TechStuff Tackles Minecraft

goes cold. Look over there, where here comes Minecraft. That's what we're gonna talk about, all right. It was my my MPR version, and it's Minecraft. It's good. We have had so many requests, mainly on Facebook from fans who really wanted us to talk about Minecraft. Um and a Minecraft, in case you do not know, is a game that on its surface seems pretty simple, but as you learn more about it, you realize that this is actually a

pretty incredible and complex game. You just if you look at it, just based upon the graphics and the the the basic idea of what you're supposed to do, you would say, oh, there's nothing to this, but oh contrair, I would say to that person, So let's talk about Minecraft. So Minecraft started right around May tenth, two thousand nine, so it's just over a year or two years old

when we record this podcast. Yes, actually, I'm assuming that you're taking it directly from the Minecraft website, which is under about the game. Minecraft is developed by Marcus Person. It's been under developments. It's about May tenth, two thousand nine,

So that's that's his best guess. Yeah. So yeah, Marcus actually was inspired, at least according to his website, to do Minecraft because he'd been playing this another sort of similar game called in Finny Minor, which I'm pretty sure was Wasn't that the the guy who came out of the Earth right at the end of The Incredibles, No, that's the under Miner. No. Actually, it was a game about mining elements from the Earth and you were, I

guess the planet. The idea was that you would you know, dig out certain elements and you would get credit for the stuff that you dug up um, which actually sounds kind of cool. I had never heard about it until then. That was actually under development for very very short period of time from what I read, and as a matter of fact, it was only out for a couple of months, and apparently a person had played it and liked the game, and then when it went away, he said, I'm going

to do something similar. Yeah. And and the concept of mining in games is not a new one. I mean, you've got you've got games, especially like multi massively multiplayer online games that have had some sort of mining and crafting uh capacity in them for ages. So games like Ultima Online and ever Quest and World of Warcraft have had similar kind of of concepts. Minecraft though, does this in a very simple way. Like again, if you look at the the graphics, if you haven't never seen it,

I do recommend you check out some videos. There's plenty of them on YouTube. Um. They're very blocky graphics, very cartoonish. Um. They seem pretty simple. But again that kind of is a uh it's deceptive because the game mechanics underneath are actually pretty complex. Yeah. Actually, when I when I first heard somebody request this, um, and I wasn't familiar with Minecraft,

immediately well, I looked. I looked it up, and I only looked at some screenshots I didn't really understand, and I was thinking, well, I mean, if you're building stuff with blocks, that kind of reminds me of Lego Digital Designer, which is sort of a CAD system for working with legos. And I heard somebody just now, one of the Minecraft fans groaning and saying, no, well, no, it's not exactly

like that. It's just not even remotely like that. Well, it's remotely like if you just look at it on the surface, though, you that might be what you would think, so exactly. In general, in Minecraft, what you're doing is you're using various kinds of blocks to build structures and environments in a virtual three dimensional environment. You are playing the part of a little avatar in this and um.

And then if you're playing the beta version, which is the version that actually is getting updated and is changing over time. It depends on when you're when you listen to this, because as of recording that it's in beta. Yeah. Yeah, who knows. By the time this this publishes, it may have a full version out. But what happens is that

during the daytime, you're safe more or less. I mean, you can fall off of of a cliff and die, but more or less you're safe, and you can do things like mine for resources, and you can mind for resources, not just through mining like digging, you can also get resources by attacking, say a sheep and gathering wool um. Again, this is not an uncommon game element. Yeah, it's in a lot of this game mechanics in a lot of games.

