Minecraft: Story Mode (2015)

I'm sorry but I see this game all everywhere on every website and advertising for it plastered all over every surface of every wall that I walk past in this concerning dystopian nightmare. I haven't played it, and I never will, so you can take my views with a grain of salt.

However: I am disgusted by this game, and it seems like a pretty shamelss cash-grab aimed at kiddies. Telltale are great and they've made a lot of great games (or so I've heard, I've never played them.. I prefer to be able to interact with my games. But I have no argument against interactive movies, I think they're a great emerging art form.. I just don't think they're games really.

Anyway my argument is this: Half Life is a game (bear with me) with a wonderful dynamic believable protagonist. It's because that protagonist is you. Gordon Freeman never speaks and his history is so ambiguous and no character info about him is shoved down our throat. It's beautiful game design because it allows the player to project their own self onto Gordon.

Minecraft takes this a step further. You are a nameless ambiguous character in a nameless ambiguous world with nameless ambiguous objectives (sort of). This is one of the main reasons (I believe) that it was so successful. The fact is: minecraft relates to everyone even your grandma. It's because the game has no story or plot or characters or anything, it just basically has really great simple interactive game mechanics. The "game itself" is you, you create the world and the characters and the identity and the buildings, landscapes, little helper friends, quiet farm villages or deep foreboding caves of horror. But central to Minecraft is that lack of identity, lack of story, lack of characters or narrative. That's what makes it so brilliant.

So, what's my point? My point is that this adds all that shit in. It's like you have a beautiful small little personal old car that you've had for decades, and someone comes along and says "Hey!! We should put in a swimming pool, a couch and a restaurant in it! I love swimming pools and couches and restaurants." It goes completely against the entire point of the thing, it defies the very nature of the game.

I was one of the first people to discover minecraft, I bought it back when you had to buy it by sending Notch money on Paypal, I think I was one of the first 40,000 players, back when it was a huge mess, software rendering and only cost $5. But in truth I haven't played it in about 3 or 4 years. I'm sure this Telltale game will be great and fun and awesome and all that, I'm sure the kiddies will love it and it will receive good reviews and it'll make a huge amount of money. I just feel that it goes against the very nature of the game and it makes me furious and kind of disgusted. It's a shameless cash grab aimed at a very young audience, and I can assure you that this would never have happened if Notch hadn't sold out to Microsoft. I'm sure Notch is probably quietly weeping in a corner somewhere, seeing his baby being morphed into his abhorrent abomination.

So: good one guys! IGN 11/10, round of applause, all the trimmings. But this is a huge step backwards in the world of games and game design.. and I hope that at least some people can see the bigger picture here. It's sad that we live in a world where mindless dull garbage is awarded and applauded while innovation and creativity is left brooding in poverty and darkness (this is true for the film industry too). It has larger implications too upon the state of humanity, but no one wants to see me write another 45 pages of boring nonsense.