This past week was a whirlwind for me, between a work conference and business trip to Ohio. I immediately followed that up with a weekend of backpacking in the mountains outside Seattle. Before the camping trip I attempted to start painting the first of my Bones minis, but we are in the middle of a heat wave here in Seattle. With no AC in the house, The 90 degree temps in my craft space made it difficult to even get past a base coat. The paints for the minis were drying almost as soon as they hit the pallette.
Working towards a wrought iron candelabra with a rather sloppy base coat. Don't worry, once the heat subsides, I'll tackle this again and it'll clean up nicely.
With the painting project unfinishable for the moment, I decided to change plans for my Make-it Monday project this week and instead worked up a contraption demonstration video for Minecraft. The video demonstrates a red stone device I worked up that can detect when an item dropper is full or empty and automatically turn on or off accordingly.
If you're not a Minecraft player, the video likely wont make any sense, so here's a picture of some deer we ran across during the hike to our campsite.
If you look close, you can see two of at least four juveniles accompanying the doe. They're on the hill to the left.
Oh, and here are a couple views from our campsite. I love where I live!
My Japanese-style castle, tower and bridge as seen from my giant orb.
So, today marks the official release of Minecraft for the XBox360. If you are unfamiliar, Minecraftis a video game originally created for the PC by Swedish game developer, Markus Persson--also known as Notch. At its core, the game is a sandbox-style building game in which a player can collect resources in the form of material blocks and then use those resources to create items and build various structures. Minecraft does away with many of the trappings of modern gaming such as fancy graphics, bloodsplosions and... oh... plot, focusing instead on providing a setting in which the user can flex his or her imagination in whichever way it bends best.
But that's really the beauty of the game. Minecraft is essentially Legos rendered as a digital world, rather than a bunch of plastic bricks in a bin. (Even Lego has not missed this similarity!) Instead of digging through the bin to find the Legos you need, your character traipses across and under a randomly generated world about 3 times the size of the Earth. You dig for your virtual Legos and occasionally fight zombies or other beasties.
As you may have guessed, I am horribly addicted to this game. Lately, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about why that is. Why do games like Skyrim and Portal sit on my shelf while I putter around in a blocky, pixelated world. I'm pretty sure it's because Minecraft doesn't feel like playing a videogame. It feels like playing with Legos, or drawing, or planning a D&D session. It engages the creative parts of my brain in a way that even a fairly open RPG like Skyrim can't begin to match. When I am playing Minecraft, there is no story to move forward or quest to accomplish unless it is something I have dreamed up for myself. This characteristic causes some people to quickly bore of the game, but it keeps me constantly coming back for more.
That's no moon!
Even though I already have Minecraft for my PC, I also plan to pick it up for XBox. The ability to play split-screen when friends come over, or online with some of my non-PC-playing pals is appealing. If you're intrigued, I highly recommend you pick it up.
Why yes, my avatar is a cyborg Abraham Lincoln!
Also, I should note that my addiction is minor compared to that of others.
Its all Fun & Games
I was actually pretty impressed by the response to my Its All Fun & Games post. I don't think any post on this blog to date has generated quite so many comments, and as a bonus, my little nugget of virtual narcissism has hit 30 followers. If you are reading this, hooray for you!
Minecraft
I continue to plug away at my Minecraft world. However, now that I have a solid grasp on the fundamentals of the game, my approach has changed slightly. I am beginning to focus more on building vs. digging and have plans to create some grandiose structures. This shift in thinking about the game was inspired, in part, by some amazing time-lapse videos like this one.
The good stuff starts at the 1:30 mark
I love the idea of using the Minecraft as a sort of 3D virtual palette for creating completely fantastical structures -who says video games need to be violent? As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am fascinated by mapping and architecture. However, I don't think I have the time or ambition to undertake a project quite as massive as the one in the above video. The overall effect reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Neil Stephenson's, The Diamond Agein which an entire island is created by nano-bots for young Princess Charlotte's birthday.
The smart coral burst out of the depths with violence that shocked Hackworth, even though he’d been in on the design, seen the trial runs. Viewed through the dark surface of the Pacific, it was like watching an explosion through a pane of shattered glass. It reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface. The speed of this process was a carefully planned sleight-of-hand; the smart coral had actually been growing down on the bottom of the ocean for the last three months, drawing its energy from a supercon that they’d grown across the seafloor for the occasion, extracting the necessary atoms directly from the seawater and the gases dissolved therein. The process happening below looked chaotic, and in a way it was; buteach lithocule knew exactly where it was supposed to go and what it was supposed to do. They were tetrahedral building blocks of calcium and carbon, the size of poppyseeds, each equipped with a power source, a brain, and a navigational system. They rose from the bottom of the sea at a signal given by Princess Charlotte; she had awakened to find a small present under her pillow, unwrapped it to find a golden whistle on a chain, stood out on her balcony, and blown the whistle.
