Calling it a “sick burn” was itself a bit of playfulness. Every time I re-read this I am sorry again to hear that we lost Golumbia 🕯️
The thing I think is true about Minecraft is that it enables true play, more along the lines of Calvinball where the only stable rule is that you can’t have any other rules be the same as before.
Minecraft is missing a strongly defined narrative where a JRPG has, to a much greater extent, a central narrative that binds the player into a story
This is precisely the value of Minecraft I think, and why it is a cultural phenomenon. You can choose your own mods, you can make your own mods using open source tools, you can invent any story. Such, I suspect, is how real “play play” (with other people who will quit if it isn’t fun) mostly works, and is related to why reading a novel isn’t as fun as writing a novel with your friends.
Calling it a “sick burn” was itself a bit of playfulness. Every time I re-read this I am sorry again to hear that we lost Golumbia 🕯️
The thing I think is true about Minecraft is that it enables true play, more along the lines of Calvinball where the only stable rule is that you can’t have any other rules be the same as before.
This is a good essay on what children’s cultures have lost, and I think that Minecraft is one of the few places where children can autopoetically reconstruct such such culture(s).
This is precisely the value of Minecraft I think, and why it is a cultural phenomenon. You can choose your own mods, you can make your own mods using open source tools, you can invent any story. Such, I suspect, is how real “play play” (with other people who will quit if it isn’t fun) mostly works, and is related to why reading a novel isn’t as fun as writing a novel with your friends.