If the Flintstones designed a boat...

I’ve already built my first underwater reverse-fishbowl, but this is much too small to host an entire tree farm, so it’ll have to be expanded. I’ve learned that there’s no real easy way to do this; you basically have to build your whole structure out of dirt , coat the oustide in glass, and then dig out the dirt piece by piece.

The best [...]]]> As I explained in my last Minecraft diary entry, trying to keep a day-by-day account of my adventures in blockyland didn’t really pan out. Now I’ve spent so much time in my game world that I’ve started thinking of it more as a series of projects than as a simulated day-to-day existence. My latest project is a Rapture-style underwater arboretum that I’ve cleverly named “Atlantis Arboretum.”

If the Flintstones designed a boat...

I’ve already built my first underwater reverse-fishbowl, but this is much too small to host an entire tree farm, so it’ll have to be expanded. I’ve learned that there’s no real easy way to do this; you basically have to build your whole structure out of dirt , coat the oustide in glass, and then dig out the dirt piece by piece.

The best part is using jack-o-lanterns for underwater light sources. Just like in real life!

Minepedia tells me that I need at least 8 empty spaces above a planted sapling to ensure that my trees can grow to full height. Surveying the bay in which I’m building, I decide on a plot of around 20 by 10 blocks. I’ll stack maybe 5 layers of glass at the top and then just dig out the rest to save some time. But that’s still 1000 blocks of dirt I have to place in order to create a base. I try to figure out if there’s some clever way to avoid this, but in Minecraft there’s no way to actually drain water from a structure – water blocks will just stay where they are forever unless you fill the space with something solid, or carry it away in a bucket (and I’m definitely not trying to do that with 1000 blocks). So my only option is to gather up a mighty dirt supply, hold my breath, and get to work.

I start out by building four posts to mark the borders of the structure (now scaled down a bit), and also to give me something to stand on, since you sink unless you hold down on the spacebar constantly. The water here is pretty deep and it doesn’t take long to figure out that diving down, placing a couple of dirt blocks, and then having to swim right back to the surface is not exactly a very efficient method. I don’t know if Notch is planning to add scuba gear to the game (although he’s a PADI certified diver, so I wouldn’t put it past him). So I try to think of an alternate method. Then I remember that sand and gravel don’t have the antigravity properties that effect things like dirt and cobblestone in this world; if you place them without a supporting block below them, they’ll fall until they hit one, right through air, lava or water. Now I have a new plan.

I use the posts I built to create an entire frame around my planned base. Then, I walk along it and place gravel and sand blocks against it, which keep falling until they’ve filled all the space below. It’s a lot quicker and I get to stay in the sweet, sweet air while I do it. But when I experimentally start chipping away at the parts of the frame I’ve already used, I end up punching a hole in the ocean.

That's a sheep swimming in there.

Minecraft’s water physics are mysterious to me, so it takes a lot of placing dirt, removing dirt, placing water in buckets, and praying for rain before I’m able to fix this craziness. In the process I do manage to fill up my entire arboretum frame, but so much of that involves just diving down and placing blocks manually that I’m forced to declare my brilliant gravity-assisted plan a failure.

Finally.

So now I just need about a million blocks of glass to coat this thing with. There’s an island nearby that I don’t care about very much, so I head over and plunder it of its precious sand until all my shovels break. Take that, natural resources!

Placing the glass is slow going. I end up working well into the night. Monsters don’t seem to spawn on the ice, which is helpful, but I need a way to get into my underwater passage without having to swim to shore and risk arrows and creepers on the way to an entrance. So I build this little underwater airlock. Or waterlock. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s cool and useful.

A few in-game days pass as I place glass blocks as fast as my furnaces can produce them from the sand. Eventually I have a nice, solid glass coating and a whole bunch of dirt to dig back out. Plus some water blocks here and there that I somehow missed, which put out all my torches a few times. Fighting a current in pitch blackness really makes you regret a rush job.

