Minecraft: A World You Never Knew (and maybe never wanted to)
By GlindaBut now that you are reading this, it is too late.
If you don’t have a tween/teen/young adult around the house, you are probably living your life in utter bliss, knowing nothing about a mythical figure called Herobrine, or things called creepers, or the vast network of people who are utterly obsessed with this video game.
Like my son.
I like to think of it as Lego on steroids. The main principle of the game, as far as I can tell, is for you to survive and build your own world that can encompass pretty much anything that can be represented by blocks. There are attacks on your personal kingdom by things called creepers and other things called zombies that you are probably more familiar with. And uh, I think that is pretty much it in a nutshell. Survive, build, defend, and build some more.
And did you know there are homemade videos on YouTube that represent hundreds and hundreds of hours of work on the part of the people who created the custom worlds for each one? And that many of them have millions and millions of views, some of them even more than Jennifer Lopez?
Here are a couple of the better ones…
It is somewhat jarring for me to admit that all of these are actually quite enjoyable to watch.
November 28th, 2012 at 11:03 am
While we have not yet entered the world of Minecraft, my older daughter has friends who play. My understanding is that it at least requires some degree of creativity and strategic thinking and problem-solving, and is therefore preferable to a lot of video games kids could otherwise be playing.
My (older) daughter does like the American Girl “university” website, which annoys me to no end. All the games are stereotypically girlie — decorating cupcakes, riding horses, trampoline jumping — and the rewards are stars you can use to buy clothes. The only science game involves wandering around a park identifying trees. Some day, in my copious amounts of spare time (ha!) I am going to design a chemistry game and send it in.
November 28th, 2012 at 8:41 pm
Minecraft is THE carrot in my house. Any infraction of any kind results in the loss of Minecraft time. I love the creativity and the critical thinking it takes to build the worlds. I do not like that the kids have to play on “servers” that include other people that they do not know. It can open up an entire FREAK SHOW of the populace to kids who don’t know any better. My son had built a huge world that was then “griefed” by a bunch of neo-nazi knuckelheads that put swastikas on everything. I had to tell my son that he was not allowed to visit that particular server anymore and he didn’t talk to me for an entire day because of all the work he “lost” by not haveing access to that server anymore.
November 29th, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Oh, I can FEEL his anger from here! That does indeed suck, I know how long it takes for them to do everything!
I only allow my son to play the Kindle version (which according to him is not as good as the PC version) but the upside is that you are not online with the aptly put “freak show.”
December 2nd, 2012 at 11:39 pm
You might try the 20-sided server. Shamus Young, the guy running the server has 3 kids that play there (youngest is 11)and there is no grieffing. I don’t play but the info is here
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?page_id=14954