Blogs
on December 16, 2025
Now Minecraft has no overarching objective, so it instantly challenges McGonigal’s claim that a goal is required in a game. But actually, Minecraft ’s main goal is composed of multiple smaller goals. It doesn’t have a "grand" objective, but it has smaller objectives, little bite-size incentives that replace each other over time and take the role of a larger objective. First you collect resources, then you build a house, then you survive the night, then you wake up and continue, but each with steadier and steadier increases in scope and scale. Even better, there’s no one direction to go. Being able to explore in multiple regions and build whatever you feel is satisfactory is open-ended. You are given tools and no direction, yet you are still creating. You’re making the direction. This is a massive undertaking, one that changes everything that anyone knew about videogames before, and it’s a bigger embodiment of the "sandbox" mentality than Grand Theft Auto has even been.
It’s easy for gamers to forget that, at its core, Minecraft is a survival game with horror elements. Underneath the bright-colored blocks, cute pigs, and nameable horses are undead creatures, monstrosities from the depths of the Nether, and what was once a pig that has horribly mutated and stalks the player with a hiss on its lips. When put like that, it's sometimes easy to forget that this game is predominantly played by child
But there are still those who "cannot get into video games." Maybe the person is intimidated by a controller with 25 buttons and three joysticks. Maybe the subject matter of a 2D platformer just appears juvenile or an FPS appears too violent. These failures to get involved push some people away from gaming, but as stated earlier, gaming is no longer a single formula. We’re seeing so many ways to approach game design, narrative and control in this day and age; I’m of the mind that, with such a buffet of choice, anyone can find at least one game that can hook them into gaming. Maybe it’s not in the "hardcore" form where they’ll stand outside at a midnight launch, but in a way that they can have a favorite game that they can revisit over the years, while still enjoying it.
Telltale Games has a way of making games based off of characters or stories that already have impressive stories and making them better. With Minecraft: Story Mode, however, they managed to create an entire universe and story based off of a game that didn't necessarily have either of those. We've seen our hero, who is meant to play the role of your average Minecraft player, traverse the overworld with his friends, each who represent different types of players, in order to meet his favorite band of heroes. Of course, not everything goes as planned as chaos ensues and Jessie and his friends are put in a position as the only ones capable of saving the world from the Wither Storm. This episode, though, is much after those events with Jessie being in charge of the new Order of the Stone, fighting monsters and searching dungeons for loot. They've become what the old Order used to be and are loved by the common folks but hated by other adventurers who do the same thing but aren't as well known as them.
Now, the game still provides new weapons and outfits frequently, they are just not presented as the main driving force pushing players forward (which does hurt the campaign's replayability to an extent). Victor Vran can be completed over a few hours, and while that might be short for this type of release, it does at least make great use of every second. Victor Vran might just have the best combat out of any action
On the surface, Victor Vran might appear to be a typical dungeon-crawler action RPG but looks can be slightly deceiving. Unlike many of the projects developed for the genre, Haemimont decided to not focus too heavily on loot and grinding, instead prioritizing real-time combat and weapon classes. As such, Victor Vran plays out like a hack and slash game that just happens to be presented from an isometric an
So what convinces us to play games in the first place? To answer that, you’d need to look at every game ever made, because that’s the solution. Because of everything games can, have, and will ever do.
When you first play Minecraft , you’re dropped into a blocky world with barely any direction whatsoever. You can generate tools and gather resources, but you aren’t given any sort of ultimate goal or context as to why you should. You are given the skills, but for no explicit reason. Instinctively, gamers realize that they can create structures which are eventually required to protect themselves from the rampant enemies that appear at night. To build structures (or any item, really), you need resources and you’re driven to "mine" for items like stone, coal and even wood and flowers.
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