While looking for something idle to do after I was out of patience for code the other day, I came across the Survivalism mod of Minecraft. Minecraft is a good sandbox, and a fair social activity, but isn’t terribly interesting as a game due to lack of objectives. Survivalism adds requirements for drinking, eating, and rest that make the game considerably more urgent and challenging, and gives the player a limited number of lives which changes the dynamic by keeping games finite. It lends a kind of rogue-like feel, which makes it way more interesting as a game. As we all know, Dying is Fun.
Web Presence
Page Navigation
Meta
-
Recent Posts
Random Quote
It ought always to be remembered, that literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good, and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education. It is not that they may be enabled to pass through life in an easy or reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society.
— Joseph McKeen,Categories
License
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Derp, I just made a comment on a later entry of yours asking if you play Minecraft. Guess this answers that question! What do you mean, not terribly interesting due to lack of objectives?? Do you ever play The Sims? Building pretty things and staying alive is objective enough for me! Though Minecraft feels akin to Animal Crossing for me, too, in that I want to collect some of everything. The most exotic thing I’ve gotten so far has been Iron Ore. 😛
Yup, I’ve blown a disgusting amount of time on Minecraft. Last semester I was running a SMP server for the ECE department, but it’s a little bit of a fuss to keep up and there wasn’t a critical mass of people playing over the summer, so it isn’t running now. It is one of the few games I actually like playing socially – game time is usually “me” time.
I also like playing with an external recipe book/guide to figure out the obscure things, because there are some seriously non obvious combinations that do fun stuff. That said, once I’d done some redstone circuits, megaliths, farming and and a couple other “Oh, hey! That works here” stunts it started to lose interest for me except as an exploration game, and making it so the death penalty is more than just “Oh shit, gotta get back to my corpse before it times out” and adding some extra survival conditions improves the dynamic for that mode of play.