just a nice cosmetic feature that accompanied the light of day.

So, taking a page from the history books, I dug a really deep well. Eratosthenes reasoned that if sunlight reached the bottom of a well in one city and did not do so in another city at the same time, the Earth must be round. It was one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

I reasoned that if the bottom of my pit got light before the sun was directly overhead, then the daylight in Minecraft did not come specifically from the sun, but was evenly distributed over the world based on elapsed time.

It was a discovery that had no impact on anything, and a hypothesis that could have been tested in any number of simpler ways. It does seem to confirm that light comes from directly above, regardless of the Blocksun's location. Huzzah, useless information! Now go read about Eratosthenes, he was an intellectual badass.

Minecraft II: The Floor is Made of Lava

When last we met our intrepid hero, he was plummeting towards a fiery death at the whim of Roadkill and his deathplank. Cruel gravity also had a hand in things, but I mostly blame Roadkill. We all went down together, though, and into the lake of fire. It wasn't a ring of fire, per se, but it was definitely burning. I don't know why I just referenced a Johnny Cash song that I hate, but there you have it.

So we land in the lava, our avatars catch on fire, and...well, that's it. The invulnerability in Minecraft multiplayer detracts a bit from the drama. We hop about in the lava until we get to the edge, haul ourselves out, and wait for the flames to extinguish themselves.

Now we're kind of stuck here.

Minecraft

I've become quite enamored with Minecraft, the current darling of the PC indie game scene. It's fairly difficult to describe the game, but at a very basic level it's Building Blocks: The Game, or perhaps Legos without the limitations of expensive plastic and gravity. It plugs directly into the part of your brain that planned elaborate snow forts or tree houses well beyond your 12 year-old self's means of construction. Minecraft helped me rediscover that the Quixotic Construction Lobe of my brain is still just as over-sized as when I was a child.

About a week ago, Minecraft had a free weekend as a result of some server authentication issues. Rather than keep paid users from playing his game, creator and good-hearted Swede Notch opened up Minecraft to all comers. So, a couple of friends and I decided to dive in and start a server so we could all build things together. As it turns out, none of us were the knock-the-other-kid's-blocks-over type, so we managed to coexist in beautiful, gravity-defying creativity.

As a caveat, I should state that our creations were achieved through "opping", which basically gave us the ability to spawn whatever building materials we desired. We still assembled everything by hand; we just didn't have to mine it all. Not quite as epic, but a lot more convenient. This entry will cover our first (real-world) night of building. This took many in-game days.

If you're not familiar with Minecraft, here's a bird's-eye view of our world:

You may notice the bridge spanning the valley in the center of the picture, or the speck on top of the tower rising in the distance. The bridge was from Roadkill (the speck) and another friend, while the tower was Roadkill's current construction project.

You may also notice that we're preposterously high in the air. In fact, we're above cloud level.

Wherein I was on a boat

This past weekend, I had the privilege of going to a friend's lake house. It was my second time there, and this time I didn't even sound like a broken record complaining about how I hate my job! Because in the meantime, I acquired a different and much better job. So it was much more relaxing, as I wasn't dreading the coming of Monday (these days, Mondays are just distracted and end with Pub Trivia). Also, Hillary was there this time, which improves all things.

The weather was overcast for the first night, which sadly nixed our planned star cruise. Normally (I say that as if I've been there more than once before), you can turn off all the cabin's lights, take the pontoon boat out onto the lake, and get a spectacular view of the Milky Way. As a perpetual victim of light pollution, this still impresses me. Anyway, though we missed out on the stargazing, we did get to make a bonfire. I tormented a marshmallow before abandoning it to the furnace's depths, where it bloated into an Akira-esque tumorous horror. It was pretty great.

Wonders of the Solar System

Apparently, Nova is still running. I thought it had gone the way of most educational television, but apparently, it continues apace! Now I need to track that down and see if it's as fine a program as I remember it.

One program which I'm certain is as fine as I remember it (because I watched it about an hour ago) is Wonders of the Solar System. A product of wonderful cinematography and the ludicrously infectious enthusiasm of host Brian Cox have led me to endure the tyranny of scheduled cable broadcasting for several weeks in a row now, hoping to catch the one episode that I haven't seen yet.

Sadly, there are only five episodes (with a second series in the making), but they're worth watching if you want to learn about our solar system. The show is very accessible, and Brian Cox's obvious fascination with the world around him will give you those Science is Awesome chills that I haven't really felt since, well, Nova.

What? You don't get those chills? I admit, they've been kind of hard to come by since optimism in scientific process and space exploration took that mid-80s dip. But I promise, those chills are still out there, waiting to be discovered.

And failing all else, there's still auto-tuned Carl Sagan: