I don't get minecraft

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

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I think i have crossed an age threshold or something. My nieces play mine craft and speak about it like I would have airplanes as a kid (And by "kid" I mean "adult".)

So I have a couple iPads and I put it on them awhile back and let my kids (5&7) give it a whirl. You would have thought Jesus was in the iPad giving free tickets to heaven. They went Ape for it.

I sat down with them this evening and had them show me what it does and I am not getting it.

The graphics are crap and there seems to be no real goal. You build stuff and then kill sheep or something :dunno:

They are fascinated by it and are asking to watch videos of people playing it.

It is unbelievably popular. Granted I don't play any video games but that is because I get started and can't stop. There was a semester in college where I think I never left the house and just stayed home and played Quake. But this one seems to be lacking in the reward area.

Anyone else baffled by this game?
Is there a goal I am missing?
 
I'm guessing they aren't interested in a nice game of Cribbage or Euchre then? ;)
 
My son plays it. I'd like to know why it's so popular too. Graphics suck and all it looks like all you do is run around hitting blocks with a hammer.


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MAKG1 said:
Think of it as digital Lego. It will make a LOT more sense.
Click to expand...


So you build things with Legos then break them with a hammer??? Sorry still don't get it.


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The younger Son really digs 'Mine craft'. I can do some 'Halo' with him, but minecraft doesn't do much for me.
 
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f_4_phantom_ii___in_minecraft_by_overdrive148-d516cne.png



Back in my day, before Minecraft actually came out, it was a proof of concept :yes: I just built stuff because it was fun.

While it doesn't look like a whole lot, it's actually pretty entertaining (in my opinion). Playing in a sandbox full of lego pieces is what I'd call it. There's a lot of generated places that are just really neat to come across and decide to build at, then landscape the area and build up a foundation and plan out a build and then get all the resources together... Some people like it, others don't.

The vanilla version of Minecraft kind of ran dry for me long ago, but adding mods that make for a ton more content in the same game (new weapons and building materials etc) as well as pretty things like this add a lot more to the game. I'd guess a lot of kids like it because it's kind of creative but I'm not sure. It's a video game :p that could be reason enough!

9W7a5sd.jpg
 
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Graphics is such first of all to enable feeling of building and also for people to be able to run it on almost anything. It's a game that enhances creativity, imagination and can teach some basic stuff too. What I think you mean by destroying stuff, when you destroy something you get a crafting material from it like e.g. if you hit a tree you will get wood and so on and so forth. Then you can build more items and finally even create more complicated materials like glass or whatever. It's a real fun game and dunno if age has anything to do with it. I am in my thirties and I dig it ;)
 
Ok I'm getting it now. Those are some cool pictures. What I see from my boy who's in 5th grade is a huge brick that gets blown apart by dynamite. :)


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Minecraft is very creative and the kids and some adults love it for that. I play video games but I don't play mindcraft and the main reason being the graphics. My kids and the neighborhood kids all play on their ipads and come up with some really cool things.

I'll stick to my flight sims and player vs player games.
 
Never got into the whole video game thing, even as a young kid I knew it was more fun going outside and actually DOING stuff than staring at a screen.
 
My 7 yr old is into it, but not obsessively so. It is basically is an unlimited, and much faster, way of building vs. LEGO. There is a bit of planning needed to gather tools and materials, etc. Kind of a "young" version of strategic planning games like the old "Civilization" game (which I spent WAY too much time playing) and Zoo Tycoon (which my kid likes, but is still a bit you to really play).

Jeff
 
Swampfox201 said:
So you build things with Legos then break them with a hammer??? Sorry still don't get it.
Click to expand...

Some people used to play with Legos in exactly that manner.

Heck, I used to "crash" Lego airplanes as a kid. For some reason, they never flew very well….

Think more about old style Legos than the newer kits. Lego jumped the shark decades ago. You didn't buy a city; you bought a bucket of bricks.
 
I remember the huge bucket of mismatched Lego bricks. Probably 2000 bricks of various sizes.

Coming up with some sort of creation out of that mess was fun.
 
I think minecraft is actually BETTER than current lego. Legos now are just models you snap together, with all of the bespoke pieces. I can't really build much else with a lego set, other than the thing pictured on the box. I used to build all sorts of things with my old lego sets, including, with the strategic addition of a few rubberbands, assorted implements for assaulting my younger sister. :D

I loved lego as a kid. I wish I had more time for minecraft as an adult. :)
 
The 15 year old son of a client is making $$$ playing this (or is it WarCraft?). 'Last I checked, he had a PayPal account with $80K+, from only 3 months of playing. He mines/sells gold and does custom things. 'Don't really know how it works, but it is real money.
 
schmookeeg said:
I think minecraft is actually BETTER than current lego. Legos now are just models you snap together, with all of the bespoke pieces. I can't really build much else with a lego set, other than the thing pictured on the box. I used to build all sorts of things with my old lego sets, including, with the strategic addition of a few rubberbands, assorted implements for assaulting my younger sister. :D

I loved lego as a kid. I wish I had more time for minecraft as an adult. :)
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You can still buy buckets of LEGOs (and other brands that are the same, because LEGO doesn't hold the patent anymore; shameless plug for my store here: http://www.enchantedtoystore.com/by/159/brictek ). Problem is advertising has brainwashed kids and parents into getting the "themed" sets. My kids (5 and 7) will build the theme set exactly once, then all the bricks end up in the bucket with the others and they creatively build whatever they want.

