Life After Minecraft

Two weeks ago I called it quits with Minecraft. A two-and-a-half year obsession came to its end. There were a lot of reasons that I stopped playing.

First off, there just wasn't anything for me to do anymore. While I may not have actually killed the Enderdragon, or conquered a Blaze spawner, the stuff was old news. I'd seen it many a time on YouTube - there really was nothing for me to discover. I didn't see a point in me going on with it anymore. Anything I'd try to do had already been done by other people dozens of times before. It's not like I would contribute something significant or unique.

Second, I've always had difficulty with the main point of the game: building stuff. Visual design is a weakness of mine, but it's the key thing in Minecraft. You know those impressive-looking houses and ships that people make? Yeah, I can't do that. Believe me, I've tried. I've had nearly three years to accomplish it, and I couldn't do it. There is something about visual details that elude me. It would probably take months or years of consistent practice for me to develop real skill, and I don't got the time for that. Which leads me to point three...

It takes forever to make anything notable. The mining, the tree chopping, the farming, the fighting. If you want to build something nice, it's going to require a long time collecting resources, planning stuff out, and then assembling the parts. But the thing is, when it comes to games I don't want something that's going to take days or weeks to do. I spend enough of my time looking at the long run. I'd like my entertainment to be more immediate. Unfortunately there's really no way of quickly making a house that doesn't look like crap.

Fourth, there are few people I can really share my builds with. That's the pity of single player worlds. You could make an awesome city, but you'll be the only one to walk around it. Nobody else can admire your work. Which to me sounds pretty pointless. While there are multiplayer servers, I can't easy access those when I'm at home. The main server I play on is populated with people who I know in real life, which is nice, but it's not terribly active and most of the time we're in different areas of the server map. Also, they can typically build stuff better than me.

By and large I've disengaged myself from the Minecraft culture. I don't watch nearly as many videos of it as I used to. I've unliked the Facebook pages for it that I used to follow. There are a couple other sites, too, but I've made it a point to not mess with those anymore.

In the absence of Minecraft, I found myself very bored and in need of something to entertain me. At the moment there are two games I am starting to get into. Parallel Kingdoms for Android is a MMORPG that uses Google Maps locations as the setting. It's kind of grindy and there is a mess ton to learn, but overall it's not bad. I like that I can see fellow players who live in my area (2 active ones). The other is Ikariam. It's basically OGame but with an ancient Greek theme, and also much more improved visuals. It, like Parallel Kingdoms, has something of a learning curve - which is unappealing but I should catch up soon enough.

Will I ever get back into Minecraft? Maybe. Perhaps something will inspire me. If not, it's alright.