Once I’ve dealt with those few surprise floods, though, I’m able to cruise through the digging and I finally have something that looks like a greenhouse!

Woohoo!

I do wish that Minecraft’s engine did a slightly better job with underwater glass. For some reason the water is constantly running down the glass, even if the blocks around it are stationary, so you always have the sound of a flowing stream when you’re down here. Also, it just doesn’t look like you’re underwater; the whole blurry blue look that you get when you swim underwater doesn’t affect a view through glass, and the shoreline appears so clearly that it might as well just be raining outside. Oh well, it looks cool from the surface.

Hovercow!

I finish my digging and start planting. I don’t need wood that desperately, so I don’t plant in a fully efficient pattern. I figure I’ll be using this arboretum as much for the coolness of a stroll through an underwater forest as I will for the actual wood blocks.

And it doesn’t take very long for the trees to start growing. A few of them spring up literally while my back is turned. Just like in real life!

I quickly discover that the trees grow so densely that a stroll isn’t as easy as it sounds. But I’m pleased with my work and I decide it’s time to declare Atlantis Arboretum officially open for business. I celebrate by hacking down all the trees and replanting the saplings they drop. I end up with tons of wood – getting wood blocks, especially if I need them at night, should no longer be a problem.

So where do I go from here? Intoxicated by success, I briefly consider expanding Atlantis into a full underwater city (or a big underwater house, at least), but then I remember how annoying it is to place all those dirt blocks. I decide to approach a more practical issue: Atlantis is located in a bay about halfway between Castle Quinn and my mountaintop villa. It’s connected to the castle through a long series of tunnels, but not the villa. If I want to get here from the villa quickly – and you should always have a plan for emergency midnight arboretum visits – I’ll need to build the route. Next time: I start laying down some rails.

(I think it was the end of Tom Francis’ hugely entertaining Minecraft Experiment over at PC Gamer that inspired me to dust off the blog and start writing about Minecraft again. The “experiment” was Francis’ attempt to take death seriously in the game by deleting his entire world any time he died. Eventually, he went through a long journey to Hell and back. It’s like Dante without the metaphors or potshots at 14th century Italian politicians. Check [...]]]> So my brilliant plan to play Minecraft and keep an entertaining diary of the experience hit the showstopping snag of me playing Minecraft. By the time I realized how long it had been since I updated the series, I had other priorities, like coming up with an excuse for all those weeks of missed work and showering.

What day is it?

(I think it was the end of Tom Francis’ hugely entertaining Minecraft Experiment over at PC Gamer that inspired me to dust off the blog and start writing about Minecraft again. The “experiment” was Francis’ attempt to take death seriously in the game by deleting his entire world any time he died. Eventually, he went through a long journey to Hell and back. It’s like Dante without the metaphors or potshots at 14th century Italian politicians. Check it out, it’s well worth the read.)

Maybe it’s possible to play Minecraft casually, the way so many people abuse meth casually. But if you’re anything like me and most of the rest of the game’s rabid fanbase, that’s not an option. You’ll find a tutorial like this one, which instructs you to build a 50x50x2 dark underground room full of canals (that’s 5000 blocks you have to clear just to get started) so that the monsters that spawn will be drawn into a trap and you can collect their dropped items from safety, and you’ll think, that’ll save me so much time! You’ll think this because you are deeply invested in the creative possibilities of Minecraft’s virtual world, and also because you are crazy.

I can't think of a better way to spend four and a half hours.

So yes, I built a 50x50x2 monster farm underground. It’s just one of a long and still-running series of ridiculous ingame projects I’ve worked on. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve done since that first Minecraft diary…

I ended up abandoning my original world after I experimentally loaded up a new one and found it much more appealing. Lots of hills, mountains and cliffs overlooking an icy sea. Close to my spawn point I found a natural cave that made a perfect starting point for Castle Quinn. Many hours later, this is what I have:

Castle Quinn ahoy!

