Minecraft’s automatically changing environment: fascinating and sometimes problematic

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about Minecraft’s game mechanics that provide players with the impression of being a part of a living virtual world.

Minecraft provides players with unique and vivid worlds they can freely explore and change. Furthermore, the open world game has no clear goals players need to complete in order to progress with the game. Instead, players are unrestricted and can do what they want as soon as they enter a Minecraft world. As a result, the most common things players do are exploring the world, digging deep into the earth to find caves full of valuable resources or building more or less ambitious projects such as large houses, huge temples or even colorful towns.

The vividness of a Minecraft world is achieved with various types of digital creatures that inhabit the virtual environments. Some of them are friendly, others are neutral or even hostile and try to kill the players once they get too close to those creatures. Also, a few of the creatures can be tamed and subsequently start to follow the players everywhere they go.

A Creeper in Minecraft.

Moreover, the virtual environment can not only be changed by the players, but also by some of the virtual creatures. Creepers, withers as well as ghasts can cause explosions that destroy parts of the landscape when they attack the players and nethermen can even pick up arbitrary blocks in order to move them around thus slowly changing the virtual worlds over time.

That way, Minecraft gives players the impression of being a part of a living world that reacts on them and even changes as time progresses. However, the changing world game mechanic also has a few downsides as it requires players who focus on building ambitious projects to be extra careful to avoid causing an explosion and to frequently check the environment if endermen have moved some blocks away that were an integral part of a particular building. As a result of this, some players turn off this game mechanic in order to be able to build spectacular projects that will never be changed by the game itself.

In the end, Minecraft’s approach of creating a living virtual world is especially fascinating due to the automatically changing terrain which is a feature only a few games have implemented so far. Personally, I very much enjoy this feature as it provides me with the feeling of being able to witness some kind of erosion which is an event I would like to see more frequently in open world games.