Full-on 2012 – Minecraft by Andrew Beeston

Between visits to Camp Magic MacGuffin in Minecraft, I’ve been exploring Bryan Alexander’s New Digital Storytelling site today. I hit the games tag and got interested in Games too long for complete stories”, a short piece referencing this CNN article from Blake Snow.

The idea: most gamers do not finish the main story-lines of long games, but they do complete other games along the way.

I was struck by a few of the examples cited by Snow as games with low player-completion percentages. I had finished one of them, but couldn’t see myself creating smaller games inside of it for myself to play. I think my reaction in that case betrayed my genre preferences (I’ll really only noodle about for 100+ hours in a fantasy world or a world-building game) and bias against multiplayer (I like to build next to people on Minecraft servers; thus far, that is the most stable build of my gaming socialization code).

When I think of successful open-world games – and by “successful” I mean games that contemporaneously hold my attention, as well as my students’ – I think of games that have structured side quests, occupations, and story-lines that cater to different play styles and gamer identities (no surprises here). I see many students struggle in games that offer too much freedom to manipulate too many variables – but “too much” is a subjective thing. I wonder if learning to code would make exploring, say, a Sim City game more intrinsically rewarding for my kids – if knowing what was happening inside a learning curve would help students better enjoy and learn from failing along its path.

I wonder what role “purposeless”, non-casual games will have in our lives – and I wonder if we’ll ever publish a AAA game that isn’t meant to be finished in any traditional sense. The prolonged endgame of navigating ambiguity: will we ever want to play it – is play it – or is play an escape from it?

I often imagine a game about an exiled protagonist who has to balance reinventing himself against being called back to win a sequel to the conflict he lost, knowing that returning to his old home would forfeit the lives of those his exile saved. Would we play a game about disappearing infinitely? A game that ends in obscurity?

I’ll quit now before I start in on the connections between Lucky Wander Boy and single-player, peaceful-mode Minecraft. I’m excited to see the story of ds106 unfold across media, as well as in-game.