The castle is connected via a two-level bridge to a tunnel that leads to this small boathouse, a few feet from my spawn point. If I die at night, I can quickly run inside to safety.

Boats optional.

The tower offers me some lovely views. Beneath it is a greenhouse, and far below that is an enormous cave system that I still haven’t explored fully.

You can drop pennies on creepers from up here.

Zombies sometimes spawn on the roof, hilariously.

Image comes courtesy of MCMap Live.

I was originally planning to do most of my building and landscaping in the area around my castle, but then I went off exploring one day and discovered this crazy mountain/mesa thing:

Go ahead and build on me. I dare you.

Well, there was no way I could ignore that. I planned to build myself a little vacation home up there, but as with all Minecraft projects, it soon ballooned into something much more grandiose. I ended up with a grand villa, complete with a glass pavilion extending over the valley below. The villa was originally supposed to be about twice this height but it turns out you can only build so high in the game before you hit a ceiling. The stone columns are right up against it.

Dare accepted.

Living in style.

Grand canyon, eat your heart out.

It doubles as a farm.

The villa has become my primary residence in the game. The top of the mountain is well-lit enough to keep any monsters from spawning, and affords me lovely views from above the clouds. I wonder if you’d be able to breathe up here in real life.

Ahhh.

The villa is connected to my original castle in two ways: via portal, which takes me to a covered tunnel in the Nether (the game’s version of hell) through which I can run back to my castle-portal in safety; and via rail, which is much less practical but way more awesome.

Eat your heart out, Amtrak.

Wheeeeeeee!

Since my pavilion is nearly at the maximum height of the world, there was only one practical thing to do with it: dig down as far as I could to create the ULTIMATE HIGH DIVE. Minecraft takes the “soft water” approach to water physics and allows you to fall any height into water without taking damage, so this is the quickest and by far the most dangerous way for me to get from my villa to the mines (and monster farm) deep below.

My newest project is a Bioshock-inspired underwater lair, located in a bay about halfway between my castle and villa. I’m planning a complete arboretum for it. Did I mention I am crazy?

Rapture can be yours as well.

So is there any value to all this? What am I getting in return for all these countless hours spent rearranging blocks in a fake computer-generated world? I guess this is a question you could ask about any video game, but I certainly didn’t put this much time and energy into Red Dead Redemption.

Well, I don’t have a great answer for that. I think Minecraft is more of a simple but deep 3D art program than a true “game,” and what I’m doing in here is just as satisfying artistically as drawing a picture or writing a story. The only thing that bothers me is that, unlike my novels or comics or animations, I can’t ever hope to sell or make any money off what I’m doing in this game. But if that ever becomes the sole metric by which I judge the value of making art, I’m in serious trouble. Art is not a very practical way to make money and never has been; if you don’t create for the pure joy of it, at least in part, then it’s probably not the best use of your time. Building in Minecraft is true art for art’s sake (and play for play’s sake, if there’s even a difference between the two). Plus, I can’t remember the last time I got this much fun out of ten bucks.

So, obviously, I’m going to keep playing. And I’ll probably update this diary a little more frequently, if only to have something to do with all the screenshots I’m taking. I’m hoping to join a friend of mine on a multiplayer server soon, which will greatly expand the building possibilites of the game and add some fun human-interaction unpredictability to the experience. Stay tuned!

But I did feel like this year had a real wealth of more modest pleasures for me, and in some ways that’s actually better. It helped me maintain a [...]]]> Happy Newest Year, everybody! I tend to resist the urge to reflect on the past year like everybody else does come January 1, because appreciating what you have and learning from your mistakes is a total buzzkill, but this year I couldn’t help it. It was a bit of a strange year for me. I had to deal with a few major personal stresses that I might elaborate on later (suspense!), and in all honesty there weren’t any really major triumphs to offset that (I haven’t updated Quinn Writes a Novel in a while because there’s really nothing to report – still no offers of representation, but the search continues).

