room3d:

Another article about Minecraft, from a parent’s perspective.   Last week my 13 year old had 6 friends over for a birthday sleepover.  They all brought laptops and ignored the XBox and the WII as they spent half the night playing Minecraft .

Minecraft is described as a “Digital Sandbox” and seems to straddle the line between game and virtual world.    Like a game,  monsters attack you and you have to fight them off and build defenses to survive.   In order to build things, you first have to gather resources.   Like “Roblox”  there are few curves to be seen – the world is made of cubes skinned with various textures.    The initial landscapes are generated pseudorandomly, which gives this world a peculiar beauty.

In addition to creating buildings and landscapes by stacking blocks, players can develop a hundred or so different tools and objects.    To do this, you first have to gather the specific resources, then assemble them following a specific “recipe”.

This approach limits what you can make, but results in a learning curve that gets players building immediately and flattens the learning curve.    The search for resources is a pleasant challenge and makes the experience more rewarding.

Anyone coming from a real virtual world like Roblox or Second Life will find the building options limiting, but for gamers making the transition to virtual worlds or young kids building for the first time, Minecraft could be a great choice.