There's this game making a big splash in the "people who play games" circles. It's called Minecraft, and the main draw of the game is essentially the fact that you get a huge goddamn world (8x the horizontal surface of planet earth)for exploration and building. This interests some people, I guess. Up until this weekend, I was one of the apathetic masses.
I want my weekend back.
Here's the thing. My first experience with Minecraft? Terrible. My blocky little avatar got dropped onto a hillside with marauding skeletons and I died unceremoniously. The game has absolutely no tutorial, no help screen, and only a cursory explanation of the controls in order to help the player, but is definitely a game where ignorance = death and boredom. I wrote it off as "not for me." This was maybe half a year ago.
Last weekend, I made the mistake of watching a video "surviving your first night in Minecraft". If you happen to find a video like this, don't watch it. Save yourself. Frankly, it's
fascinating. Should send up all kinds of warning signs, like "Stay away from this if you want to accomplish anything." So I watched it and promptly fell headfirst into the damn game.
I still don't care about building elaborate, pretty shit. I'm not that kind of player. Basically, I built a two-story shack on the beach, a little fenced-off wheat farm, and a grassy area for my logging operations. Nothing fancy, just everything I need to survive. It's all covered in lights so I really don't see any monsters (there are monsters at night now) in my neck of the woods (beach?). Having secured my safety, I decided to abandon my mine somewhere in the hills and just dig into the hill behind my shack. My goal? Rock bottom. I was going to construct a spiral staircase to the bottom of the whole damn world, and find some gold and platinum while I was at it (so I could have the best equipment ever).
So I was putting in the fourth glass floor of the glass-walled lava silo overlooking my hellish lava farm when I lost all of my buckets to a freak lava-related accident. There's still more lava, but I'm not really in a position to harvest it...and what the hell am I doing? When did I plunge headlong into super-villainy? I was just trying to dig!