But then what happens is at night, the monsters come out, and uh so what you ideally, what you do is you use the the resources in the virtual world to create uh structures for you to stay safe in at night, while you also continue to build more complex um elements. And the interesting thing to me about Minecraft is not just that you can build a castle, let's say, but

you can build a castle of different materials. It's not You're not limited to like this is your block, this is you know, you use this block to build things. You know, it's and you might have different colors of blocks, but they all have the same properties. That's not the case with Minecraft. Minecraft. You actually can create blocks that have unique properties. And according according the website, yeah, there

there are seventy seven different types of blocks at this point. Yeah, I according to the Minecraft WICKI yes, I also visited that from my research, they have you can think of they have recipes, all right, that's what you get, Like the recipes you have of combining various resources within the game and what the outcome is. Yeah. So like, if you have a block of type A and a block of type B, you can combine them to create a block of type N. Yeah. And in this case, they said,

there are currently one and forty four recipes. So let's say, let me let me scroll down and find it's kind of interesting. So if you think about it, um, if you're not familiar with the game, you think about it, you have elements, um, like for example, uh, sodium and oxygen, yeah you could, you know, and hydrogen. You can combine them to make elements. I mean, yeah, I'm I'm sorry. You can combine them to make molecules of different something else using a scientific sort of it's more on a

it's more on a macro scale. But like here's an example. Let's say you want to build a pick ax. Okay, so if you wanted to build a pick ax in Minecraft, you would need as your your ingredients and your recipe. You would need some sticks, which you can also create through wooden planks. But you need sticks plus a wooden plank or nudan a sticks plus cobble stone or sticks plus iron ingets or sticks plus golding It's or sticks

plus diamond gems. So the wooden plank, cobblestone, ironing, it's golding, it's or diamond gems would serve as the actual um, the actual pick part of the pickaxe, like they pick in the ax as opposed, then the stick would be your handle. Now you would ask you and you might ask yourself, well, why would I even bother trying to to find a diamond gem or create a diamond gem if I could just make a pickax using a stick

and a wooden plank. Well, the tools in Minecraft have a limited number of uses, and so if you're gonna use a pickax to mind more materials, uh, the number of uses that pickax has is dependent upon what the pickax itself is made up of, right, So if you use a softer metal like gold, it wouldn't hold up

as well as something like iron, which is tougher. Yeah, So if you are going for if you're going for a really long term tool that you want to be able to use over and over again, you want to use the stronger materials, which are of course harder to get in most cases of course. So uh, it's it's interesting, you know, it's a part of your strategy is that, Okay, well, how much effort do I want to take in order to get the raw materials I need to make a tool so that I can get more raw materials? Well,

it depends on how fast you need to work before nightfall. Yeah, and it also depends on what your eventual goal is, like, uh uh, you know, do you want to create something that is is functional? Do you want to create something that is decorative? Do you want to create something that is both? Do you want to create something that is innovative that no one else has managed to do yet? Um? If you want to do that, You're going to have to really start working soon, because I've seen some pretty

incredible stuff made in Minecraft. Now talking about incredible stuff made of Minecraft. There are two versions of the game that are out in the wild. There's the Beta version, which is the one that keeps getting updates and gets new elements added into it over time, and then there's the classic version. Now, Classic you can think of as kind of just a giant sandbox. Yeah, you can go in and build or destroy if you're one of those kind of people, to anything you like within a game

on a server. So you can actually have a game of Minecraft playing on a server and invite the people you know to come and play Minecraft there or build on Minecraft there. And if you're using the Classic system, you don't have to worry about monsters hunting you down and killing you. It's really just a place for you

to play and build stuff. Now, granted, you don't have all the materials available to you that you would in the beta system because again Classics not getting updates, so it's gonna have, you know, the the amount of resources you have is set Classic, it's fixed changes, so that doesn't hasn't stopped people from creating some pretty amazing objects

in Minecraft. We've seen a few just we watched some videos if you oh gosh, it's been a few months now, but I remember seeing one where someone created a globe of the Earth and it was huge, an enormous globe. I mean not to scale because that would have been a little too much, but yeah, it was an enormous globe and it was fairly accurate. It was missing a few blocks because there were some vandals who showed up

and destroyed some of the blocks. And you do get that occasionally if you have your your creations on a server that has got a very open policy. You're gonna get some jerks in there. It's just the way the world works, unfortunately, not unlike real life. Yeah, just like real life. But yeah, I remember seeing that globe and it was really impressive, and it had a hole at the very top of the globe where you could go

