In tonight’s episode of Community, I am reliably informed (by their commercials — and my prophetic dreams) that the gang will be playing a little D&D.
That’s fun. But it makes me a little itchy.
It makes me itchy because I haven’t rolled the bones — meaning, I have not gamed — in quite a long time. Too long. In fact, it’s been at least eight or nine months.
By and large, it’s difficult for adult life to accommodate any kind of regular gaming. This isn’t unusual, mind — I can’t tell you how many dudes in their mid-30s who say, with a faint ember still in their eye (and the clatter of a 20-sider echoing in their brain chamber), “Oh, man! I used to game.”
And I know it’s not going to get a damn sight easier once the Tiny Monkey comes into our life, heaving everything upside-down. Frankly, I’m probably going to have to hide my dice just because they’re a choking hazard.
Kids, man. Kids. They try to eat everything. I almost choked to death on a penny when I was a tot. I can only imagine how many d10s my nascent heir will be able to jam down his windpipe.
On the one hand, I miss it. On the other hand, part of me thinks: man, I’ve got things to do. Like, I want to play video games more often, but when I do, I tend to find myself wanting to do other stuff. Sometimes, I even have these absurd moments where I think, “I’d rather be doing the dishes because the dishes need doing.” Is this adulthood? It feels like a brain parasite. Get me a coat hanger and some anti-fungal paste.
Stat!
Anyway.
This brings me to you, trusty game-heads.
First, I ask you: what are you playing these days? Anything really. I’m mostly asking about pen-and-paper stuff, but hey, unload your game-flavored goodness upon my head. Board games, video games, whatever.
Second, I beseech you: anybody found a way to play without actually sitting across the table from folks? Anybody game over Skype? Is there an iPad solution of which I’m not yet aware? Help a brother out.
Two more tiny things:
I think I might do a free PDF writing up some of my “irregular creatures” as statted-up World of Darkness monsters. Because, hey, why the fuck not? Could be fun. Shits and giggles. You know. For the kids.
Also, why the hell aren’t you watching Community again? Sheesh.
Did you hear the news? There’s a new flu bug going around.
It’s probably nothing to worry about.
Or is it?
People aren’t feeling well. Coughing, sneezing, stuffy noses, low-grade fevers.
They want to sleep. During the day, at least.
At night, the sickness changes form.
Those in its thrall might be seen sleep-walking. Or sleep-eating. Some hoard objects. Others wander the streets unaware. And this is only the beginning.
Rumor: Is it true that the flu only affects adults? What is it that makes an adult, anyway?
Park City is the nexus of the outbreak, but it’s happening everywhere.
And it’s only the second day.
You have 120 hours to become part of the story.
Tweet with the hashtag #pandemic11. Whether from your own account or another of your creation.
Follow the stories of our characters — characters like Anna, like Billy, like Bree. Or like the others. Look for the Twitter accounts with the yellow backgrounds and black numbers.
Tell your tale. Whether it’s one tweet or 100, maybe what you tell the world can save it from the spreading sickness. Or maybe it’ll be a record left behind by the next generation.
If they’re still alive. And if they’re still sane.
What do you see? Are you sick? Are your parents sick? Follow the story. Then tell your own.
And if you’re on the ground at Park City: head to Mission Control at Sundance: New Frontier to see how you can make a difference. Maybe you even want to request a scare…
I build a boat so that I can cross the ocean without having to hop and splash through the waters like a drunken moose. I build a miles-long underground tunnel connecting my spawn point and my rat’s warren canyon. Upon my spawn point I build a glass house so that I may watch the sun set and the moon rise. At the top of my glass house I build an air bridge traveling to the peak of the nearest mountain.
And it is near to this peak that I find my first dungeon.
It’s already pre-carved out of the side of the hill. I descend into the deep, placing torches along the way so I can find my way back. Down there in the dark I hear the first rheumy growls: zombies.
Sure enough, there they are: a trio of the blockheaded assholes, playing a game of clumsy grab-ass. Ah. But a waterfall and stream separate us. It’s easy for me to wade into the water, hack at them with my diamond-edged sword, and cut them into little puffs of pixillated smoke.
But somehow, more of them show.
They’re coming from somewhere back there. In the dark. Spawning endlessly.
I cross the water. I quick throw torches on the wall just as a zombie tries to paw my face with his rotten box-hands. Then another, then another. I back to the wall, I cut ’em down with my blade, and then I see more of this room: mossy stone, two chests, and a burning cage in the center with a little zombie effigy doll in the center, endlessly spinning.
I kill the zombies.
I flood the room with torchlight.
I end the spawning.
I open the chests and claim my booty: gold and iron and arrows.
I am the hero, triumphant.
The Hero, Descendant (Or, “The Hero Shits His Pants Multiple Times And Falls Down Into The Deep Dark Where He Must Contend With Lava And Evil”)
I continue to dig, build, and explore.
Fact is, I want to find another dungeon. The dungeon made me feel like an intrepid hero-architect, a builder of great things but also a slayer of demons, a gatherer of treasure.
I find my second cavern opening not far from the first: just a quarter-day’s walk. I see the deep dark grotto. I gather torches. And I wade into the mouth of shadow.
