DISCLAIMER: Quarantine is a volume of written word that will be running until people have stopped dying.

Creation is a primary act of play. I’m going to lead with that sentence and pretend I know what it means – we’re both going to go on a journey to discover it.
Creation is a primary act of play. Not every play session is built around creation. Some of the best videogames lead with creation as the main focus of play. There are maybe no better than Minecraft. It’s a videogame, but it’s mostly a toy. Every once in awhile it loops back around to being a videogame.
If you have not played Minecraft, ever, it’s a cruel and calculated creation sim. There are no outward goals beyond survival and creation, and everything outside of the latter is stapled onto honestly regrettable design choices.

However bad the game parts of Minecraft are, they’re not important. I doubt they’re what draws anyone into the experience at all. It is maybe the only videogame that is both cheap, easily accessible and on a wide variety of systems allowing for the creation of a world at the push of a button. An instant draw happens when you create a world in Minecraft urged on by maybe the only mechanic that works. Hunger immediately starts draining the players resources. It’s something small but instantly urges players to either explore or start setting down roots right where they are.

There are, as of writing this, probably a thousand ways to play Minecraft. Let’s get all of the explanation about the game out of the way – it’s highly customizable, filled to the brim with new additions every patch by developers milking it with no clear direction. Villages and NPC’s? Sure. Underwater ruins and forgotten worlds? Absolutely. It’s maybe not insane to suggest there is more in an individual world here than most players may be capable of creating without help. Help could come in the form of multiplayer worlds or external tools – but an ideal Minecraft game is a solitary one.

What worth is the outside world? What worth could it possibly have when here, we’re capable of being both gods and worshippers are the same time. Should we pipe lava from an active volcano down to the ocean to solidify it? Extract the resources from the surface of an icecap and turn it into a desert. Make a farm that continually spawns the horrors of the world and immediately terminates them, funneling their precious resources to a place convenient to us. Functionally, all of this is possible. Even more possible is to do it from the confines of a recreation of Bioshock’s undersea city – or a more fervent creation from our own imaginations.
Places of creations in videogame seldom are afforded the scale, luxury and sheer involvement that a world can in Minecraft. That’s what contributes to its lasting popularity more than anything. A convenient form of escapism where any ends justify any means.

I was thinking when I went into writing this series it would be mostly about horror games. But there is a type of horror here. An intentional loneliness is an integral part of play here – a rejection of systems and mechanics that might focus on involving other people. Anything is possible in a world, with or without help: you can even subsidize it yourself by using a variety of external tools. Passion projects are limited only by skill – a skill in design that may not often extend anywhere else! The horror here is a one of rejection. Why exist outside at all?

Live vicariously through pictures of the world. Cannibalize famous architecture and real world locations. Hell – cannibalize the architecture of famous fictional ones. Learn nothing about them, but recreate them as your own places of worship. It’s not necessary to share anything. Minecraft’s builder community frequently reads like an isolated one. Brief excursions into the wild to learn new techniques or share them, and then a return to seclusion. Here I dream of countless worlds – untouched and unseen by the majority of the awake.

It would be more damning if my own hard drive wasn’t at one point in time filled with them. All kinds of worlds at various stages of constructions. Cathedrals in the tops of trees, towns floating on the salt of the ocean. Linked together by strange portals and even stranger happenings – all abandoned. Why did I build beds for people that would never exist? Because that’s what you do after a point that resources are theoretically infinite and the world never stops.

Minecraft is a rejection of the outside world. Come in, build your ideal home out of whatever you want. Live out a dramatic story where you’re the only person on earth. Ravage an ecosystem or create an entirely contained floating one. As long as what you’re doing involves placing and removing blocks, what’s the harm? It makes for a perfect game to be played in isolation. The low curve of the grind certainly helps, as any skill with the systems means hitting the ground running on successive playwrights. Anyone who’s spend substantial time with the survival mode has a trick or two to get started quick. What’s so bad about drawing the curtains and stepping away?

Loneliness here is the focus. A gentle soundtrack of easy synth breeze and soft piano dominates the landscape. Fly through creative mode just to see what you can find.
I don’t know him – or do I have any desire to be his friend, but every time I step back into Minecraft I can’t help but think. I think of the creator, who could make such lonely worlds and systems, and other lonely creators like him. Of course the creator of Minecraft is now a disgustingly rich white man. Someone who somehow embodies the stereotype of the reclusive millionaire with success at his every fingertip and the twitter-posting chud. Convinced the world has never stopped lashing out at him.

Now a full decade and change after the original release – it is a game colored in every aspect by its creator. That creator and his tendency to lash out at women and people’s time he thinks he deserves. That creator and his perverse Beverly hills mansion, itself not so far removed from the popularity of modern architecture in the game he made. I wonder if he ever wanders through its marble colored corridors and empty candy rooms, thinking about the people he encouraged to create their own worlds just like his? I don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt to thought that deep.

Curiously, it’s also a game that seems to look at outpacing its creator. There are more ways to play with people than ever, more devices you can connect. More mods and player-made worlds – it’s almost a given that if you find an online community anywhere that it likely has it’s own Minecraft server. It’s curiously a product that is neither the mark of a genius creator – but a ripoff artist who copied someone else, that’s changed hands and can’t be solely defined to any one person.

Minecraft continues in its appeal despite its creator, who’s name has been scrubbed from as many places as Microsoft could – and intentionally from this article. For the amount of ways we can interact with it without ever leaving the comfort of our phone or computer desk, what a perfect game for a time of enforced isolation. Thousands of communities archiving their hijinks on youtube. A billion architects and roller-coaster magnates documenting their prowess with the systems here. All of it available to be re-created at the nearest whim. Why go back out? Looking through the window can’t give you the kind of worlds you can create here.

CHANCE OF INFECTION: 0/5
ISOLATION SCORE: 5/5