Jeff
 
I just remember a decade or so ago when lots of my friends were saying the same exact thing about Pokemon.
 
Its weird to imagine a future where dads are no longer shouting profanities in the middle of the night after having stepped on legos.

Seriously, someone make rounded edge legos. Dad's everywhere will buy them.
 
CT4ME said:
The 15 year old son of a client is making $$$ playing this (or is it WarCraft?). 'Last I checked, he had a PayPal account with $80K+, from only 3 months of playing. He mines/sells gold and does custom things. 'Don't really know how it works, but it is real money.
Click to expand...

Sounds more like World of Warcraft. While such is frowned upon by Blizzard Entertainment, it's not unknown for players to sell gold, better gear, and maxed out 'toons to those who do not want to take the time to obtain it the "normal" way.
 
CT4ME said:
The 15 year old son of a client is making $$$ playing this (or is it WarCraft?). 'Last I checked, he had a PayPal account with $80K+, from only 3 months of playing. He mines/sells gold and does custom things. 'Don't really know how it works, but it is real money.
Click to expand...

Wait, What? You can make money playing video games? I am 42 and just now learning about this? This makes me question my entire career in IT and the guilty feelings I have for all those hours spent playing Techmo Bowl in the dorm when I should have been in class.
 
Jeff Oslick said:
My 7 yr old is into it, but not obsessively so. It is basically is an unlimited, and much faster, way of building vs. LEGO. There is a bit of planning needed to gather tools and materials, etc. Kind of a "young" version of strategic planning games like the old "Civilization" game (which I spent WAY too much time playing) and Zoo Tycoon (which my kid likes, but is still a bit you to really play).

Jeff
Click to expand...
I could never get any good at Civ, but I know the feeling. "One more turn..."

CT4ME said:
The 15 year old son of a client is making $$$ playing this (or is it WarCraft?). 'Last I checked, he had a PayPal account with $80K+, from only 3 months of playing. He mines/sells gold and does custom things. 'Don't really know how it works, but it is real money.
Click to expand...
Probably World of Warcraft or pretty much any MMO (massively multiplayer online). When you install the game and make an account in most MMO's, you sign an EULA (end user license agreement) that says you can't buy or sell things for real world money unless under certain circumstances. What people tend to do is make a ton of accounts and turn them into robots that just get a bunch of in game currency and then they sell that currency to players for a small sum of real world money. Apparently it's pretty profitable even though against the rules and in most cases a bannable offense. This happens in almost every MMO I've played, including Eve online.

If he creates content for the game, that's a different story, but I think that WoW isn't a place that would have that kind of optional.

Swampfox201 said:
Ok I'm getting it now. Those are some cool pictures. What I see from my boy who's in 5th grade is a huge brick that gets blown apart by dynamite. :)


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Click to expand...

There's really a lot more to it than that! The core concept of the game is finding materials in hard to reach places to build awesome things. The mechanics are pretty awesome and its quite a solid game. Then you can add on modifications (at least on the PC version) that allow you to have more content like...Galacticraft for example. It adds a ton of more materials and allows you to build a rocket to fly to the moon and mars. Or ones with more monsters and quests to run around and kill, with shiny loot that allows you to attack in new ways. To me, it's a fantastic game on its own, but being able to go a different way with it as you see fit with addons is the best part :yes:

Also, those planes! Those were a bit harder to build than the rest of this stuff I'm talking about, even though the blocks were free. I had some spare time though and liked making full scale stuff look awesome, almost exclusively planes. Not very good at houses though :rofl:

Tex_Mike said:
Wait, What? You can make money playing video games? I am 42 and just now learning about this? This makes me question my entire career in IT and the guilty feelings I have for all those hours spent playing Techmo Bowl in the dorm when I should have been in class.
Click to expand...


A steam game called Team Fortress 2 is another example. It used to be $20 bucks or so on its own, then the popularity of the game exploded when they introduced hats. Then the entire basis of the game became getting all kinds of cosmetics for your mercenary and TF2 just kept cranking them out. Then they introduced crates, which were found for free, but opened for a price of $2.50 per key - one time only of course. Then the game went free to play - all the new players rushed in and saw all the stuff the older players were wearing and went nuts.

Then valve had the idea to make a community workshop based around letting players make cosmetics and submitting them for approval and inclusion into the game. If they accepted one, the player would receive a cut of the cash. They got people to line up and generate content for free, and bought it for a very small fee, to get more people, who make more content, who...
 
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It's a matter of perspective, when we were kids Pong was freaking awesome! Then holy ****...Atari in 8 bit graphics! Then Dragon's Layer, hit the arcades and we all learned what CD-ROM could do! If you wanted to play computer games, you had to write them for your TRS-80 and store them on cassette. I think the Commodore 64 was the first computer you could buy games for and gaming consoles were better with more invested in game development. Then Wolfenstien changed the entire PC gaming market and when ID games came out with Doom, they set a new standard for 3D graphics.

