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There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
I've never played Minecraft, is this more of a late-millennial thing? (I was born in 1984.)
i've never understood the appeal of Minecraft, hopefully someone explains.
Vanilla survival. You're placed into a random location, under serious and often annoying constraints, such that Things Will Suck if you don't change them. That's not just the normal combat-progression stuff, although the difference between stone tools and enchanted diamond ones are pretty vast too. Traveling too far taking too long? Build a highway through hell or tame a horse or breed a mule, or get a hangglider ('elytra') and be able to cover in seconds what could previously take ten minutes. Creepers blow up your front door (again)? Build a guard post, or tame an ocelot to scare them off. Sick of running out of food? Build a scenic farm and start raising animals.
Creatives. Yes, the graphics are dated and it's nothing like equivalent to a true modeling software, but you can build a lot with it. More importantly, if you're struggling to make something in Creative Mode, it's not likely to be because the controls are fighting you, unlike something like Blender.
Completionism. Collect some amount of every block, get to every dimension and beat the Ender Dragon, have a fully functional (and safe) village, get all the achievements, yada yada.
'Technical' minecraft play. You know those stories where someone get sucked into a world with bizarre rules and has to find ways to exploit them? Minecraft is one of those things, and even in the modern day a lot of it's still something to be discovered or shared for most kids, rather than Just Look At GameFAQs. In vanilla, this can range from iron or cactus farming to breaking bedrock to RS-latchs and sorting systems to self-driving mining machines. (I haven't seen the movie, but this is one of the reasons I don't think the thread-writer is really engaged with the game: the bucket nun-chunks thing from the trailers is absolutely the sort of things that minecraft players mentor each other with.)
In modded minecraft, the above, but more so. Mods like Create or Botania have dozens of major puzzles built into their basic play, and hundreds or thousands if you're trying to go after specific uses. Or you can go the full GregTech-focused modpack if you want. Some of these might have only a few hundred active players, or you can make challenges that literally no one has ever tried. (HexCasting with dolphin memory? Using Spectrum and NeepMeat as your sole item transportation mods in a factory-focused pack like MI:Foundation? GFL.)
Survival multiplayer, aka social play. These tend to be some of the most popular and funniest to watch, but a lot of people just enjoy goofing off (or dying horribly) with friends. HyPixel is the degenerate (ie, gotcha game) case, but the ideal case has a variety of people finding different things that they enjoy doing, and then having them work with each other on that.
Guided challenges. Popularized by JadedCats Agrarian Skies in the 1.6 era, modded games can include questbooks or other breadcrumbs with specific challenges to complete, usually starting with basic survival and going onto things like automating production of million meals or building a single piece of the forbidden clay. Blightfall is probably the most whole-heartedly designed approach down to a fully customized world, but Create: Above and Beyond, the Material Energy series, SevTech, Manufactio, Crash Landing, and Cottage Witch are all great options for different types of play. (GregTech:NewHorizons is the magnum opus in a... different sense.)
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There is a world beyond these shores, a new world ready for you to shape, full of ancient wonders, fantastical creatures, mighty foes and riches beyond imagination.
Embark on this journey with nothing but your wits and your friends, and make your mark. You will tame these new shores and uncover the secrets of its ancient inhabitants as you make yourself the rightful shepherd of these lands and beyond.
Or, forego all danger and give yourself the power of a God, and draw from your imagination to shape a whole world into the cathedrals of your mind.
Or, bring yourself into a truly anarchic free for all competition for domination and survival. Many legendary figures have lived here before you and the world bears the marks of their wars. Ancient forteresses blown up, empires defiled, and yet so much that still remains hidden, forgotten and lost. Find help in your fellow man, but remember that alliances are fleeting, and that people can find your exact location through the patterns of the stone in a picture.
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To add to the other comments. It also has a lot of mods. Some that focus on action and adventure, others that focus more on the pure creation lego aspect, and then you also have automation mods. Like Factorio was inspired by a Minecraft mod originally. So an entire genre came out of it.
The lego aspect of it really appealed to me as a kid, but I still love the automation mods. Especially when your base is functional and looks good.
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For my generation, a few aspects, but to me the core appeal was the sort of human (male) survival-adjacent aspect. You are in a world alone, you survive, beat down the wildlife, bend it to your will, build things that leave a permanent mark on the world, etc. Scratches a bit of the human itch that way. There was also originally a bit of the self-taught pride, because you had to go to the wiki to figure out how to actually make stuff (the game literally had no tutorial for over 6 years!) or consult YouTube to set up some limited automation via some jank unintentional mechanics (for example, to originally boost a minecart to crazy speeds, you had to have little smaller minecarts spinning in tiny circle tracks tangential to your main track) so if you did something notable (or creative/effortful, especially in a server with friends), it was impressive! And also, for those of us in school or college, it was a nice side outlet that felt a little more wholesome than the games like counterstrike, Dota2, League, etc. that were just getting going at the time. Plus, updates were frequent, so you could re-discover and build on your knowledge (for free) a few months or years after last playing, or maybe a friend would start up a server, so you'd potentially go in cycles of binging.
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How about the appeal of legos? But there's also a mode where instead of just having all the legos you want, you have to hunt for/create them, following a gameplay loop, with just enough adversarial events (monsters) to keep you from getting complacent too easily.
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