The bounce effect of Minecraft’s physics

Posted by on December 21, 2011 in Games

Here I am, nearly a year after first hearing about it, finally giving Minecraft a shot. My first attempt didn’t go so well. When night fell and the zombies came out, I retreated to the back of a cave to hide until dawn. Of course, it’s dark in caves, and even darker in caves at night, and zombies are persistent. So when I heard zombies coming and I was unable to see anything, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I attacked the darkness. My inventory consisted of 8 flowers, 3 mushrooms, and 9 blocks of dirt. Of those three things, I figured the blocks of dirt would make for the most powerful projectiles. So I equipped them and right-clicked to throw them in the general direction of the moaning. I threw them until I didn’t have any more to throw.

I don’t think I killed any zombies. But I did succeed in walling myself in so I couldn’t move. Or see anything. I tried jumping, right-clicking, punching, crouching, to no avail. There’s apparently no crouching in Minecraft. Having Cask of Amontillado’ed myself, I think my only recourse is waiting until I starve to death and respawn. So, yeah, game one of Minecraft. So far, so good.

My second (and final?) game, after the jump

For guys like me who like a little guidance in our sandboxes, Minecraft’s achievements are a way to walk you through the basics so you don’t wall yourself into the back of a cave. Fair enough. I spent quite a while trying to punch down a tree before realizing that all I had to do was hold down the punch button instead of click individually for each punch. I’m willing to work out some of this stuff on my own. After all, there are blocky ducks, sheep, cows, and octopuses scuttling about adorably. What a pretty sunset. What an even prettier moonrise.

But now I’m stuck trying to figure out how to makes sticks. I get that you punch down a tree for wood, which you then craft into wooden planks, which you then craft into a workbench. But sticks? How am I supposed to make sticks? I accidentally made a few, but I have no idea how. And Minecraft, a game that has sold four million copies, can’t be bothered to tell me how. Every achievement from this point is based on me figuring out how to make sticks. Sticks. You know, the things you break off trees that are nowhere in evidence in Minecraft. I have hit a brick wall made of sticks.

But that’s not what kills Minecraft for me. I’m accustomed to figuring stuff out. If there’s one thing bad videogames have taught me over the years, it’s figuring stuff out. What has killed Minecraft for me is my own expectation for a construction sandbox. Early on, in that walking around and admiring how retro-cool this world is, I found a tree next to a pool of lava. The tree caught fire. And then the trunk burned away, which left the top part of a tree floating in the air. A burning tree. A hovering burning tree, suspended in mid-air like some sort of Old Testament omen. I watched it float and burn, simultaneously. So this is Minecraft, huh?

But maybe that’s just funky glitch involving fire. Surely when I chop away the trunk of a tree, the rest of the tree doesn’t just hang there. Right? Right? Wrong. The thorough Minecraft lumberjack has to reach up and punch down the higher parts of a tree after he’s punched down the base of the tree.

Look, I don’t want to be an unappreciative jerk, but Minecraft hasn’t figured out gravity? In X-Com, which was made nearly two decades ago, this tree wouldn’t be floating in the air after its trunk was chopped down or burned away. It can’t have been easy, but Nick and Julian Gollop figured out that when the bottom story of a building is destroyed, the top story shouldn’t then hover in mid-air. They figured out that the basics of what we expect from the real world deserve a place in a videogame world, even if it’s about extra-dimensional psychic aliens invading Earth and laser guns and action points. I have a few fundamentals when it comes to destructibility, and things falling down is one of those fundamentals.

I can respect that people love Minecraft and especially the things they’ve done with it. I’ve seen the YouTube videos. Bravo, Minecraft fans! When and if there’s more of a game in here that doesn’t rely on my fumbling around trying to craft sticks, and hopefully physics that include gravity, I look forward to giving it another try. But the release version of Minecraft is an interesting experiment whose physics consist of the ability to completely bounce off me.