Thing is, each of these upgrades was individually awesome going forward, but looking back you see what lame crap it really was from your current perspective. These are little kids, they have no prior perspective, everything is still great and something to master.
 
Your in a maze of little twisty passages, all alike.

Sounds like a normal day at the office for me.

------------------------

Henning... agree with what you posted about the looking back... But I do find it amusing that many of the new games in the Android and Apple app stores are trying to reach out to a "retro" audience with their version of 8-bit graphics and sound.
 
I have an old copy of Colossal Cave Adventure on a machine I play with. I pulled the boy away from minecraft and showed him how my generation wasted time (and could actually look busy at work) and I got the biggest WTF look an 8 year old could ever come up with.;)

don't go north...there are trolls there...
 
jbarrass said:
I have an old copy of Colossal Cave Adventure on a machine I play with. I pulled the boy away from minecraft and showed him how my generation wasted time (and could actually look busy at work) and I got the biggest WTF look an 8 year old could ever come up with.;)

don't go north...there are trolls there...
Click to expand...

"adventure" has been part of every Linux distribution since BSD was invented in the 70s.

Look for the bsdgames Debian package.
 
Henning said:
Then Dragon's Layer, hit the arcades and we all learned what CD-ROM could do!
Click to expand...

Dragon's Lair actually used a Laserdisc, not CD-ROM. One of my favorite games back when I was an arcade rat at the local Aladdin's Castle.

I still have the Gauntlet II t-shirt I won off the in-game contest (find a super-secret room and escape, or something like that).

Ah, I miss the 80's...
 
$$$ conversion is completely legal in Eve Online. And you can get more than cash from MMOs. I originally met my wife because we played EverQuest :)
 
ChrisK said:
I originally met my wife because we played EverQuest :)
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Jeez, I remember the EverQuest days. I had a 46 gnome necro on The Nameless. SOE had a "free week" not long ago, so I downloaded the client to see if he was still there, and yep. I had parked him near Ak'Anon years ago, and he was still there after all these years.
 
I still have a 61 druid and a something-or-other ranger on EQ1, a 65 Coercer and 65 Shaman on EQ2, a max level necro on Rift, a something-or-other on SWTOR, and I had some dudes on SWG before they killed it. I'm sure I'm missing some games in there (Vanguard, Conan, DAoC... positive there are more...) I hated Eve, but I still managed to have a maxed out miner and a specops dude.

I'm not an addict. I swear.
 
My gaming started out with text-based versions on AOL. Dragonrealms, specifically (which still exists!). Progressed to graphics-based MMOs in college and afterward: FFXI and WoW, primarily. Spent way, way too much time on those, especially the former.

I have no time for gaming any longer. I play around with Evennia a bit, which is "...an open-source Python system for building multi-player online text games". Real neat project, actually. Keeps me dabbling in my gaming roots, but from a game design angle.

Oh, and my step kids love Minecraft. A lot.
 
CT4ME said:
The 15 year old son of a client is making $$$ playing this (or is it WarCraft?). 'Last I checked, he had a PayPal account with $80K+, from only 3 months of playing. He mines/sells gold and does custom things. 'Don't really know how it works, but it is real money.
Click to expand...


WoW.

Tex_Mike said:
Wait, What? You can make money playing video games? I am 42 and just now learning about this? This makes me question my entire career in IT and the guilty feelings I have for all those hours spent playing Techmo Bowl in the dorm when I should have been in class.
Click to expand...


LOL. Many of the gaming companies are sweatshops. Like aviation, they have employees who want to work in that industry so bad, they'll work 24/7 until they keel over.

overdrive148 said:
A steam game called Team Fortress 2 is another example. It used to be $20 bucks or so on its own, then the popularity of the game exploded when they introduced hats. Then the entire basis of the game became getting all kinds of cosmetics for your mercenary and TF2 just kept cranking them out. Then they introduced crates, which were found for free, but opened for a price of $2.50 per key - one time only of course. Then the game went free to play - all the new players rushed in and saw all the stuff the older players were wearing and went nuts.

Then valve had the idea to make a community workshop based around letting players make cosmetics and submitting them for approval and inclusion into the game. If they accepted one, the player would receive a cut of the cash. They got people to line up and generate content for free, and bought it for a very small fee, to get more people, who make more content, who...
Click to expand...


Oh holy hell. They blinged TF2??? Sigh. Glad I missed that.

AggieMike88 said:
Your in a maze of little twisty passages, all alike.



Sounds like a normal day at the office for me.
Click to expand...


You have been eaten by a Grue. :)

LoneAspen said:
Dragon's Lair actually used a Laserdisc, not CD-ROM. One of my favorite games back when I was an arcade rat at the local Aladdin's Castle.

I still have the Gauntlet II t-shirt I won off the in-game contest (find a super-secret room and escape, or something like that).

Ah, I miss the 80's...
Click to expand...


Warrior, your life is running out... ;)
 
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