Minecraft = Mindcraft

Earlier this week, my husband, Caspian, purchased the real version of Minecraft.  It's a strange, ugly, beautiful game.  I have wasted many hours these past few nights after work and dance constructing worlds in this game, hours which I should have spent writing the novel.  I digress.

The game, which is deceptively simple and lo-res, is actually huge and complex.  A whole world is randomly generated for you to explore, containing different biomes, plenty of resources, animals for food and materials, seas, deserts, forests, bizarre and lovely archipelagos composed of soaring hills.  But...  At night...  The world is spontaneously populated by monsters.  Monsters like zombies, and giant spiders, and horrible black sticklike beings called "endermen," which teleport behind you if you look directly at them, and start hacking away.

Caspian and I have our own worlds.  They are incredibly different.  I have a hilly, mountainous world of deep ravines, rivers, heavy forests and seas to the horizon.  His is a world of grasslands, plains, gentle beaches.  We go about the game completely differently.  For example, his construction goals include mining out a gigantic, perfectly-symmetrical hall of dwarven proportions.  I, on the other hand, build glowing white sandcastles and giant lit beacons on the highest promontories I can find.  My architecture style is simple and dramatic; Caspian's is elegant and fastidiously even.

And there are depths, such amazing depths!  Monsters spawn in darkness, and there are strongholds, cave complexes and mind-boggling lakes and waterfalls of lava just waiting to be explored, gold and iron to be gathered and made into armor and swords and self-propelled mining carts.  You can even build a portal to the nether world, where huge, white, hostile jellyfish sail the skies and zombiepigmen chase after you if provoked.

There are endless possibilities, whether your goals are exploration, construction or complexity.  Wherever your eye can rove, you can travel.  You can build into the clouds.  You can sail the seas and discover unexplored lands of snow or sand or trees to the horizon.

I am such a romantic video game player.  I like to climb to the top of my highest, whitest sandcastle, which is lit from within with torches so that it glows like a beacon for miles, and listen to the soft, sad, spontaneous piano music that sometimes accompanies the sunrise, punctuated by the snarls of burning zombies (which can't survive in sunlight).