Late to the Party: Minecraft Edition

Late to the Party is a new feature on ElroyHead.Com, where I get into something after everybody is already tired of it.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been addicted to drugs. If I was, they were memory-erasing drugs, that erased my memory of being addicted to them. Although really, how would that work? How can you be addicted to something you don’t ever remember taking?

Speaking of crippling addiction, recently I’ve started playing Minecraft. What started as an innocent trial version offered through the Humble Indie Bundle #3 has become what some doctors have diagnosed as “a problem” for me. A fun problem!

For those of you who are also LATE TO THE PARTY (hey! that’s the name of the show), Minecraft is a world where you can do ANYTHING, as long as that ANYTHING includes “building” or “mining” or “getting murdered by gunpowder zombies”. By “build anything” (I said that up there, right?) I really do mean anything—people have recreated iconic buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Millennium Falcon (which as we all know was a flying building).

I, however, lack that kind of creativity, so the game has more of a “survivalist going mad in the mountains” feel to it for me. You see, the game is completely open-ended, and you aren’t given any tools or quests (although there is an Adventure update coming soon that is supposed to add…adventure), so you are left up to your own devices to craft (hey!) items so you can mine (hey hey!) for other materials to craft (hey hey hey!) better items. It’s more fun than it sounds!

However, you also have to deal with the dreaded mobs, which for some reason is the word Minecraft players use to describe the monsters that appear at night and wreck yo homes. I wasn’t kidding when I said gunpowder zombies, except they’re really called Creepers, and they will straight up murder dat sandstone house. How offensive is this paragraph, be honest.

Here’s what happened to me when I booted up Minecraft for the first time:

1. Appeared in the middle of a vast world, filled with flowing water, a vast seascape, towering mountains, adorable animals, and thriving plant life.

2. Punched a tree so I could harvest wood.

3. Made wood planks out of the wood, and made a crafting table out of the wood planks. (A lot of stuff in Minecraft requires you to make something into something else so you can make that into something else and then use that as a component in something else.)

4. Made an axe out of wood (what) and murdered more trees.

5. Made a pickaxe and furiously dug a hole into a mountain, so I wouldn’t die at night.

6. Put a wooden door on my new cave home because I assume that monsters can’t open doors.

All of this, by the way, only made sense to me because I googled “Minecraft Wiki”. Particularly the Crafting page, because I don’t really know how I was supposed to know how to make anything. For example, did you know that you can make a bed by murdering three sheep and then putting their wool over three wooden planks? That’s how Sealy does it!

By the way, the whole process I explained up there ended up draining about four hours of my life, since I ended up tunneling really far into this mountain, finding iron, and then smelting the iron and making iron weapons. You have no idea how badly I want to stop writing and smelt more iron. I wasn’t kidding when I compared it to an addiction—even now, I can picture myself booting up the launcher, logging in, just to get a little bit of that sweet baby Mine in my system. IT IS A PROBLEM.

I spent four other hours building a giant stone bridge, and a giant sandstone tomb (that floats!). There’s pictures of all that in this album. So basically, I’ve become one of them. Or, more likely, I’ve become one of you.

There’s also a multiplayer component, which I haven’t tried. Although, if Minecraft is a drug, then I bet multiplayer Minecraft is like those “circle” parts on That 70s Show.

HYDE: I built a floating house, completely suspended from the ground, and a skeleton appeared in my sleep! I bet it was The Man, because I am a rebel.

KELSO: I was just driving outside, and I saw a creeper! He was hissing at me!

ERIC: KELSO that was just your flat tire! YOU ARE DUMB

FEZ: BOOBS

In summation, Minecraft is pretty cool.