to the very top and fall down. And also, in Classic mode, you don't die if you fall off a cliff, so because the the the focus in Classic mode isn't the game element where you're trying to stay alive and and flourish. It's all about creating. So uh yeah, and this version you you could actually go inside the globe and see what was on what they had built on

the inside, which was also kind of cool. But then there was another one I showed Chris that I thought was really neat, which was a person who was trying to build a scale model of the starship Enterprise in Minecraft. That's pretty amazing. We should actually check and see if that's been updated, because we looked at it months ago and it was. It wasn't a pretty good like, it wasn't finished by any means, but it was going along

pretty well. And this was a guy who was actually trying to create these enterprise based off of plans from various Star Trek source books and uh, including all the decks. So it wasn't just that he had the shell of the Enterprise there. He wanted to build it so that you could actually go inside and explore the Enterprise as if you were a crew member, which you know, for geeks like me, that's pretty amazing. It's a painstaking process

to get that much detail in there. Though. Yeah, I remember that he had created some way where he created sort of like a macro where he had built the frame through some weird means and then was able to import that into Minecraft. I don't remember the details. I remember it's in the video, though, that that was pretty neat that he wasn't he didn't have to do it block by block in other words, which would take I

don't know how many hours. Even so, even with that that added element in where he had been able to build a lot of it automatically, it was still just the the kind of like the skeleton of the Enterprise. It wasn't everything by any stretch of the imagination, but that that's pretty phenomenal, And like I said, there are a lot of of cool examples of people who have built some amazing structures out in Minecraft. But that's even that's just the beginning. Um, have you seen any of

the Minecraft roller coasters. There are various ways to build roller coasters in Minecraft. You and actually build rails or the ones I've seen a lot of are the not rails,

but are their waterways. So you build like essentially a giant water slide, and you create an enormous uh structure that is going to be the is gonna be really tall, so that gravity, the gravity of the virtual world can pull the water along, and then you create a little boat to ride in, and then you can just ride on down the whole length of the the water slide. And I saw someone who created one that was uh huge.

I mean it took hours to write all the way down and it went essentially like the equivalent of what it would be to write a water slide from New York to Georgia. Is crazy. That's impressive now, yeah, and also would be you have to pick a real particular time of year for that to work out. But anyway, Um, even then, these elements that's still just scratching the surface. What has truly blown my mind is the fact that within Minecraft all these different objects that you can build.

Among them are not just the transportation things, but the mechanism recipes. Now, mechanism recipes allow you to create electronic components or or electronic component analogs within the Minecraft world. Well yes, but how could you possibly do that, Well, they have designated they being you know, the creator of the game has designated certain objects to have particular UH features that are equivalent to electronic features. So, for example,

the red Stone torch. No torches, normally they doesn't just generate light, you know, they're not they don't do anything else like that. But red Stone torch what it does is it constantly sends an electrical charge or can be used as a receiver transmitter when connected to the side of a block, and can also be used for low level lighting. So if you just want some low level lighting,

you could do that. But if you want to use it as a switch, you could You could create a you know, it creates this electrical charge, then you create a pathway for that electrical charge to go down. You can also create uh levers and buttons um, you can create little note blocks. You can create a dispenser which is used to hold and shoot out items in a random ortar UM. You can create what's called a redstone repeater, and that is uh uh used in circuits as a repeater,

de layer or a diode. And so you know, you've got these basic elements that are used in electronics UM and if you put them into Minecraft in the proper way, you can actually create very simple computers. I've seen people who have created calculators. I've seen people have created uh an actual computer by building enough of these circuits together so that it does computation. You can give it a

computer problem and it will work it out. UM. I've also seen people use the music generating blocks, and you know, there are ways where you can adjust the pitch and tone of the block. Maybe it's just the pitch may not be the tone, but you can adjust the pitch of the block makes when it's activated. And then by creating the right set of circuits so that the electricity flows in a particular uh direction and order, you can

create music. You put all enough of these blocks around and it will start playing in sequence depending upon the pathway you have built. Using these these virtual circuits, you can create a music synthesizer, or you can actually create a an automatic song, so you know, you you become obsessed with that new pop tune. You end up figuring out what notes that pop tune plays. You create it in Minecraft, and it's this enormous like it's a landscape.