But I did feel like this year had a real wealth of more modest pleasures for me, and in some ways that’s actually better. It helped me maintain a low-level positive mood throughout the whole 12 months, regardless of whether I was dealing with unpleasantness or not at the time. Many of these little things were fun nights spent with friends or family, exciting vacations or delicious meals, but a lot of them were simply new geeky bits of pop culture for me to enjoy. I’m a geek not because I play Dungeons and Dragons or spend time seriously considering the exact type of spaceship I’d like to own; I’m a geek because I love to get into things. When I pick up a movie or a novel or anything that looks appealing to me, I’m usually hoping I will love it enough to delve into the rest of the series, or the whole span of its creators’ body of work, until the well runs dry. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy disposable, one-hit pop fluff as well as anyone else. But the works I truly love are the ones that draw me inexorably into their world, in whatever form that world might take. Non-geeks want pop culture to be entertainment. Geeks want it to be a job. Yeah, it’s weird, but I’ve come to accept and embrace this part of myself.

So I thought I’d take a look back at the pop culture treasures and guilty pleasures that I discovered in 2010, and where they have me looking in this year ahead.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

My friend Chris recommended this to me years ago, but it was Netflix Streaming – that beautiful addiction delivery system – that finally put this Nickelodeon series right in front of me where I could give it a try. And I loved it. Brilliantly creative world-building, with a rock-solid foundation of engaging, three-dimensional, relatable characters. Plus, people shoot fire from their hands. It was also great to see an epic fantasy story that wasn’t tied down to a blandly white, male-dominated medieval England pastiche for once; this series took deep, well-researched inspiration from Asian culture across all its storylines and art direction, and it featured some of the best female characters I’ve seen on any TV show, animated or otherwise.

What it’s got me looking forward to: Next up from the show’s co-creators is Avatar: The Legend Of Korra, a new series set a few generations after this one with an all-new cast and storyline, but all the same bending fun I’ve come to love. Consider the ill-conceived film adaptation gone and forgotten.

Firefly

If I was late on Airbender, I was way past due on this one. I was shocked to find that Joss Whedon’s space cowboy series only lasted for 14 episodes and a movie, given the still-rabid fanbase the show has (compare it to the decades of Star Trek or Doctor Who material, for example). It certainly keeps the barrier to entry low: I was able to leisurely watch the whole epic in just a couple of weeks. Though rocky at times – and what show, in its first 14 episodes, isn’t? – the series had a clear brilliance right from the start. Its take on the space opera was a novel one, its characters grew on me quickly, and even after Serenity managed admirably to wrap up the loose plot threads, it left me wanting oh so much more. That wistful musing about what could have been, as it happens, fits perfectly with the melancholy of the show, and I think that’s a huge part of why people are still thinking about it more than seven years after it went off the air.

What it’s got me looking forward to: Anything Joss Whedon does, I guess (yeah, I’m a fan now, disdain me if you must). I watched all of Dollhouse this year, too, largely to see what he could do with a still-cut-short-but-technically-finished series, and I enjoyed it. The Avengers should be fun; it’s only Whedon’s second film as a director, and I thought Serenity was even better than Firefly in terms of storytelling, so I trust the guy within the feature film format.

The Wire

Yes, I’d like to be the 900th person to tell you that you should really check out this show, man, it’s as good as everyone says it is, and did you know it never won a single Emmy? It’s dense, expertly structured, and most of all it’s smart. I’m always thrilled to find TV that doesn’t talk down to me, so I’m more than willing to deal with the occasional conversation between two cops in which I can only understand a third of what they’re talking about.

