Danger and hardware

[bnewman]

The other day, the following songs came up consecutively on party shuffle: "Danger and Desire" (track 10 on the linked album) and "Hardware Store". And this seemed perfect, because it perfectly captured the essence of what I was doing at the time:

MineCraft is an indie computer game that places you in a world of giant voxels and leaves you to survive with nothing but your wits and what you can wrest from the low-resolution earth. It's currently in open alpha testing, and thus feature-unstable but mostly perfectly playable. There is multiplayer support for both public and private servers which will eventually actually work. It's clever and addictive and really, really nifty, and it's become something of a viral hit. Well, consider yourselves sneezed on. (Wait, that didn't come out how I meant it to...)

I don't know what the timeframe is on MineCraft going from alpha to beta (and from half-price to full-price), but I'd love for people I know to get the game and create community servers where we can build Castle SWIL, or the Mines of Moria, or whatever, and work together to defend our holdings from the creatures of the night... oh, yeah, there are zombies.

MineCraft currently costs 10 euros.

Comments

[caprine.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for the shout-out!

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

"Danger and Desire" has been something of a touchstone for me since I first heard it, although for me it's as much about video games as it is about role-playing. I know that I have a mind that craves adventurous risk, and I know that minds like mine (and, I guess from meeting you and reading your journal and from the fact that you wrote that song, like yours) have drawn others into addiction, injury, and real danger of personal ruin. That beast grows up much healthier and more manageable, if never quite tame, if it's fed a steady diet of stories and video games and rock climbing and hang gliding.

This is why my mom should be glad I do so much computer gaming. ;-) But I should probably do more of those last two which involve real exercise...

[sildra.livejournal.com]

It's certainly true that I get a pleasant thrill and a decent amount of excitement from stories and video games. And, although I'm a fairly risk-averse person, I've occasionally done thrill-seeking things like rock climbing (or, for that matter, simulated thrill-seeking things like roller coasters) and enjoyed them quite a bit. But the feel of taking a real life risk, and the thrill of surviving it or even conquering it, feels so different from the vicarious thrill of stories, or even the adrenaline rush of video games, that I can't imagine any amount of video games could serve as a substitute for those real life risky experiences.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. I'm blessed not to be the sort of person who gets bored and twitchy unless I place myself in actual mortal danger on a regular basis. Or is that not the kind of "real life risk" you meant?

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean mortal danger, necessarily--I meant things like the ones you listed: rock climbing, hang gliding (which I've never done), etc. Things where there's a small element of mortal danger, and because of that there some feel of being in mortal danger, but unless you're being completely reckless you aren't really in very much actual mortal danger at all. Wanting to place oneself in actual mortal danger--for whatever reason, trying to jump the Springfield Gorge on a skateboard is the only image springing to mind--is the very rare, very extreme version of this same impulse, but isn't really what I meant.

What I meant was that the real-life-ness of those activities makes them feel so different to me that the excitement of video games is qualitatively different, and I could never compare, and certainly not substitute, one for the other.