You're actually looking at a landscape that represents a song, and then you hit a little switch and it plays the song up. And then you put it on YouTube and everyone criticizes you for it. Yeah, and then eventually you have uh Sony Music contact you until you to take it down because it's infringing copyright exactly. And then you say this is transformative, and then there's a big legal lawsuit and then Jonathan has a meltdown because of

we're getting off track. Yeah. Actually our long time listeners have heard that before. Um So yeah, the the game itself, I mean, the essential components you'll find in the the creative game, the uh the one that's set forever and ever, you know, just learning how to to get around in the environment. Um. But if you want to to uh play Minecraft yourself, um, it's not hard. You you will need to pay to get into the beta though, which

is less than than you would pay for the final version. Um, I don't know that anyone has actually said with the final version of we cost, but the game has been so successful that Notch as he's known, has been able to look into the possibility of hiring some people to help him out with development, which is pretty cool. UM. So you know you would need to do that if you were you were going to do that. But once you get in, then you start to learn more about

the environment that he's uh creative for you. Now we've mentioned that there are many many different kinds of of core blocks, and then you can use them to buy to build other things. UM. You'll also find that when you move around that you have, you know, you'll see things like food, which you can actually craft yourself, depending on what it is that you want to eat, I

guess uh. And food of course converts into health in the game, because yeah, there are all these monsters that are out there and they can hurt you or you can get hurt if you fall too far that kind of thing. Um, And you can you can create weapons and armor as well to help protect you against monsters. You can also use create vehicles to get you around. UM. Like I said, with the rails, you can create mind cart rails, and that's essentially what I was talking about

with the roller coasters. But what you'll encounter when you travel around other than environmental things like that and the things that you build are mobs. And those are the different kinds of other creatures that you're going to find as you travel around in Minecraft. Now, mobs, uh could be good or bad or neutral. Um, sort of depends on what you're short for. Actually, it's probably mobs because it is short for mobile according to the Minecraft wiki,

So pardon my mispronunciation. Everyone calls them mobs. Really yeah, okay, cool, because I mean that's that's the term that's been used in uh and various various games, not just not just Minecraft, but any any Normally it's used for monsters, but it's any uh, any creature that's being controlled by the game itself, not being controlled by a player. Yes, okay, um, well you can. You can team up with a wolf if you want to. You might run into pigs, sheeps, sheeps.

I don't know, I'm I'm just hungry like a wolf. You can also run into pigs or sheep about the sheeps in the fields, the sheeps in the fields, the cows, chicken, I don't like you anymore. But then you have some some creepy stuff out there. You might run into zombies or skeletons or spiders. Yes, although these are all blocky,

yes it is. It is kind of funny because you know, if you think about something like World of Warcraft, and we're talking about creatures that have been designed with a huge polygon count so that they are they render you have to have a great graphics card to render this realistically, so and and lots of memory and a high powered processor or you know, reasonably high powered processor to to render this so that it looks real. I mean, these these creatures are round dish, they have you know, skin,

they drool when they open their mouths. They have lots of points of articulation as well. Yes, so for example, and the reason why I bring that up is I'm watching a video about Minecraft right now and it's hilarious watching the little man run around because he has no knees, like you know, the legs are just straight, so when they run, there's just these straight sticks that move back

and forth. And you think, well, look at how sophisticated some of the other games on the market look right now compared to this and then you wonder how could this be so popular? And I think the answer to that is the gameplay is really really advanced, and it gives you so much freedom to do various things, and it's such an outlet for creativity that people have really

taken off with it, right. I mean, it's not like you know other games where you get to play in a world, but that not that world isn't your world, right, And I'll take this as an aside um, and I'll I promise to keep it short. But if you think about it, it's sort of like the we intruding on the Xbox three sixty in the PlayStation three because people, a lot of people who were the the hardcore gamers

at the time that WE was introduced. We're saying, how can Nintendo compete with a processor that won't even do full Tinity lines of resolution? You know what? We have these big screen TVs and and they you know, it's not gonna look as good. It only has you know,

DVD level resolution seven hundred twenty. And that it turns out that the gameplay UH and using the WE remote was innovative enough and cool enough for so many people that they bought it even though it wouldn't do as higher resolution as you could do with these other machines. And I think that's what works for Minecraft, is that the gameplay, uh is sometimes ignored in favor of um really hot graphics with all kinds of things and enormous worlds.