  • Barac Wiley

    Minecraft has a ton of cool stuff going on, and, at least last I checked, a gaping vacant space underneath that cool stuff where the actual gameplay and structure would normally fit. For people who like undirected sandboxes without so much as an in-game help system (and there are plenty of people like that), it appears to be magical. Not for me. Still, it’s come a long way since I risked my money on an alpha purchase. Maybe sometime it’ll find the bits in the middle I’m looking for.

  • Mattt

    Sticks: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Sticks. I consider the Minecraft wiki to effectively be part of the game.

    As for gravity, once you start building things I think it’s ultimately a lot more fun when stuff doesn’t fall.

  • Anonymous

    Minecraft needs multiplayer modes: capture the flag, defend the fort, VIP. Top men, get on it!

  • Superslug

    I am going to assume that you know you could look up recipes on the internet very easily yet decided not to. Is that because you thought it would be more fun or are you choosing to ignore it because it is not actually part of the game?

    I think the physics are as they are because it is better that way. There are blocks that fall when not supported (sand and gravel) but most blocks stick to any surface and remain there until removed. The most important is construction proper physics would be a frustration rather than an improvement.

    I think minecraft makes the word sandbox inappropriate for most games it has been used to describe. Playing in the sand as a child was not just about creating your own fun it was about creating. Minecraft captures this better than any other video game I have ever played.

    Playing in the sand as a child was also always better with friends. Minecraft becomes hollow on your after a while. Having a server with people you know on it makes a huge difference whether working together or each making something of your own.

  • Wade42

    I’m sure there’s arguments to be made for and against no-gravity.  Yes, it would suck to be in the middle of a cave-in, but floating islands are pretty cool.

    Apparently the effects of The Calamity extend all the way to Notch-land. :)

  • Anonymous

    Are you guys okay with this idea of having to look up stuff on the internet to play a game? That just rubs me the wrong way. Especially when it’s something as basic as an early step in what’s supposed to be a tutorial. I had no idea that placement in the Horadric Cube had an effect on production! I like the idea, but why can’t the game tell me that? Why should I have to refer to a Wiki? And if I can’t figure out sticks, what’s going to happen when it’s time to build, I dunno…combustion engines and whatnot?

    Compare this to something like Anno 2070, another arguably sandbox game. Anno 2070 has pretty exhaustive ingame documentation, but it leaves the basics of optimization to trial-and-error and wikis.

  • Anonymous

    Good points about gravity making construction hard.  Perhaps I’m too hung up on the destruction aspect to appreciate the construction possibilities.  I’m a child of Red Faction: Guerrilla. :)

  • Nightgaunt

    I love everything about Minecraft, just about.  Except those damn hovering leaves.  For a long time they didn’t go away at all.  Now they slowly disappear once the trunk is gone, and I guess that’s good enough for me.

    There was also a time when the terrain generator didn’t make floating dirt in the air.  I still don’t understand why that was never fixed.

    To fall in love with Minecraft, you have to bild something of your own.  Not a whole house or a castle, mind you, or a USS Enterprise.  Just a little room.  With squared off walls and a door.  And then you think, “I just need to dig over a bit and water from that lake will flow in.  That’ll be pretty!”  And it is.  And then you think, “Hey, there’s a cave in that mountain on the other side of the valley.  Maybe I’ll build a bridge over to there.  And maybe it should be made of GLASS.  That would be awesome!”  And it is.  And once you’ve put your thumbprint on some tiny corner of one huge world never-before-and-never-again-seen, that’s when you fall in love with Minecraft.

    You should give it another try sometime.

  • Guest

    You’ve described exactly how I fell in love with Minecraft. Well put.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Zhou-Fang/1324842836 Zhou Fang

    Maybe try playing multiplayer sometime? Asking someone how to do something in a cooperative environment might trigger your ‘this is outside the game!’ instincts less.

  • Bryan_holcomb

    A hovering burning bush…. Think I saw that in.. was it Everquest 2?