The coral was converging on the site of the island from all directions, some of the lithocules traveling several kilometers to reach their assigned positions. They displaced a volume of water equal to the island itself, several cubic kilometers in all. The result was furious turbulence, an upswelling in the surface of the ocean that made some of the children scream, thinking it might rise up and snatch the airship out of the sky; and indeed a few drops pelted the ship’s diamond belly, prompting the pilot to give her a little more altitude. The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.
The foam and mist cleared away at some length to reveal a new island, salmon-colored in the light of dawn. Applause and cheers diminished to a professional murmur. The chattering of the
astonished children was too loud and high to hear.
It would be a couple of hours yet. Hackworth snapped his fingers for a waiter and ordered fresh fruit, juice, Belgian waffles, more coffee. They might as well enjoy Æther’s famous cuisine while the island sprouted castles, fauns, centaurs, and enchanted forests.
Princess Charlotte was the first human to set foot on the enchanted isle, tripping down the gangway of Atlantis with a couple of her little friends in tow, all of them looking like tiny wildflowers in their ribboned sun-bonnets, all carrying little baskets for souvenirs, though before long these were handed over to governesses. The Princess faced Æther and Chinook, moored a couple of hundred meters away, and spoke to them in a normal tone of voice that was, however, heard clearly by all; a nanophone was hidden somewhere in the lace collar of her pinafore, tied into phased-audio-array systems grown into the top layers of the island itself.
“I would like to express my gratitude to Lord Finkle-McGraw and all the employees of Machine-Phase Systems Limited for thismost wonderful birthday present. Now, children of Atlantis/Shanghai, won’t you please join me at my birthday party?”
In other Minecraft news, apparently the game will be available for XBox 360 sometime this coming winter. When that happens, I fully intend to get in on some massive cooperative world-building with my friends.
Impending Visits
My girlfriend's 8 year old brother is scheduled to fly out for his first visit out of his home state (KS) at the end of the month and he will be in town over one of our regularly scheduled game nights. I am weighing a couple of options for how to approach the event:
Option 1: cancel game night and spend time with little brother -practical, but unimaginative. Option 2: incorporate little brother into our already existent game night structure. While I think it would be fairly simple to work him in, I think a hyperactive 8 year old might be unable to sit through 3 hours of D&D. Option 3: Run an alternate game with little brother and some or all of the usual game group. Possible alternates include RPG kids, Castle Ravenloft, Munchkin or other simplified game systems.
Any recommendations? I'm generally good with kids. I have nephews of my own and have worked in museum education for several years, but when it comes to kids, nobody knows everything.
First off, I my campaign wiki for the Westerlands over at Obsidian Portal just hit 50 fans! W00T!
I am facing a couple major deadlines at work this week (I am forcing myself to take lunch today to regain some sanity and post about stuff I like) as such, when I arrive at home, I feel very stressed and have been turning to Minecraft as a way to relax and turn off my brain.
There is quite a bit of discussion out on the web that likens Minecraft to a sort of video game equivalent of a Bob Ross painting (The "happy trees" guy). Just do a Google search for "bob ross minecraft" and you'll see what I mean. While most of the "discussion" is in the form of one-line quips, I think there is a solid basis behind the equation.
As with Bob Ross's show, the Minecraft experience is one of pure creation. There is no driving plot or set adventure. The user makes whatever he/she wishes out of the randomly generated world. The single-player Minecraft world is also rugged and devoid of people, just like a Bob Ross landscape -but with some farm animals, skeletons, zombies and other monsters thrown in. Most importantly, however, the experience is very soothing. I have found myself chipping away at virtual mountainsides for hours in the evening -to the increasing chagrin of my wonderful girlfriend... sorry babe. It's sort of zen like in a way and has really helped me to turn off my brain so I can sleep this week.
To take the parallel even further, I have become at least as addicted, if not moreso to a series of YouTube videos called X's Adventures in Minecraft. While the narrator is certainly more animated than his afro-clad painterly equivalent, I find the cadence of his delivery accompanied by the visuals of gradual creation result in a very soothing experience very similar to watching Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting -its visual vallium. At the same time, however, the videos provide inspiration, making me want to go out and make an X style Minecraft structure of my own. I've already copied his design for a greenhouse.
Anyway, I recommend you check out at least the first video to see what I am talking about.