But if the gameplay isn't there, the game isn't going to do as well. And Minecraft, being an independent game developed you know, initially by one person, is doing amazingly well because of the gameplay and because it's got you know, you have certain simple elements and then there's an underlying complexity of the world that just makes it irresistible to some people. Yeah, and um, I mean it's it's gotten so big now that there's there's a real community around

Minecraft and they've all been sending us comments on Facebook. Yeah, it's not just like it's not just people who are playing Minecraft. There are people who are getting together to do big events, like there's the Minecraft Con. Minecraft Conn is taking place in Las Vegas, or at least that's I think that that's one of the choices that they were looking at, um. And so it's the I don't think it's set in stone yet. I think that that's according to the World of Notch, which is the official

blog for Minecraft. That's the that's the main choice right now is Las Vegas. But then there's a lot of people who are saying, hey, but I want to go to I want it to be closer to where I live,

so put it, you know, somewhere else. Um. And so they're talking about like the post bility of it being a this this convention of Minecraft players who all get together and and share notes essentially about things that they've created and ideas that they have, uh, both for what is possible in the game right now and what might be possible in the future. Um. There are new elements being added to the game all the time, including things like environmental elements. So it's not just a static world

that only has daytime and nighttime. Um. There's there are more elements to it than that. But I wish you'd never shown me that BBC video with the animals nighttime, daytime, nighttime anyway, Steve, Um, Yeah, it's a it's a an interesting phenomenon to me. I'm wondering. You know, you mentioned the connection to Nintendo, at least as far as gameplay

is concerned. What I'm wondering is if they can if Minecraft can avoid the pitfalls that Nintendo fill into, which is that Nintendo had a problem in that people would adopt it really quickly. Casual gamers adopted the game. But one of the issues about casual gamers is they're not the kind of gamers who will go out and buy the next game as as frequently as hardcore gamers do. Like casual gamers, they don't play the game games as often as frequently. So they might have a collection of

four or five games, and that's good for them. They're fine because they don't play it that frequently. They're not getting tired of it, or they may just forget about the the system entirely and it just kind of sits off to the side. It doesn't get played very much. Uh. And then the problem with that is that Nintendo doesn't have an ongoing stream of revenue because they're not selling games. And part of that issue, players might argue is that Nintendo kind of hurt when it came to compelling games

for the Wei. There just weren't as many of them out there as there were for the other systems. According to some gamers, I happen to be one of those, But I'm just saying I know that there are other points of view out there too. Um, but if Minecraft can avoid that where you you don't have people suddenly lose interest or maybe not even suddenly, but gradually lose interest and then the game just kind of suffers for it.

If they can avoid that, I would really be curious to see what comes out of this game in the next couple of years, because what it really tells me is that there are some incredibly creative people out there who are really really good at thinking outside the box. I didn't want to use that, but then I realized

it was too late. The cube outside the cube and uh, you know, like I said, if you want to really see what's possible in Minecraft, just go to YouTube and type in Minecraft, and you're gonna see dozens and dozens of videos, some of which are you know, some of them are going to be those typical little videos where you watch it and like, I don't even see what

the point of that was. But there are other ones that are really really impressive, where people have built these complex mechanisms where you hit a switch on one side of the map and a door all the way on the other side. Of the map, but these maps can be enormous. Us. Uh, door on the other side of the map opens and you think, wow, that's you know, it took a lot of work to create that. Now you might also ask what was the point of that?