What it’s got me looking forward to: I’ve still got four seasons to go, so my Netflix queue is going to be full for quite some time.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

This one just barely makes the cut, since I watched it on New Year’s Eve (I was sick), and I really wish I’d gone to see it in theaters – partly for the awesome spectacle and partly to support its box office take. Still, I loved it all the same on home video. Edgar Wright has been a favorite of mine since Hot Fuzz, and this is something like the perfect material for him: a ridiculously over-the-top real-life video game about a young man stumbling into maturity. The result is great fun and some of the best use of CG that I’ve ever seen. The central love story was a bit weak – I never really saw much in Ramona as a character – but honestly, it doesn’t matter. I was in it for the crazy visuals and goofy humor, and Scott Pilgrim offers that in spades.

What it’s got me looking forward to: I hear that Wright is working on the third installment in his unofficial Simon Pegg-Nick Frost trilogy that includes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Since a Scott Pilgrim sequel is highly unlikely, this will be pretty much the best possible substitute.

Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

OK, I didn’t actually discover Kanye West this year (remaining unaware of the guy for the past few years would have taken some serious effort), but this year marked the first time I actually sat and listened to one of his albums all the way through. I picked the perfect album with which to do so; MBDTF was hyped as Kanye’s Thriller, and its widespread popularity and critical acclaim made it easy to draw that comparison. It’s big, it’s dense, and it never gets boring from start to finish. Not a lot of artists really take the time to craft albums anymore in this age of digital quick fixes, but the cohesion and flow of this one make a good case for keeping the format alive. I don’t listen to a lot of hip-hop, so I can’t really approach a work like this critically, but frankly, I didn’t have to in order to enjoy it.

What it’s got me looking forward to: Following something like this is going to be a doozy, even for a wildly ambitious egomaniac like Kanye. Still, I’ll be interested to see where he takes his music next.

A Game of Thrones

I mentioned how much I liked that A:TLA was a fantasy that wasn’t a blandly white, male-dominated medieval England pastiche. George R.R. Martin’s series certainly looks like that at a first glance, but there’s much more going on here than your typical glorified Tolkien fanfic. It’s a gritty, personal, realistic take on politics and intrigue in a brutal medieval world. There’s not a lot of magic or dragons (though it does contain both, served sparingly), which keeps the focus largely on relatable characters and their labyrinthine network of alliances, hostilities and betrayals. I don’t often give books 400 pages to really hook me, but I’m glad I did it with this one.

What it’s got me looking forward to: I’ve still got the other three currently available books in the series to check out (which hopefully will give Martin time to get off his laurels and finish writing the rest of them already), but I’m really looking forward to HBO’s adaptation of this book, thanks to some pitch-perfect casting and really promising trailers.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Author N.K. Jemisin’s first book is an epic fantasy that reads nothing like typical epic fantasy, in a good way. It’s a fantastically creative and multilayered story of gods, demigods, royalty, and power, and a young woman coping with forces trying to control her from all sides. The follow-up, The Broken Kingdoms, was just as good or better. What’s more, Jemisin is a prolific blogger and has a lot of really insightful things to say about fantasy writing and the world at large, particularly where issues of race and privilege are concerned, so her blog makes for a nice companion read. Stuff like this makes me really glad to be reading fantasy that’s actually being released now, as opposed to catching up on the giants of the genre from decades in the past, like I usually do.

What it’s got me looking forward to: The final volume of the Inheritance Trilogy (not to be confused with Christopher Paolini’s, shall we say, not-as-good Eragon series) is due out this year, and Jemisin also recently reported selling a new cool-sounding duology set in an Egypt-inspired fantasy world.

Just Cause 2

Yahtzee, one of my favorite gaming critics, just named this as his game of the year, so it wasn’t just me who got way too into this ridiculous sandbox action game. It’s like Avalanche Studios were taking notes when I was playing with my action figures as a little kid and just made a game out of it – all of it. Set loose on a gorgeous, massive 1000 square km archipelago, with jungles, deserts, snowy mountain peaks, and an endless supply of disposable enemy soldiers, the player is basically free to cause ludicrous amounts of fiery explodey chaos, any way they please. Sure, there’s also a stupid plot and a series of boilerplate missions, but I spent 50 hours playing this game and pretty much never touched them. This is the kind of game where I would steal a speedboat, crash it into an airstrip, and surf on the nose of a plane as it took off before tethering it to a passing helicopter and parachuting away as both of them smashed into brilliant explosions, all in the five minutes after I sat down to start playing. That’s all you need to know.

