Minecraft?! You're still alive my 'old friend'.
Kono Giorno Giovanna Niwa yume ga aru
A long time ago, on a computer system far away and now outdated, back when I was of the optimal age group I used to play Minecraft. No, no- I don't suppose play work so well here, now does it? Anyone who knows me from those dark days knows that I used Minecraft in probably the least healthy way it was possible to use a game of 'infinite creative possibility' like that. I turned that straight-up into my job. What's that? You jump into Minecraft in order to build your little base, go out, and explore all of the little wonders of the world bit by bit? Yeah, that's not me. You go onto creative mode and let the juices flow with unlimited resources and the power of unhinderable building? That's the weak stuff to me. See- I had that horrible combination of too-big dreams and a crippling desire to make it 'legit'; so I it wasn't long until I signed myself up to the sort of project that would define my next years (Yes, years) of playing Minecraft.
But first, when I got into Minecraft it was as a spectator during it's first few years of growing into Youtube prominence, after the Indev days and into the Beta. I would see people enjoy the game in the simplest of ways and marvelled at a concept so simple yet executed so well, and to this day I still find that a marvel. Many smaller games form themselves around the 'find your own goal' model, but most of them end up falling apart from that very rhetoric either because they've got a very clear path of what the game loop actually is, and are just pretending to be 'free form' under clearly false pretences, or they've just got a really aimless and directionless game inside which it's impossible to conjure any sort of meaningful direction. (I would call out Dreamworld here, but I think it's unfair to even call that a game.) Minecraft wrote the book on how to nail this with simplicity, approachability and just great visual communication of mechanics to the players. You don't need to log onto a Minecraft world too long until you've got a decent idea what's going to be the most fun thing for you to do, even if that's just digging a hole somewhere and figuring out everything one blocky day at a time.
But what was this about 'treating Minecraft like a job'? Oh, heh, yeah about that... So everyone picks their own goals in Minecraft, and mine was to make a ludicrously huge home base to live in that would literally float in the freaking sky. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not, I dreamt up something that stupidly big. And I don't just mean a little floating fortress or nothing, nah this was an entire full island ripped out of the ground and hung in the air with all that would entail. It was a whole thing, don't ask. The point is that led to actual years of me just sitting down on Minecraft whenever I had the free time just to mine stone, dirt, and slowly the new blocks they kept adding. (Yes, I hated the 'new' useless mineral blocks with a passion.) That was my entire Minecraft experience, and it was honestly total bliss. There's a freedom in seeking out some mindless, seemingly impossible goal, and I relished in actually trying to achieve something this unwise and out-and-out stupid. So that was my Minecraft play experience up until about 2 years back.
What happened then? Minecraft itself just sort of locked me out. Yeah, I guess something innate in the game's programming sensed that I was grinding away my sanity in its little caves because Minecraft just crashed endlessly on by Xbox One and no one could quite figure out why. So that was a little bit of a 'forced retirement' on my end, but in a sense it was just as well because the Minecraft ecosystem was slowly getting 'out of hand' for me through endless updates that were fundamentally changing things in ways that I was having trouble keeping track of. When I left the game it was only a few weeks into the 'Village and Pillage' update, and the simple game I remembered was slowly getting buried because of it. That was totally fine in my book, of course, I loved all the new added complexity, but I just couldn't always gel with it, so to speak.
But it's now two years down the line, and I've done what I'm surprised I hadn't done an age ago and bought Minecraft Java Edition so that I may renew my stupid endless pursuit of making my dream world. Oh that's right, I haven't given up! When the last version of the game locked me out I had already built the island and was working on filling it up, and it was grand- but it had the potential to be so much more... Part 2 of Minecraft's newest update is promising to increase the height of the world by over 100 blocks, something I kept scraping into during my time playing the game. See where I'm going with this? New floating island- twice as big! Better shape, more scope, less people working on it. (I used to have a friend who helped out occasionally with life-saving redstone QOL contraptions back in the day. Now I'm just trying to rudimentally follow his shadow.) Minecraft is the endless dream that I just can't put down and my consciousness will soon belong only to it's vastly superior blocky world.
In all honesty, however, I was genuinely surprised by how jarring my reintroduction to Minecraft was. Getting used to the controls again was no big deal at all, despite years of playing with a controller I suppose I'm just so acclimatised to PC controls from similar games (thanks No Man's Sky) that I was Minecrafting to the standard of the old days (almost) in no time. It was the game itself, changed in many weird little ways, that caught me off guard. A sea of fish, coral and drowned when I was used to looking at blank oceans, (I played on a legacy world, so even after the update I had to go looking for new stuff) the wandering trader appearing out of the friggn' blue and giving me a heart attack, the various new flowers that are colourful, lush yet entirely new to me. And then, most jarring of all, the Nether. Good lord what have they done to the Nether! That update is wild to me, after the fact and having followed none of the dev blogs at all. Learning these new ultra powerful Piglin Brutes exist, reading that I need to wear a piece of gold armour in order to not be mobbed to death everywhere I go nowadays, trekking over 500 blocks in desperate search of my good-old-Nether-Fortresses and seeing entirely new alien biomes. It feels like I'm playing with mods, it's the weirdest thing.
Looking upon a game you feel like you knew intimately and not recognizing it is alienating and honestly rather scary. It gets me thinking about what things would have ended up like if I had waited another two years: would the game have been so unrecognisable that I couldn't get back into it? On the verge of the new update, which I've been cramming about in knowledge that Part 1 drops on the 8th, I've heard concerns about the Minecraft world becoming overly complicated and if that betrayed the original vision at all. I hate to break to ya, guys, but that's already happened an age ago. Minecraft is more intricate then many other titles of it's kind nowadays, and we just don't recognise it because the developers are so good at tying the game up to be as intuitive as possible. It's only when I was deeply tied into the game, pulled out and thrown back in again that I saw how crazy the evolutions this game goes through are. It's amazing to think that a single game can shift so fundamentally over a decade since it's launch, but Minecraft is that model which proves how it can be done and to rampant success. 
Hello once more, my Minecraft , I hope we treat each other well this time. (No more 20 hour sessions, I promise.)
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