But you know, that's another element I would I would be curious to see if they start building into in things like creating a device that that triggers something essentially wirelessly. Like you create a transmitter and a receiver and they are unique to one another, so only one transmitter will activate a specific receiver, and then you put that receiver on a device where when the receiver receives a signal, it triggers an electrical electric chain of events that will

cause something to happen. I thought would be a cool thing to add in there. Yeah, definitely. What will it help you fend off the spiders? Um? I was thinking of a thing that when you hit a switch, then across the room, uh, funky Town would play, and Spider's love of dancing to funky Town, so you could actually distract them long enough to squish them. There are records in Minecraft, and you can put them into a jukebox. Yes, you can build a jukebox and play and play music,

which again I find that fascinating. Um So yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting to see there. There are a lot of games, indie developed games that UH have provided a good launching pad for other series or for the career of a developer. I think it's safe to say that um not is probably doing is it's probably going to get a lot of attention out of the Minecraft phenomenon, because I don't think it's even remotely close to being extinct at this point. I think it's still on the

rise and will be sure. Yeah, I mean it's right now. I would say it's still kind of a fringe thing that Minecraft hasn't reached UH full blown UH awareness in the market. Um it's more so than when I first discovered it ages ago, but it's one of those things that I think it's still kind of a relatively small community of the potential community this game could have. So I'm sure that over time we're gonna see even more people discover and adopt this game and create even more

amazing UH creations in this world. And not to mention the fact that you know you're gonna keep seeing the world itself evolve over time, and you're gonna have to you You'll have to be more creative because the game will become more and more difficult to uh to navigate if you don't engage those creative muscles in in the old noggin. So yeah, I definitely think that this is something that that UM has a lot of room to grow.

I wonder if it's something that you could see on consoles, perhaps um as something you can download um you know, or or maybe even acquired by one of the major developers. I'm sure Again, I just heard some of the Minecraft fans out there who prefer yeah, no, well, I mean, you know, it's it's it bears some similarity to some other games that kind of got the strong community around them, like a little Big Planet. It reminds me a lot

of that as well. So I could definitely see the potential for for our consoles to be interested in it, uh, although depending on the executives for those consoles, right, because if the executives are all tied up about graphics and and uh that kind of element, like I wanted to look really really good, it has to look state of the art, they might not be able to get past the fact that these characters are much more blocky and almost comedic really in their appearance. Uh, but that that

simplicity is deceptive, like we've been saying. So maybe there's some executives out there who can look past the blocky aspect of this game and see it for what it really is, and then yeah, who knows, you might be able to get a cool version on one of the console games. Although the problem you have there is how

do you host the worlds? Do you host the world's like, do you have it where you would be able to create servers like you can and Minecraft, or would everybody share in the same big virtual world, because then you would have the troll problem becomes enormous, you know. Or maybe you have a region in that world that's just yours and you can give keys to the people that you like and they can come and check out your stuff.

I don't know. I mean, these are problems that I would be thinking of, because I wouldn't I would hate to spend a lot of time and creativity and building something and then come in and lug in the next day and just see that some some jerk had gone in and totally taken out half of it. Right, Yeah, I'm looking at you jerks. You know who you are.

On the other hand, yeah, I would never have expected Angry Birds to do as well as it has and be available on all the different platforms it is, especially since it is many people say, a clone of a different game. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to say the name out loud or else. It's summons them the birds. Yeah, the pigs, No, maybe a coincidence. Does you know Minecraft has pigs? There you go. It's all part of a plot.

Is it's a swine plot? All right? Well, the way this wine flew, you know, I was about to say that's the weird thing about Angry Birds. It's not the swine that flew. Anyway. We're gonna wrap this up because we're getting a little loopy in here. So you guys, if you have another specific topic you want us to talk about, and uh, and if you have not seen Minecraft, I do urge you to check it out. It is pretty neat, neat, you know, it's it's especially for people

who like to build stuff. It's neat for you guys. So all you guys out there who love legos and things like that, check it out because it's got a lot of potential, but if you have a specific topic you would like us to cover, you can let us know on Facebook and Twitter are handled. There is Text Stuff hs W, or you can send us an email. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,

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