My Time With Minecraft Pocket Edition

Minecraft. What’s that all about then? I’ll admit: before this past week, I had avoided almost all contact with Minecraft. I’d seen some incredibly unattractive, uninspiring videos from it, heard a few very vague little bits and pieces on podcasts and read one or two editorial pieces about how jaw-droppingly amazing it was.

It was a phenomenon in PC gaming that seemed to defy all explanation. As such, I decided that I didn’t have time to dedicate to working out what the thing was by myself. I had games to play for the site, to preview and review, other stuff to do. I couldn’t dedicate hours to fathoming just what this weird PC explosion was all about. I mentally filed it in my metaphorical cabinet under “Aren’t those PC gamers an odd bunch sometimes?” It was in there with World of Warcraft and the unhealthy resistance to Counter Strike 1.6.

But then it was released on the Xperia Play and it occurred to me that this platform was crying out for a “killer app” and that Minecraft might just be it. I decided it was time to jump down the mineshaft and see if it causes me to re-evaluate my attitude towards Sony Ericsson’s gaming phone.

The first thing to note with Minecraft Pocket Edition is that it’s not really a game. I’ve since done a fair bit of research into the PC version with its collection, combination and levelling mechanics and imminent perils. The Pocket Edition doesn’t have that. It’s more accurately described as a construction sandbox. To the best of my understanding, it’s similar to the Creative Mode of the Classic PC version of the game. A world is randomly generated (or seeded from a text entry) and you’re left in that world with your infinite supply of 36 different types of building blocks and objects.

You start the experience at a random spawn point in your world. There is a jutting, angular landscape constructed from Minecraft’s trademark pixelated cubes. You have a cube of something in the traditional lower right corner of the screen – it would be a pistol if this was a first person shooter, in Minecraft it’s a… well, my best guess is that it’s a wooden crate. There’s a crosshair in the centre of the screen and if you look at nearby surfaces, they light up to show where your building blocks will stick. Along the bottom of the screen, there’s a strip of different materials and objects, like a quick select bar.

[drop]I was baffled. I moved towards a blocky, mud-and-grass hill and hit the X button. I jumped. Right, okay… I’ll try each of the buttons in turn. Square moves to the left in the list of materials displayed along the bottom of the screen, Circle to the right. Triangle brings up all of your materials to navigate with the D-Pad. The D-Pad moves forward, backwards and strafes, the right analogue area works as a mouse control to look. The left shoulder button hits whatever you’re pointed at and, in a few bludgeoning prods, causes it to explode in a shower of pixelated squares and disappear from the world forever. The right shoulder button places whatever material you’re brandishing.

I’d cracked the control systems and it had only taken me two minutes. What now?

I bashed at the nearby hill a bit. I wandered around this clunky, blocky island looking for a way to mine something or craft something. I found nothing. Eventually, I decided that I should have a house. I vaguely remember reading something once that said it was dangerous to be around without shelter at night. So I decided I needed a house on the edge of a nice little bay I’d found. The bay was surrounded on three sides by high hills and on the fourth by the sea. That seemed secure.

I had to excavate some of the hill to make room for my swanky bayside pad. I couldn’t find a pick axe or shovel in my list of items so I decided to do my heavy earth works with a little yellow flower. At one point, I needed to fell a tree. This was quite an exciting prospect. I set about hacking into the trunk of the tree, expecting some sort of situation that would require me to yell “TIMBER!” but I was ultimately disappointed when one cube of tree trunk disappeared and left the rest of the mighty oak suspended in space.  I ended up having to build myself a little staircase so I could remove the cubes of leaves that had been at the top. Minecraft’s world clearly doesn’t work to the same laws of physics as our own.

Eventually, I had cleared enough of the hill to give me a bit of room for a bungalow. This was taking quite a long time. I found a material that looked like bricks and laid out my exterior wall, then I built those walls up to just over head height and left a few gaps to put in my windows. I filled those with the glass-like cubes, obviously. I couldn’t find a door material so I just left an opening in the wall. I figured that I’d just brick myself in for a while when the beasties came. When I went up the hill to admire my construction from afar, I noticed that I hadn’t built a roof. This was soon rectified with a kind of staircase construction of red blocks. It was hideously ugly and made the inside of my abode completely dark. Clearly, I needed a flashy glass ceiling/roof construction.

Once done, I wandered around the surrounding hills for a while and then went back to my house to wait for darkness and the danger it would bring. It never got dark. I can’t tell you how long I waited. Mostly because it would be a little bit embarrassing.

[drop2]Even more embarrassing is that, after I finally gave up waiting for night, I went to dig myself a mine. I dug for ages. I found blocks that weren’t in my inventory. They looked like they might have been intended to represent gold and rubies. I smashed them, expecting to see them added to my inventory but I was ultimately disappointed. I decided to just dig down. Eventually, I ended up at the bottom of a deep mineshaft, staring straight up at a tiny square of sky, wondering how to get out. I was far too long into digging out a rudimentary staircase before I realised that one of my materials was a ladder.

I skulked back to my glass-roofed, bayside bungalow and dug a little hole to make a fire. I put wood in it. At least, I think it was wood. I put a little torch from my inventory in it. It just sat there, flickering intermittently. I wanted a roaring fire, I got a wooden crate with a jumbo matchstick balancing on it.

Subsequent internet and practical research taught me that Minecraft Pocket Edition doesn’t have night-time. It doesn’t have dangers. It doesn’t have mining. It doesn’t have crafting. It doesn’t have fire. It doesn’t have proper multiplayer options, although you can play with someone else if you’re both on the same local WiFi network. I don’t know anyone else who has access to an Xperia Play to test this.

Minecraft Pocket Edition is solely about building and destroying. It doesn’t offer much help or guidance, either. Apparently, some of my coloured blocks are supposed to be wool. I have no idea how I would know that, they react just like the rock, glass and wooden ones do, as far as I can tell.

I still don’t know what Minecraft really is. I still don’t entirely understand it. When I think logically about it, Pocket Edition is an extremely basic sandbox with barely anything in it to entertain the user. But when I consider how much time I’ve spent in that world, I’m baffled all over again. I’ve spent hours with it. Much more time than any other Xperia Play game and, this week at least, longer than any other game. There’s nothing to it but it still manages to be strangely compelling.

Is this Xperia Play’s killer app? Well, no, not yet. There are plans to continuously add features though, to bring it closer in line with the PC version. Once those features start to appear, well, I can only imagine it will become even more peculiarly addictive.