Minecraft: It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

Minecraft is less a game and more an impressive toolset that throws players into a world and allows them to build (or destroy) wonderful things. This is, perhaps, the most discussed aspect of the game. However, the yin to Minecraft’s yang of digital Legos gets decidedly less attention: exploring a mysterious world. If you, like me, look at the fantastic structures built by other players with awe but also with the feeling, “I will never have the time to build something that ridiculous,” you may find the more appealing draw of Minecraft is getting to explore a random and unknown world.

Years ago, games were often not documented well-enough, and, before the Internet, this was a serious problem. Now, we have the opposite problem: games are often too well documented sometimes forcing you, the player, to suffer through hours of banal tutorials before letting you actually play the game. Minecraft is the antithesis of this approach. But, unlike its counterparts of yore, Minecrafthas the giant network of documentation we know as the Internet on which to rely.

It’s sometimes a bit cumbersome for the modern gamer to have to search for documentation online rather than having it in-game. Despite this, the approach does have its advantages. When you first generate your world in Minecraft, you have no idea what to do or what is possible within the confines of the game world. Everything waiting for you in this vast random world is a mystery waiting to be discovered. In fact, many of the best tutorials available (like this one) are written sparsely enough to show you the basics while preserving much of the mystique.

The minimal documentation lends itself to a succession of startling discoveries, the first being that the game allows you to craft certain tools and objects using the resources you find in the world. This knowledge along with the specific recipes for a couple of basic items were the extent of the preparation I made going into my own first play session.

The “game” for me is setting some goal for crafting a particular item and then doing whatever necessary to attain it. One of my typical early goals when I start a new game is to make torches so that I may light the way as I dig deep and discover some of the hard-to-find minerals in the game. For this, you need coal.

I found some coal but not enough to produce the torches necessary to really get deep to where the good stuff is. This led to my digging a shallow mine into the side of a mountain. As you can see, even the crafting goals I set for myself tend to devolve into more exploration than actual crafting. I wasn’t finding much over the standard stone until I made a very literal breakthrough.

As I dug further into the mountain, I found myself falling. To what, I didn’t know, but I ended up in a cavern already hollowed out below the mine I myself was digging. This is a single-player game, mind you, so it was surprising to find a seemingly deliberate network of caves below my own handiwork. I started to explore.

The caverns were, for the most part, very much like the hallways of rock I had hollowed out above. That’s when I came across a room surrounded by a different type of stone than I was accustomed to seeing. There was a small opening from this room into the main corridor. I peaked inside to find the undead welcoming committee firing at me with abandon. The opening was quite small (only a single block wide and a couple of blocks tall). The skeletons had great difficulty getting even an arrow out to me let alone they themselves escaping to bring me to my doom.

My character was, at this time, ill-prepared for any sort of battle scenario. I was much more interested in — that’s right — the exploration aspects of the game. I had a plethora of picks but only a single sword. Luckily, I found the skeletons at the back of the room were content to continue firing their arrows despite the obstructive positionining of their cohorts. Most of the skeletons were eliminated by friendly fire leaving me only one or two to clean up.

I finished them off and placed a torch on the wall to find quite a bounty. Much to my surprise, the wall was lined with chests loaded with items I didn’t even know were possible. It was at this moment I realized the monsters must be crafting too. (Although they may not actually be crafting in-game, this seems to be the only logical explanation for the existence of such items in my otherwise unpopulated world.) I looted as much as I could before I found myself being fired on yet again. Another skeleton was behind me and struck his killing blow before I could make the necessary adjustment (i.e. my sword prying apart his ribs).

After respawning, I returned to my little slice of Hell-on-virtual-Earth, killed a couple of skeletons, and took another look around. In the center of the room, a small odd-looking cube cried out that it could be the source of the enemies. I tried to destroy it but failed.

In a few seconds, more enemies had spawned and put a fatal stop to my investigation. Sure, this didn’t end with any sort of climactic battle or even a single Earth-shattering discovery, but the entire event was a cascading series of discoveries that each changed my view of what Minecraft is.

The whole thing was a humbling experience. There I was, thinking I had this game figured (“It’s about crafting. Duh!”) when the game rose up and dumped a cup of undead ice water in my face. I had only scratched the surface.

Even veteran players are constantly discovering new facets as the developer pushes out updates automatically through the client. Rather than breaking all the additions down in plain view as is often the way of developers, Notch, as he is lovingly called by his throngs of adoring fans, simply pushes out the update and lets the community organically discover their shiny new cubes of wonder.

Exploration and discovery are such highly sought-after human experiences, it’s no wonder many thousands of players have signed on to bash cubes and rip apart trees with their bare hands. Notch has created an engine that builds interesting worlds and hands them over to the player. We have a vast expanse, little guidance, and no pesky tutorials telling us to go here or to click this button to make stuff.

Maybe after I’ve played a bit more, I will tire of exploring and get down to just building, but I think there will always be a part of me that wants to see what’s out there. Given a new world and the tools to make it ours, who can blame us for first taking a look around?

This article first ran on Bitmob.