  • Tony M

    The wiki really is the manual for this game.  Especially the page that shows how to make stuff.  Tom I understand that you feel a games tutorial or manual should teach you how to play without outside references.  I agree.  But you’re missing out on a great game just because you’re not willing to click on a wiki link.  Is it really that important a principle?  I don’t like DRM but I’m not going to miss out on great games just because they have DRM.

  • http://rudolphthesnowdeer.myopenid.com/ Rudolf

    Like someone else said, think of the wikis as the manual.

    I agree it’s far from ideal that the game is so lousy at explaining stuff. But it’s a minor stumbling block, really. So I don’t really care if I’m okay with a game needing the manual (official or not) to be enjoyable; passing that stumbling block gave me the best gaming experience of 2010 and quite a few hours of fun this year too.

  • http://twitter.com/SESSpackman SamSpackman

    Ha, yeah I think the point where Minecraft begins to make sense is the point where you realise you are stuck in an infinite 3D grid of cubes; and all you can do is change the status of each of those cubes until you form something which is pleasing to the eye. 

  • Superslug

    in this instance yes. The wiki existed before the game was even close to release. Why have a everything in game when it already exists in a better format that I can look up in my lunch break?

    It is possible to play minecraft without looking up a recipe or instruction.  Choosing to discover a game from the bottom up just by clicking on things is another experience minecraft offers and not having the in game tutorials offers that experience.

    How do you feel about battlelog?

    The $80 price tag has scared me off anno 2070 but a city builder is the closest to this in terms of creation however in my experience city builders are about planning out things other people have created.

    There is a point where adding rules and instructions begins to stifle creativity. There is a game in minecraft but it is at its heart still a creative tool for imagination. I described it when I first started playing as online lego and that still fits.

    Maybe there is just not enough game there for you, there isn’t for a lot of people I would strongly recommend trying to play it with 4-8 people you know for a little while before throwing in the towel.

    Interestingly from listening to reviewers talk about this it is a common theme that there is not enough game for them to enjoy it. Maybe being conditioned to evaluate a game in a certain way ruins this.

  • Superslug

    I agree that is brilliant.
    The leaves used to hover because the clean-up code was creating an infinite loop.

  • MikeP

    If trees fell down when you cut the trunk, how would you get wood without getting crushed?

    Reading your post, it feels like you don’t want to suspend disbelief. For example, you talk about destructibility, but this isn’t a game where you blow up buildings with explosives. You’re punching a tree with your fist.

    I suggest reading a bit of the tutorials, go spelunking in a cave, and build a house. If, after that, you don’t want to dive to the center of the world or see what’s over the horizon, then I guess it isn’t for you.

  • Wader

    Tom,

    After the repeated talk about Minecraft on the podcast, I was fully prepared for you to hate Minecraft (it’s kind of an anti-Bastion), but the “leaves dont fall down” argument seems kind of missing the point of the game entirely.  I mean, if they fell down, how would you be able to create a giant elephant shaped topiary to decorate the garden outside of your mile high sky castle?  How would you have a sky castle in the first place if it had to be connected to the ground?

    Gravity certainly exists in Minecraft (sand and gravel fall, as do people and monsters), but Notch made the choice to sacrifice realism for construction possibilities. 

    For myself, my best moments in Minecraft were on the QT3 server walking around seeing the HUGE impossible structures that people had created, then getting inspired by the shape of a valley, lake, or mountain and making that into something that could inspire others.

    And thats why as Minecraft got further into development, I liked the new stuff less and less.  It seemed like Notch was emphasizing (with more monsters and an endgame) the parts of the game I liked the least.  

    I guess it feels a little like you missed the entire point of the game, and I think you are missing a fantastic experience because of it.