What it’s got me looking forward to: Just Cause 3 is apparently going to be set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so I’ll be interested to see where that takes the gameplay. More than that, though, I’d love to see someone license the incredible engine behind this game and do something else with it – the sheer scope and detail of the world is so amazing that you could make practically anything with it, from flight simulators to fantasy RPGs to some new open-world genre no one’s tried yet. Let’s get on it, developers.

Minecraft

The other game I poured hours of my life into this year was also by a Swedish developer, only this time it was one single guy and the game wasn’t even in beta yet (it is now, and only costs 15 euro!). The fact that one person was able to create something of this scope and sell, as of this writing, nearly a million copies of it with no marketing budget tells me that this is a glimpse into the future of gaming. The gameplay follows suit: it’s a true sandbox game, maybe the first I’ve ever played. The game creates procedurally generated terrain for you, all made up of one-meter cubed blocks, and every single block in the world – as well as the various animals and monsters that roam it – can be altered by the player in some way. This means you can dig through the earth, harvest minerals, build structures to the limits of your imagination and do pretty much whatever you want. By making the world just threatening enough to give the player stakes (at night, the world is swarmed by deadly monsters, so you have to build or dig to keep yourself safe) the game speaks to something primal and incredibly powerful in the human psyche: build to survive. Once you’ve done that, build just for fun. Just Cause 2 was all about the joy of destruction, but this game is about the joy of creation, and I can’t recommend it enough.

What it’s got me looking forward to: The game is still being developed as we speak, so this should be a fun and exciting year for the thriving Minecraft community. I’m particularly interested in seeing what kind of mods start cropping up once full support is available. Even the game as-is holds nearly limitless possibilities in its enormous code-generated worlds. But more than anything, this game gets me excited about games in general, and where they’re headed. For players, there has never been so much choice, and never have games offered so much agency for players to make the game’s world their own. For developers, never have there been more tools and libraries so freely available, to say nothing of distribution channels and the chance to actually make money on these things. For someone who’s already dabbling in indie game design and plans to do a whole lot more, things are looking better all the time.

Here’s wishing you a great year of getting way too into things!

So I plunk down my 10 euro and register for the alpha. The game randomly generates my first world, and I find myself standing on a small sandbar a short ways off a mountainous coast.

I start to play around and figure out the mechanics. My first discovery: that blocky trapezoidal thing on the lower right is my hand, apparently. Also, I can’t swim.

Those little bubbles above my hearts are decreasing rapidly, and I think I know what happens when they run out, [...]]]>

I knew it would happen eventually. A celebration of retro blocky graphics? A simple and yet deceptively deep interface for constructing a virtual world? Zombies? The question was not if I’d get sucked into the little indie gem that’s taking the gaming world by storm, but when. Turns out when is now.

So I plunk down my 10 euro and register for the alpha. The game randomly generates my first world, and I find myself standing on a small sandbar a short ways off a mountainous coast.

I start to play around and figure out the mechanics. My first discovery: that blocky trapezoidal thing on the lower right is my hand, apparently. Also, I can’t swim.

The moon is still high in the sky, and there’s no way I’m going to try to navigate these treacherous waters in the dark, so I’m staying put. This seems like the safest spot I’ve found so far anyway. I have plenty of time to kill, so I start playing around with the sand. I discover that it doesn’t have the same anti-gravity properties of leaves and dirt, so it immediately falls whenever I dig underneath it. This is surprisingly limiting, and my sandcastle (from what little I can see) suffers for it.

Next entry: crumbled rubble and new plans.

I’m not sure exactly how this applies to my life; yet somehow I’m sure it does.

[Mimi and Eunice]

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Um…thanks?

Here’s to you, Geocities.