Sandbox games are nothing new. People have been playing in the sandbox since the cavemen, but sandbox games today deal with much more sophistication than a handful of dirt. They are full blown worlds that allow a person to get lost and do what they want to do. Linear video games, or games where your path is already laid out for you are still quite popular, but more and more people don’t want to be told what to do. They want to do what they want, when they want, and how they want. In Minecraft, you get complete and total control.

Think about it for a second. You pay a good chunk of money for a video game. You most likely do this for some level of entertainment, but how fun can it be when everything is scripted just like a movie. It may be fun the first time through, but with every additional game play, it becomes more stale, more boring. There are no more surprises. You already know what is behind every corner. You know the twists and turns of every plot line. You know the game inside and out, and you either trade it in for a new linear game that will eventually become boring, or the game sits on your shelve, and starts to collect some dust. If you are inventive, you may use the game disc as a Frisbee, or a coaster, but 9 times out of ten, when you finish the game, you are finished with the game.

Multiplayer brought a nice change to video games. It made things more unpredictable. It is impossible to determine your opponents next move in the fast paced world of online video games. This added challenge has breathed new life into what was becoming a stale video game world, but could it possibly get even better? Of course it can!

What about a multiplayer sandbox game? A game that took place in a huge open environment, and you got to enjoy this huge open environment with your friends. Games like Crackdown quickly became huge hits. It was as if video games as a whole just leveled up, but instead of getting a free man, or increasing your health, the world in which we played video games changed and evolved for the better. Now you can play with your friends in a huge open world. You get to make the decisions, and the world around you reacts to those decisions. Could it possibly get any better? Of course it can, but how?

That is where Minecraft comes in. Video gaming as whole just leveled up again, and as a result gamers now get to build the world that they play in. This is huge! This is as incredible as pizza, as good as sliced bread. Minecraft opens the door to a new way to play video games. The only real limit is your imagination.

In Minecraft, you can make anything that you want, and everything is made from blocks. It is almost like playing with Legos, but 100 million times better. Instead of rushing out to the store to purchase every little Lego kit that you can find, you get everything right in the palm of your hand. It is all in a fantastic virtual world that you control. With over 4.5 million purchases, Minecraft has proven that people want creative freedom in their video games.

Minecraft A brave new world!

When you start a new game of Minecraft, you are thrown into a brave new world. An island surrounded by blue water. The blue sky is filled with blocky clouds, and the sun slowly makes its way across the sky. You can do anything that you want, but you should play later, because when darkness falls in Minecraft, you have to survive.

Whoah, wait a minute. Backup. Did you just say, “survive?”

For everything that is good in the world, you can bet there is an equal an opposite bad. So for all the fun that you can have during the day in Minecraft, when it gets dark, monsters will appear. These are hungry monsters who simply want to eat you. You must survive the night, or the darkness. Anywhere in Minecraft where there is darkness, you risk the possibility of being eaten by a creature.

Your first task should be to build a shelter. How do you do that? You have to get some wood. Just walk over to a tree and start hacking away at it. The wood from the tree becomes a wooded block in your inventory. In its raw form, you can’t do anything with it. You are also going to need a source of light for your shelter. Light keeps the dark away, which keeps the monsters away, which helps you to survive!

Minecraft, Let there be light!

How are you going to make light? Think way back in time. What was used for light before electricity?
Fire! Fire make good light. Fire burn! You need to make a torch, but in order to do that, you are going to need some more resources, one of which is coal. How do you get coal? You mine it! With a name like Minecraft, you can only expect to do some mining. You will need to convert your wood blocks down to sticks. You can then attach your coal to the stick to make a torch.

In Minecraft you start with almost nothing, and you have to create everything from scratch. When your health is low, you have to eat to restore it, but in order to eat, you must craft a weapon that will slaughter an animal or two. Do you see the idea yet? You will need to create or craft everything in the game, and in order to craft, you must mine resources. Hence the name Minecraft. All of this happens in a single player game.