Screenshot: Late to the block party

I have a friend who is somewhat obsessed with a particular writer, but hasn’t read what is widely considered this author’s masterpiece, as he’s intentionally saving it for a particular moment. After I accidentally spoiled part of the novel for him this week, I teased him for being the only person I knew who was so obsessed with a book he’d never read. And then I realized you could probably say the same situation applies to me, only not with a book but the video game Minecraft.

Digressive confession: Although for the moment I am writing a monthly column on video games, I am no expert. Up until March of last year, the most recent system I owned was a Playstation 2; my most frequently played game was NCAA March Madness 2004, in which game I led my hometown Fighting Illini to seven Championships in a row, a carefully constructed alternate history to the last seven seasons of Illinois basketball. And the last time I had played a game online for an extended period was probably in the days of Quake II (yes—the ‘90s).

http://youtu.be/qvyxOvYZ5tY

All this is to say that, although I’ve clearly rediscovered video games, I’ve missed some things. One of these things would seem to be Minecraft, the original version of which came out for the PC over three years ago. But it’s only over the last week that I’ve gotten obsessed with this game, watching videos and homemade tutorials, reading articles and making mental plans for my gameplay. I haven’t bought it yet simply because this game is going to be the end of me. Here, I’d like to try to explain this obsession.

For the uninitiated (technically, I’m still among you), here is this game—if you can even call it a game—that has reached massive popularity despite the fect that it presents no goals, direction or victory conditions. Like a number of other games released in the last decade, it’s labeled an “open-world” game. Unlike traditional video games that either have linear progression through levels toward an ultimate goal (e.g., Mario Bros), or simply increase difficulty after every successful completion of a task (e.g., Space Invaders), open-world games give more freedom to the user to control his or her experience of the game and generate a free-standing universe to explore.

The thing about open-world games is that their openness is paradoxically—and in some sense necessarily—a circumscribed one. While playing, one runs into arbitrary borders and inaccessible areas, and “missions” that progress the games’ narratives must be completed in order to unlock certain portions of gameplay. Moreover, such games still have narrative, which means, among other things, a goal, progress, an end: a closed system.

To be polemic for a moment, although I very much enjoy narrative in general, and some of these games in particular, I suspect that the “heart” of video games lies elsewhere, and I think I’ve found it in Minecraft. This game has no goal, notions of progress have to stem from the user him- or herself, it by definition does not end. It is open. The user starts in—or is abandoned to, one might say—an effectively infinite world. This world is populated by blocks of various minerals the user may harvest to build tools and shelter, animals who essentially function in a likewise manner, and, at night, supernatural threats. But there is no goal, and there is no end to this world: no missions, no arbitrary borders.

Before I idealize the game too much, it is generally assumed that as one spends more time in the world of the game, one’s technology will advance, more areas will be discovered and excavated, one’s dwellings will increase in size and improve in design. After all, the possibility to advance technologically is programmed into the game. But there’s nothing compelling the user to take advantage of this feature, no rewards but the self-satisfaction one might receive from the simulacrum of a bigger reserve of iron, a taller tower, a complex underground bunker.

And if one does follow such a goal-oriented path, in single-player mode there’s ultimately no one to share it with; the serene yet melancholy score of the game emphasizes one’s solitude as the only human in an infinite world. The constructions of the user represent nothing but the manifestation of one’s will upon nature. The radically open space of this game thus exposes goals and progress as cultural notions that depend on a human subject; ironically, of course, it achieves this effect through complex coding and hardware that are a direct real-world result of the imposition of human will on the world. It generates its openness from a closed system.

So there is a certain closed-ness in the very foundations of Minecraft, but the game allows this closed-ness to manifest itself in the game’s blocky, lo-fi graphics. Minecraft doesn’t practice illusionism in its imagery or realism in its (lack of) narrative, but it is immersive and, perhaps even critical. I think this is why I’ve become so obsessed with it.

Pat Brown is a graduate student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa. No, that doesn’t mean he makes movies; he just likes them a lot.