Minecraft - New Development Ideas

I'm an avid minecraft player. However, I think the game has a huge amount of untapped potential, which perhaps (I hope) the developers will begin to take advantage of. For starters, lets summarize what the game currently has to offer, and then talk about what these offerings can do for game mechanics.

Minecraft is a game which creates a huge (semi-infinite) procedurally generated world, separated into biomes with unique resources, textures and landscape features. There are evil monsters that come out at night to hunt for you, and there are passive creatures which you can enlist for aid, or farm for resources that come out at day. The terrain has spectacular features, rendered in a charming blocky style. There are etherial dimensions with fabulous vistas and dangerous creatures, and scattered throughout the world are hidden portals to these dimensions.

Alone in this world, you must start with your bare hands, survive the dangers at night, and eventually carve out a strong-hold for yourself. You're given nothing, and, with some strategy, you can craft special items with gathered, rare resources to build yourself a fortress from the elements, powerful tools to reshape the world around you, defend yourself from enemies, and grow crops of food. With enough effort, you can even craft complicated rail-way networks, machines, and various mechanical structures from basic elements such as moving pistons, electrical circuits.

The game as an amazing lego set, filled with dynamic pieces and huge opportunities for story, quests and adventures. What if Notch were to include factions offering competing quests, with rare-resource rewards? What if the tedium of mining for resources could be replaced or supplemented with questing for resources? What if the game could contain several sub-plots of story, interweaving, and taking the player from one fantastic location to the next, allowing the player the freedom to stop, build bases, and connect to an existing transportation network? I think this could allow for a richness of content as of yet unheard of.

What if, players could create a 'quest engine' and NPC or player civilizations with stories, plots, etc, that were uploaded to a central sever, and downloaded by other players for free, dynamic, and ever varying content? I think that minecraft is on the precipice of emergent, user generated gameplay. With this set of tools, and a relatively simple interface, users could create templates for buildings, templates for quests, etc, and get so much more from the game.

The current state of the game is a gigantic world to explore, reshape, but no real motivation to do so. The problem is that there could be story which motivates the game play, which could even allow the player time and space to pause in the story, and be creative, and alternatively, take advantage of a vast fantasy world full of quests and adventures. The game literally has nothing to lose by implementing this sort of play-style, and a huge player base to gain.

Just some thought. Maybe I'll write some tools some day that allow for this kind of content creation.

Just think of it:
1. NPC villages care how you interact with them, and which other villages you form ties with
2. Questing and rewards centered around exploring new content - finding hidden treasures and rare items
3. Trade networks between NPC villages
4. Storylines unique to villages
5. Larger city-state villages

Minecraft seems to be at 'critical mass' regarding possessing all the pieces needed to produce endless quests, heroic journeys to far off dimensions to conquer great evils, find powerful relics, ally with cities, you name it!

Millions of Starving People

Anyone else notice that "starving children in africa" is used in an almost casual, even joking sense when talking about stuff? As it turns out, people are actually starving right now, in what is probably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world currently. Yet, for some reason, the only place I find it is Reddit news...

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/millions-are-starving-horn-africa

We we all just anesthetized as kids with the 'save the children' infomercials? I was reading this article this morning, and just thinking about how some crises get more attention than others - it blows my mind how many things happen simultaneously on earth, and the sum of the world's problems seems insurmountable. I guess I understand why some people roll up into a ball, or ignore it. I wish there was some way to effectively help, but the most effective thing I can think of is donating money - and I have a pitiable amount of that.

Reminds me a bit of how Chris might have been feeling in his earlier post this week.

I don't want to try and determine some currency by which world disasters can be weighted - I find that to be annoying and pretentious, but seriously - why doesn't this kind of story get equal coverage in the media? I mean, this may veer off onto a whole different topic, but when media outlets recieve money from advertisments, are there any guarantees of fair, equal coverage to world events?

I get this feeling in the gut of my stomach, that is the integration of hearing about this sort of crisis over and over again, and finally, understanding somewhat the magnitude of the crisis. When I feel this way, somehow my philosophical unrest of any given moment seems pretty selfish compared to what my fellow human beings are forced to endure. Its a feeling of impotence mixed with loathing.

It seems unfair that I can devote my life to something abstract like particle physics, while others have to devote their lives to making continuous sacrifices to get even their most basic needs met..

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/09/01/general-af-ivory-coast-un-wikileaks_8654181.html

I mead, god damn it, reality check people, we should all probably stop jacking ourselves off about all our problems, about how much jesus and god loves us, or how we're such enlightened secular humanists that see through all the bullshit and focus on what matters - each other.

I guess that is a bit of an un-focused rant. But, then again, I've just come off listening to atheist pod-casts for the last two days and BBC news about Tripoli and Qaddafi, and felt kind of pissed that these other stories aren't covered. There is a lot of fucked up shit happening in Africa right now, and we should all care about it. Its our long-lost home-land, after all.

[EDIT]

It turns out, Somalia, like many African countries (not all, thankfully) is not impoverished due to a lack of food. Journalists who have traveled in and around Somalia have noticed that in areas, there are flourishing crops, and large, fat herds of cattle. Why is there such a starvation crises, then? It turns out that Somalia is fractured, and divided between warlords. These men and their child-armies, conscripted very young and essentially brainwashed until adulthood, systematically work to utterly deprive other competitors of food, water, and medical treatment. Thus, if you happen to live in a less powerful, or unprotected village, you are certain to be utterly fucked. And, the infighting prevents anyone from receiving external aid. Aid workers attempting to enter are robbed systematically of their aid money and supplies, and turned back, at best. The situation is utterly fucked, and nothing short of a country wide unification and rebellion will save Somalia, aside from large-scale UN invasion. And why isn't there one already? Probably because Somalia is not of 'strategic interest' to the United States.