In case you’ve been living under a rock all year, Minecraft is a game that was cooked up and released by a guy who calls himself Notch and has since spread like wildfire to all odd corners of the internet. The premise of the game can be summed up by two words: Build stuff.

Somehow, in spite of (or perhaps because of) this simplicity, the game has spawned a huge fan following and various jokes pertaining to aspects of the game have become as ubiquitous on many online communities as Portal jokes are.

Frequently, I have people asking me if I’ve tried the game. Presumably this is because I’m a huge fan of building and creating things, and thus, the game should be right up my alley. Right?

Well, I’m not gonna lie, that logic is quite sound. So yes, I did try the game, some time back when it first burst onto the scene. Unfortunately, it didn’t grab me the way the hype had me ready to believe it would. There were, I believe, a few different reasons for this, but here were the big ones:

• Nighttime.  Sitting around for ten minutes– not in-game minutes, but actual minutes– in the dark, doing nothing, waiting for the sun to come up, gets old quick.  Yes, I know you’re supposed to build a house and get torches and whatnot in advance.  But if you’re new to the game and don’t realize this, this is a big turnoff.
• Blueprints.  From what I gather, Minecraft is largely supposed to be about discovery and figuring out what sort of tools you can build from your random blocks.  Unfortunately, there was really no sort of help or hints for this, and I found myself consulting an outside wiki every few minutes trying desperately to figure out how to make what I wanted to make.  Not to say I haven’t been-there,-done-that with other games, but it seemed rather over my head, considering I’d just started playing the game some five minutes earlier.
• It’s basically virtual Legos.  Which is cool and all, but I could just, I dunno, play with some Legos or something.

So those three things, in roughly that order, are why I only played Minecraft about two or three times and then promptly quit being interested. They may have changed some of these things since then– I don’t know, I haven’t tried to play in months– but, in a nutshell, that was my experience.

Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the game was terrible or that you shouldn’t play it. Obviously, considering the game’s enormous fanbase, there is something that it offers to certain people. People who love building and sharing things in a virtual space and people who love those sort of sandbox style games will probably eat Minecraft up. And I’m not going to deny that I have seen some amazing pictures and videos of Minecraft creations on YouTube or image sharing sites. If the game works for you, then that’s great.

Ultimately, what the game offers on its most basic level– sheer freedom to create– is appealing to most everyone, and I can definitely appreciate that. But I suppose that some of us are looking for a little more interaction with our building games (spoiled by SimCity as we were), and I’m one of those people.

…or, if you’re Mister Adequate, you can just go play Dwarf Fortress. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.