I Don't See The Attraction To Minecraft.

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My nieces and nephews are mad on it. Three of rhem are young adults and the rest are children from around the age of 7 and up, but my brother used to play it with them when he had a chance, but for me it looks too much like a false world.
Though I have played games that are cartoony, but for some reason Minecraft turns on me as it is the wrong sense of falseness? It makes me feel "Yuck" as they have me play it.

Mind you, if I do find a game I like I can be too obsessed with it until I walk away from it after a few years, so in the past I have not bought games systems so I can concentrate on other things. I only bought a Nintendo Switch last autumn because my nephew had one and I tried and loved a game on it, and due to having had burnout, I found the mental ability to use my hands and eye co-ordination was effected, so I saw that very slowly my hand to eye co-ordination was improving by playing his racing car game, and then I became obsessed with it and my poor nephew had to limit how often I could borrow his Switch, so I bought my own, and while I still struggle at some tasks with my hands, I have vastly improved on what I was.... As when I first tried the game on his Switch, I could not play it, as my eyes could not keep up with the movement of the game on the screen.
So it has been good that I have bought a Switch, but I only play two games which are free games. I do not want to get any more. I spend too much time on them as it is!

But going back to Minecraft. It reminds me too much of falsifying a game of Lego. (If game is the right word to use?) I loved playing with Lego and I did not ween myself off until my 20's and gave the collection to my nephews and nieces when in my 30's when I was not using it. (As I wanted to dedicate my time to trains, so if I start making something out of Lego I can be days on it or weeks! But I would make the same thing again and again. Lego cars to crash into each other.... Though I had perfected a design that was more likely to damage or break Lego bricks then it was to fall apart by crashing... And with this final victory if design, the interest waned as I could not perfect it any more. (I had been building Lego cars to crash into each other with my brother since a young child and we were always playing with it, and apart from model trains (Which I looked after) and model cars which I also crashed into each other or lined the entire collection up in colour and size form... And I would rid the cars of people. Never wanted people in my cars! I would even bite their heads off if I could not remove them! So yes. I guess I was a strange child as the orher kids in school would play with their cars differently).

But Minecraft is like a false Lego. To me I want real or nothing. But other games which are what they are I enjoy, if they involve racing cars! Haha!

Yeah, it's basically the same appeal as LEGO, just being able to build whatever you want and run around in it.
I think the multiplayer survival mode is kind of fun for a while, but I'm not really a big fan of playing it by myself, it just doesn't feel like there's much of a point to it.

I used to play quite a lot of Minecraft, but never got crazy into it. I think largely because I never had the motivation to build big megastructures like people do. I made a simple house that didn't intrude too much on the local landscape, and made a small farm to provide regular food. For me it was always game over after that. I did hang out in the game with my friends, and I liked exploring the procedurally generated worlds. But if you want amazing procedural generation, Dwarf Fortress has it beat.

I have fun designing machines in minecraft.
My favorite design so far, quite useful in survival mode, is 100% automatic silent chicken farm - you set it up, fill the input container with eggs and leave it, after some time it starts putting meat and feathers into the output chest (eggs are redirected to run the machine indefinitely).
My animal rights conscience feels awful about it but no real animals are harmed in a video game.

My grandson got into minecraft a year or two ago, so we got it on the tablet here for him. He used to ask me how to this that or the other and I had no clue, so I started playing minecraft to be able to help him. Turned out that I got to playing it on my own, a bit too much sometimes. I've erased a lot of worlds once I got my house, garden and so on set up. I find the repetition in supply gathering and arranging of things to be calming, but once I have the basics covered, I get like, well now what? I will randomly build things for my grandson that I think he will enjoy. Most recently I made him a large roller coaster of sorts with music note blocks next to it so as he rides it he can listen to a song from a different game he likes. I do that on saves for him, not on my stuff. He gets a little click happy and I don't want him to accidentally destroy my house or something.

I never really thought about it as a lego-ish thing before. But I never used legos for anything more than building. I didn't 'play' with them, exactly. I had those at my grandparent's house, and I'd go there, and just stack, arrange, undo, repeat. For me, minecraft isn't much like lego because there's so much more going on, the world, animals, monsters, gathering and so on. Maybe if I had 'played' with legos I would have that sort of connection going on here. But it never would have occurred to me as a kid that there you could do more with them than make a house or some type of structure. But I think all I had there were basic blocks anyway. If there were more than that, I don't know if I ever used them. I don't recall people, cars, or anything like that.

I've never really gotten the appeal of Minecraft either. Survival mode is mildly interesting, but other than that, I've never been big on the creative aspects of it, or its non-linear, non-goal-oriented nature. I also don't particularly like item crafting as a game mechanic; if I'm going to collect lots of crap, I'd rather collect cool new weapons and armor like in Diablo instead of random junk that I have to figure out how to turn into other stuff.

I feel like nearly everything that's a big trend in gaming right now is something I'm not a fan of. Crafting, open-world games, e-sports, microtransaction-driven F2P games, permadeath mechanics... Ugh.

Whether or not I see the appeal of Minecraft...


I just can't play it for more than 10 minutes long without getting physically sick.

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Minecraft isn't a good "game" in the sense of a structured set of rules and a challenge. It's just fun to build things. That's it. And it's much better in that regard than legos since there is more room to be creative and you can even build circuitry and such. I haven't played the game in years but the appeal is easy to see.

It is basically lego but the fun thing about it is that you can have your friends play with you online and you can create something together, like how kids used to build lego stuff together.

The appeal to it is

1) It's accessible: cheap and available on all platforms. Low-end spec machines can run it.

2) It's casual friendly, but also a game that dedicated players can sink time into

3) Lot of customization, creativity. Making worlds that you can explore, etc.

My psychology 101 take on Minecraft is that give a lot of us the sort of agency that we wish we had in the real world. It's a kind of hunter/gatherer thing, that simplicity of going out into the world and collecting what you need to survive, then making life easier for yourself by acquiring more and automating processes. Building is also a human instinct, building a home to protect ourselves and store our crap in, even more so.

But IRL I can't build myself a home. I can't dig up clay and fire bricks because I own no land to dig up clay from. Or land to build myself a home on. And even if I did own land, I don't automatically have the right to build on it and if I did manage to get the right, I wouldn't have free choice of what I built, it would have to be approved and I'd need machines and it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds that I don't have.

Minecraft removes all that crap and I can build freely and what I need to do it, I just go out and dig out of the ground.

It's scratches a very primal itch, I think.

I love minecraft, and I totally see the appeal of it. You get to build your own world and who wouldn't want to do that.

I agree with DuckHairback, Minecraft lets you take control of the world in ways that are difficult to impossible in the real world. When I built my creeper wall around my farm, I know that my cow herd is safe. I'm going to install stairs all the way to the bottom of my mine. I know exactly how many crates I need to sort all the different types of things I might pick up or craft (until the next update!). That level of control is cat-nip to me, and I'm sure many other people on this forum.
Being able to hold in your (real) hand something that you actual build? That is important too!

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