  • Anonymous

    Wader, I think I get the point just fine.  I just expected a more polished game, and a more immersive world-building system, but it looks like that’s not really what the developers are doing.  It’s still just a free-form set of building blocks. Nightgaunt’s comment a few entries up tells me exactly what I needed to know, and exactly what I suspect: loving Minecraft involves wanting to build something.  But that’s not why I play videogames.  I have outlets other than videogames when I want to *create* something.  When it comes to Minecraft, I suspect I can get all I need by just checking out more YouTube videos. :)

    That said, I’m happy to revisit it later.  All I’m saying here is that at a basic entry level, it bounced off me entirely.

  • Anonymous

    Great post, Nightgaunt!  Thanks for that.

  • Anonymous

    Oh, I’m perfectly willing to check wikis for games I want to play.

    However, it’s lazy for the developers to rely on wikis.  And if they’re going to do that, they can at least make it clear in the game.  There is *no* excuse for Minecraft to confound someone by not explaining its unique tree-punching and stick making vocabulary.  Being indie is no excuse for being poorly documented.

  • Anonymous

    Wait, wait, reading what tutorials?  I thought the achievements were the tutorials.

  • Anonymous

    Nice! For all the sandbox games out there, Minecraft is a sandcastle game.

  • Alexx Kay

    Minecraft has no in-game tutorial; the fact that the Achievements have a sort-of partial functionality as one is nice, but doesn’t really count.  Personally, I would have considered a real (basic) tutorial a necessity before calling it 1.0.  But if you’re willing to wiki, the info there is quite good.

    For me, Minecraft love has little to do with construction.  For me, it’s all about the exploration.  Complex, ramifying cave systems that go on forEVER.  The small, twisty passage youre in might dead end, or might open up into a massive abyssal cavern with water and lava-falls.  The presence of monsters and the ability to construct weapons and armor to mitigate them add a nice layer of challenge to the exploration, but that exploration remains pretty central for me.

  • http://twitter.com/yamoomay yamo

    The charm of the game for me was that it was made by one guy(sorta) living in his parent’s basement, surviving on Pizza Puffs and diet root beer.   A personal fascination gone meme.  The lack of polish is part of that.  The punchline is the 4 million copies sold.

  • http://twitter.com/kentdoggydog Brian Kent

    How would you compare/contrast it with Dark Souls, which I’ve heard, though I’ve not played it, is similarly confounding and unhelpful?

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    As others said, the wiki was created all the way back when Minecraft was the work of one guy who hadn’t sold his first million copies yet.

    By the time Mojang was a company big enough to do their own proper documentation, the wiki was so complete and entrenched it would have been silly to duplicate it in the game.

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    Construction is maybe half the game. 

    The other half is exploration.  The procedural terrain and cavern generation is amazing.  I don’t think there’s anything else like it in video games.

    And then there’s the genius of the day/night, light/dark mechanic for monster spawning.   You carve out for yourself a safe little spot, lit by torches.  Then you go out exploring.   You enter a cave, or dig a tunnel, and place torches, and it’s like there’s a frontier of safety — behind you are safely lit spaces (if you’re careful and didn’t miss a dark alcove), ahead of you is darkness and danger.

    If you don’t want to think of construction as an outlet for creativity, think of it more like base building.   And you haven’t experienced Minecraft until you’ve emerged from your shelter in the morning and had creeper sneak up behind you and blow up you and the front door of your base.  It’s a rare game that gives us a genuinely original (and iconic!) new type of enemy.

    Here’s one more story of adventure that might catch your interest. I was actually lost, deep in a cavern, and I died, dropping a whole bunch of valuable stuff. I respawned at my start point, naked andempty-handed, a long way from where I’d been exploring.  Stuff you drop disappears about five minutes after you drop it, so I had five minutes to rush back to that general area (including a dangerous shortcut through the Nether), hunt for the spot I’d entered the caverns, and try to retrace my steps to a place that was surrounded by the monsters that had killed me when I was wearing armor and carrying weapons.

    I grabbed a few supplies, crafted a quick sword, and made the trip. Somehow I was able to retrace my steps down deep into the caverns (trying to follow the most recent path of the branching trail of torches I’d been placing), find the place I’d died, dodge the monsters, scoop up all my stuff, and get out of there. Very seldom have I had such a feeling of triumph in a video game.

