I've been a gamer for years. And while I've never been a hard core gamer, I've played a lot of games and even took some games to extremes. I started back in the days of Wolfenstein - still love that game - and have played through all the Dooms, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, Quake(s), Unreal, and many others. Some I can't even remember anymore.
I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights a lot. Once I created a character on Neverwinter Nights that became so uber awesome, there was no bad guy, or group of bad guys in the game I couldn't defeat. So yeah, I can be OCD about games.
I was always a PC gamer, not console gamer. I never had a console until we got one for my young son (at the time) when he received a Nintendo 64. Mario never looked so good as he did on that game. We played the heck out of that console.
Over the years we played a lot of console games though. After the N64 came the Gamecube, a PS2, and finally we waited around and got the Xbox 360 after the prices dropped on it. And a Wii. Oh, by the way, as a kid I had one of the first Atari 2600 game consoles anywhere near where I lived. We rocked.
I stopped playing video games for a while until along came a game that sucked me in further than any other.
World of Warcraft.
I was never into the whole Warcraft series because I didn't like the style. But Wow had that whole FP perspective and that hooked me.
I wasn't a big-time raider or belong to one of the big-time guilds or anything. I was a solo quester and chased after the quests, achievements, and exploring the land and lore of Azeroth. I played this game a lot. Too much. Way too much.
In a compromise with my wife, where I would give up WoW and she wouldn't kill me in my sleep, I quit playing WoW. I quit playing all games in fact.
I was good for a while. Then I had to play something. I played Temple Run for a time on my phone. I played Candy Crush - and then decided that game was using psychology to lure people into real purchases to advance through the game so I quit - and I recently played through a number of levels of Minion Rush (which did a similar thing as Candy Crush).
Yes, it placated my OCD brain a little, but it wasn't immersive. There was no tie-in to imagination.
Then my wife bought Minecraft for the Xbox 360 for our daughter. I started playing it with my daughter (who is only in Kindergarten). Together we built dozens of houses, a floating island with a water slide, a number of floating structures, and even an entire airport with hanger (my daughter's idea).
With my daughter's wild imagination and creativity, we created all kinds of things. She likes color, so we used the dyed wools a lot for construction in orange, pink, and every other color it has. She created an entire house out of Pepto-Bismol pink that to me, is an abomination to the eyes, but she likes it.
Then she saw an image online of a fairly elaborate house and she asked me to help her build it. Which meant I mostly built it while she ran around and planted cactus and created waterfalls in the trees - we were using cooperative play mode and two controllers on the Xbox 360.
I decided to create a world of my own. Being a newb, I didn't understand Minecraft all that well, but I understood questing, survival, and construction. So I jumped right in. I forbid my daughter from going into it because she likes to "make it better". That usually means randomly she plops in red, blue, orange, or pink blocks in my finely crafted stone brick walls and floors.
I was all about the survival mode on my game world and all about the creative mode on her game world. In her world, we had everything available to us in creative mode. In my world, I had only what I could mine or craft.
Any my OCD brain got hooked again.
I've been playing Minecraft now far more than I should. I know it's annoying to others. But, unlike WoW, it is by definition casual. And that means that when the wife says "honey..." or the kids need something, I can just go to the menu screen and put down the controller. And I do, every time, immediately.
As I learned more about the game and watched online videos, I realized just how crappy the world is that I spawned in. It has to be one of the worst random seeds in existence Minecraft.
There are no deserts, two-thirds of the world is covered in snow, there are no prairies to speak of, and not one temple or overland dungeon anywhere.
There is one and only one village. It was way north on the map and I spawned way south. I found it by meandering around with stacks of torches and building dirt huts to spend the night in.
I settled into the blacksmith shop and immediately expanded it and started digging down. I went down a few levels and started a tunnel straight back south to my original base. It was over 450 meters of digging a 3x3 tunnel.
Now here's the weird part. While digging under the village that first day, I could hear the villagers going in and out of doors like crazy. This went on and on. It took me a while to get past the village above because I kept running into water I had to block it off several times as well as crossing a chasm.
Then I heard the zombies trying to smash doors above me in the village. It was night apparently. Still, the villagers were opening and closing doors like mad. I go back to the surface and look out. It was night. There were zombies everywhere now. I went back to digging. I came back up during the day and the village was completely empty.
That's right. I had been in the village exactly one day and it was wiped out by the zombie apocalypse.
That was when I decided that I was tired of struggling in this crappy spawn world, but I already had an investment in time and construction in it. That's when I decided to use creative mode liberally.
I built a wall around the entire village - the only village in the map - and created new houses. Then I spawned new villagers. I also set up fencing and spawned some animals.
Basically I rebuilt the entire village.
Now I am all OCD about my "mine" which arguably would rival the impressiveness of the Mines of Moria and would even have the Dwarven miners from LOTR praising its construction.
So World of Warcraft and Minecraft... what's the connection?
My OCD brain likes to immerse in a fantasy world. In WoW I was immersed in a world of the game designers creation. In Minecraft, the world was a canvas and I am altering it to suit my purposes and my designs.
Often, I find myself using Minecraft to model ideas I have in my head about locations in my next book.
Quick unashamed self plug here:
I've created areas in Minecraft that help me figure out travel times over distance for my books, as well as relative positioning. It has been invaluable. But mostly, I've been building stuff.
Am I playing Minecraft too much just like I was in WoW?
Maybe. I play it a lot. But, I still get everything done that I need to and I have the added benefit of playing it with my daughter and encouraging her imagination. If she wants waterfalls out of the tops of tall trees, why not? It's her world, let her be master over it.
There. I've confessed my sins. I play Minecraft casually in creative mode. I suppose some would say I've lost my gamer reputation. So be it, we have some pink houses to build in the clouds.
