Last week I wrote about Minecraft, a really simple sandbox game with an addictively existential premise: there isn't one. One week later, and having plumbed the depths of this self-described emergent game, I've realized how simplistic and utterly brilliant it is, because what emerges is a single-player recreation of human progress; the birth of civilization onward. 

     Right now you're thinking: that's a little generous, isn't it?  Maybe even: Wow, this guy's .44 caliber dork. Though the latter may be true, the former is not, and here's why...

     At the beginning of the game the player is dropped into the quaint pixilated, randomly-generated world. No map, no instructions, no convenient in-game tutorial. You're just there, you exist. However, it's the middle of the day and there are cows and pigs and little ducks and everything seems nice. You explore a little. You chop down a tree, get a little achievement, and feel good about yourself. After a bit the sky begins to darken. Night's falling. You know (because you've already read my review) that meanies come out at night and so you look for a high place to wait out the bad guys. Maybe you even find a little cave to hide in. Unfortunately, when night falls it's not that play-nice little twilight effect that game designers do for you as a courtesy. It's black as coal and there are menacing noises and pretty soon you're dead and you have no idea where it came from.

     You respawn. OK, learned my lesson there, I'm going to build a little house. You start building and you're figuring out how to make different pieces of equipment and pretty soon the night is falling again and all you've got are a shovel and a nice little flower garden (you got distracted) in front of what's effectively the slab foundation of a house. Night falls and you're killed again by a God-knows-what. However, when you respawn you lose everything you were carrying. You've got your foundation and flower bed, but that's it. Pretty soon you know that daytime is "go time" and you can't get distracted by anything. Pigs are for food, trees are for building, and as soon as that sun goes down you're either in a shelter or you've burrowed into a hillside somewhere...and you have torches ev-ry-where.

     Here's the comparison I'm trying to draw. Like early man, you are simply thrust into a hostile word. You must figure out how to shape this world to survive. There are pitfalls and dangers, but what early man feared the most was the night. After several days in-game I could literally feel my heart start to quicken when I saw the sun going down. Everywhere I went, underground or aboveground, I put torches. The darkness is the enemy because those things that go bump in the night kill you, and quickly.

     After awhile I had established some level of safety, as long as I returned to my little bungalow in the mountain. As early man began to develop better strategies for survival, I did as well. One of the major developments was my own mini-agricultural revolution. I started putting up farms everywhere, because farms gave wheat, wheat gave bread, and bread gave life. (Seeing the connection?) I also mined...a lot. The Bronze and Iron Age happened almost simultaneously as I crafted badder armor and weapons to fight off the baddies.

     I also gave in to my other basic human instinct...building. At first a hole in the ground was fine, then a modest house. After several hours I'd hollowed out a mountain mining and decided to build Notre Dame on top of it with a network of basements and tunnels to various outposts so I never had to travel above ground at night. Truly shaping the environment to become a human ecosystem...granted with a population of just one.

     So there you have it, evolution of human civilization from our humble beginnings all the way up through cathedrals (yeah, there are flying buttresses). There are multiplayer options with the game on which people get together on dedicated servers and pool their collective efforts, much as man did around the agricultural revolution. I've read about people that recreated the Star Trek Enterprise block-by-block in-game (see pic above), or built the Lost City of Atlantis. What astounds me is the simplicity of the game nonetheless lays the foundation for an allegorical experience, one which mimics (some may say mocks) the progress of human civilization.

Side note: There is the potential for a monumental loss of productivity with this game. I found it incredibly hard to meet my deadlines last week. Enter at your own risk.