  • Ben

    You know… in Xcom 1 if you shot a tree at the bottom it would disapear and leave the rest of the tree floating. It wasn’t untill Xcom 3 did they get gravity.

  • Jason Townsend

    Yeah I’m not positive about buildings but I distinctly remember X-Com having gravity-defying destructibility.

    The original “learning curve” with Minecraft was “the game told you nothing,” especially crafting; generally players knew from whatever source they’d heard about Minecraft from that “they had to do XYZ before nightfall or they’d die, but the details were all guesswork, wiki-googling or both.  At the time, in Minecraft’s long, semi-comic “pay beta,” this was part of the indie charm of it all.  Indie games are allowed to be baffling.  (There’s no question a brilliant learning/exposition curve as in Bastion is the ideal, but certainly not the norm.)

    The “achievements” are just another odd thing that Notch plunked in long after the huge pelaton of Minecraft players had put in their ~50-100 hours of play and left.  They are a half-hearted gesture in the direction of explaining/prompting things in the early game, but they weren’t there when most people actually played Minecraft.  I get the whole “reviewing Minecraft 1.0 because now it’s released” thing, but really, the game was back when people were buying/playing/running servers/turning it into a meme.  People dressed up as Minecraft characters for Halloween in 2010, not 2011.

  • Anonymous

    Tom, play Terraria instead.  It’s more of a ‘game’ in the sense that you are looking for.

    Minecraft is a phenomena.  A friend of mine’s kids play it and the wild thing is that the whole neighborhood plays too, all on the same server.  And the parents join in!  Kids from 6+ all the way up to their parents playing together.  Then the kids visit other servers at school, and vice versa. Just wild.  I’ve never seen a game with such appeal before. The family has three computers in the living room so more can play at once.

  • Anonymous

    Nooo! Are you serious? Well, you just knocked four years off the point I was trying to make.

  • Mygaffer Nunya

    Sounds like the game is not for you then, or at least you have not given it enough time to figure out what it is about. It is NOT about realistic physics and gravity.
    It is a playground you can shape to your whims. It may seem a waste of time to some (myself included) but I can spend hours building things, mining, exploring the world. I don’t know why it is fun but I do enjoy it.

  • Ypy

    Personally I’m not playing it because I find the ultra-low-res textures insulting.

    I understand that dividing spaces into cubes, while aesthetically horrible, has advantages for a modifiable world, but the low res textures are inexcusable.

    Super Nintendo games look better.

  • DSB

    There are really two interesting subplots going on here. One is the actual survival story, and the other is the opinion.

    When faced with a challenge that has no obvious answer, which is often how the great instances of survival have gone in history, some people adapt, and some people die. I think it’s an achievement in itself that Minecraft managed to test you in a way that pretty much lives up to the basic tenets of survival in that sense.

    The opinion is fair though. It’s not much of a game at all, but it is still a pretty outstanding interactive experience, once you get past the obvious shortcomings. Like having to rely on wikis and forums to stay on top of what you can or can’t do, and why.

    It’s a sandbox. Without you, it’s 4 sides and a certain quantity of sand. With you, it can be the most majestic desert sprouting huge castles and challenging even the most rugged of hotwheels.

  • _Nocturnal

    The flying trees argument is ridiculous. A world where everything is made of blocks and uses only 256 colors is somehow acceptable, but selective gravity isn’t? You don’t say anything negative about the fact that dead people are walking around at night for example, so that must be okay, I guess. But why?

    Is it just because zombies have been used in other games and art forms before and you’ve gotten used to them? Or is it because you know it’s a conscious decision by the authors to deviate from reality in pursuit of a specific aesthetic goal?

    Minecraft’s is a strange world. A world that’s built entirely for you to play with. There may be other games that provide you with something akin to that but for the moment none of them do Minecraft’s thing better.

    As for the lack of ingame documentation, I guess your criticism is indeed valid: it’s 2011 and a proper game *should* have proper documentation. But time is an interesting thing.

    You’re a game journalist, you know Minecraft’s story and you *should* know that it would be an impossible one to achieve just a couple of years earlier. Yet it happened, because times have changed and made a hell of a lot of things behave differently. People are used to multitasking and getting information from wikis now. It comes naturally to them and it’s going to become even more natural with time.

    Would it be that different if they copy-pasted the information from the wiki into the game? How about if they made an ingame browser which loaded up that exact same wiki? Would that have changed your opinion of the game? Because it seems trivial to me. The important thing is that the game *is* documented and the information is easily available.

    I could also make the case that not having any of the information ingame actually furthers some aesthetic goals of the game, but there’s no point in having that discussion before we’ve cleared things up in the current one.

    So please, Tom, go back to Minecraft and try embracing what it is, instead of what it isn’t. I would very much like to read your thoughts on the matter.

  • _Nocturnal

    “It’s a sandbox. Without you, it’s 4 sides and a certain quantity of sand. With you, it can be the most majestic desert sprouting huge castles and challenging even the most rugged of hotwheels.”

    Which could be said about any work of art, really. Without people to appreciate them, sculptures are just rocks. I was going to write “rocks in strange shapes”, but there would have to be people who would consider them “strange” for that.

  • DSB

    Sure, but the crucial difference is that being an observer and thinking too hard “about” Minecraft is likely to take away any pleasure you might get from diving into it. Unless you pour your imagination into it, and engage with it, there’s nothing there, except those illogical elements and distractions that Tom got hung up on. 
    It’s more like your old lego collection than anything that requires deeper analysis to me.

  • http://caesarbear.wordpress.com/ caesarbear

    If I gave you a puzzle box but didn’t tell you it was a puzzle box, instead maybe said it was a tool, you’d probably be upset that there were no instructions. But if I give you a puzzle box and then show you one or two things that you can do with it, then it becomes a game to you. This is how Minecraft is presented and it’s a large part of what makes it special. Many words of the internets and hours of youtube are dedicated to Minecraft players discovering new and interesting tricks and designs for other Minecraft players to appreciate.

    Be honest with yourself though. You passed on Minecraft back when you first heard about it. You passed on it after all of the crazy attention and memes it produced. You knew full well before trying the release version that you weren’t interested in Minecraft. It’s ok, but it’s not because of the physics or that you couldn’t figure out sticks. It’s because Minecraft is a tool for you instead of a puzzle box. If you have no inclination to look at Minecraft creations and perhaps post some of your own, then just ignore it and don’t write about it.

  • http://www.nosuch.org/ Anonymous

    I think I have to agree with the distinction that Greg Costikyan made between computer games and a computer toys. Minecraft is an awesome computer toy. It is NOT a game. I think Tom wants more game in it, and really, there isn’t one to be found. There are no implicit goals in Minecraft, only the ones each player decides to overlay on the toy itself. This is no way trying to diminish what Minecraft is. A game is not better than a toy. They are just different.
    Compelling computer toys, such as freeform world builders like SimCity and such, which have “infinite” non-scenario based goals, are rare. Minecraft is one.

    But if you are looking for a game, it’s the wrong place to look.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    I like the exploration the most, I believe.

  • Anonymous

    Oh. man, lots of great posts here.  Sorry I wasn’t around for the last bits of the conversation, but I appreciate everyone’s input.  Also, just to clarify, this was in no way a review.  It was just a description of my experience coming to the game with my own set of expectations and how I came away from that session not really wanting to play Minecraft anymore.  Because, you know, I hate fun…

    But if anyone’s interested, I was a guest on this week’s Jumping the Shark, the podcast for Gameshark (episode #103).  During their “What We’ve Been Playing” segment, we talk a bit about Minecraft, and I almost talk myself into playing again based on how some of the comments here relate to a book I’d read earlier this year.  How’s that for a teaser? :)

  • moose

    try youtube?