This one goes deep. Much deeper than the last. Every step is a step down, a step around a corner, a step around a stream of falling water or past tunnel mouths where I hear spiders hissing or the rattle of a skeleton archer’s bones. I’m getting worried.
But I’m also getting pretty fucking geeked.
I travel for a long time — sometimes falling a few blocks without certainty of how I’ll get out (I can always build steps, I tell myself), until finally I reach the bottom.
I know it’s the bottom because, ye gods, it’s full of lava.
In the center of this canyon tumbles a massive column of lava, a lavafall coming from way, way up there. Up there in shadow. Up there where monsters roam.
It’s easy to see that this is a special place. The walls are lined with precious kit: gold and diamonds and redstone and so much iron, so much coal. I even see some lapis lazuli and some obsidian.
I hear water. I fling up torches. I step into the heavy current.
And — b-d-d-d-ing.
The sound of a bowstring drawn and loosed. A skeleton archer’s arrow pierces my heart. Then another. Then another. I die there in the water, my inventory exploded around me.
I respawn upon my glass house, I hurry to my stash of goods in the house, I snatch up a blade. I’m going back. Fuck that archer. Fuck him up his bony ass with his own damn femur.
Once again I descend into the void — this time, with only an iron blade. I follow the trail of light. I fall again into darkness. I wander aimlessly on the shores of scorching lava.
Finally, I see it: all my shit laid bare, floating there in the water like flotsam (or jetsam, whatever). This time it’s no skeleton archer but rather a creeper. But he can’t get to me on this ledge. He’s easy to dispatch. A swipey-swipe of the blade and he’s down, the dumb geek. Another jumps in: hack-slash, nighty-night.
I jump into the water.
I grab all my shit. My compass, my watch, my diamond sword.
And then a zombie appears out of nowhere and bashes my block-head in with one of his block-fists.
Fuckity-fuck.
Okay. Fine. My stuff’s still down there. I’ll just go back again. Except this time, I think, I’ll run back to my other stash and grab another sword, because I can’t go down there unarmed. This takes me a little time, but I manage. And — you know the story: again I stumble blindly into the booty hole.
Uhh. Rephrase that at your leisure.
This time, it’s different. I go down. I wander the trails. I follow the torches. I jog along lava.
No monsters this time.
And also: no stuff.
My shit is all gone. My compass, my watch, my diamond sword.
Little do I know: loose materials degrade to nothing after five minutes. Poof. Gone. It’s not here because I took too long fetching a sword. And ironically, the canyon has no more monsters for me to fight.
Frustrated, I still recognize that this is a bountiful canyon. I can easily make up what I lost just by spending some time down here, cutting away the precious metals and mystical materials.
So, I do that. I begin to mine.
I mine until my pockets are bulging with goodness. So many diamonds. So much iron. I’m filled to the tits with redstone dust and lapis lazuli. And the gold! I’m rich! I’m a king! Eeeee! Thing is, this place is even bigger than I thought. It goes on, and on, and on. I keep wandering. I keep digging.
I see a little more iron, so I cross a little stream to get it.
The stream has a current. I am pulled not two squares to my right, and I slip under a ledge because the water is deeper than anticipated.
And then I tumble into a pit of lava.
I struggle in the well, burning alive. Cooking. Hissing. Screaming.
I perish.
All my items explode out of my body. And then they hit the lava.
When they do, they go Sssss! and are gone. Burned up into the void.
I am once more a pauper. No longer the hero-architect, I am just a burned-up chump, a scarred buckethead fumbling around the dark, pawing at my junk with my impossible, fingerless hands.
And so it is that I think I must back away from Minecraft for a time. I achieved a lot in a short time, but I jumped for the brass ring…
Sure, you can waste those 13 minutes building spaceships or funny statues.
But you’d damn well better spend that time building a shelter. Because at the end of those 13 minutes?
Night comes.
And when night comes, so do the monsters.
And if you haven’t built yourself a place to hide? You’re dead.
Welcome to LEGO: Survival Horror edition.
My First Day Cycle
The game dropped my ass onto a sandy beach at morning. Not far away I saw them: great and mighty hills — hills comprising voxels of dirt, grass, and stone — rising up out of the fog.
I figured, hey, let’s explore. I wandered up into those hills. I chopped down a tree for shits and giggles. And by “chopped,” I mean, “punched with my blocky orange dildo hand until the tree yielded its sweet sweet tree meat to my violence.” The tree, mysteriously, hovered there even when its base was destroyed. (Destroy its canopy and you may find yourself with a sapling in hand.)
Then I wandered some more. I witnessed voxel sheep and boxy chickens. Clunky cows be-bopped around. In the distance, out in the ocean, big Cthulhu-beard squid jerked and twitched.
I wandered across chasms.
I found a lake, and half of that lake was ice.
I almost drowned, but then learned how to swim.
Somewhere, I thought, “Hey, I’m going to dig. Just to see.” So, with a hunk of wood in my hand, I began bashing the earth. My first mistake? The first several blocks, I bashed beneath my feet. Clarification: directly beneath my feet. I dropped down into a pit of my own making but thought, “I can get back out of here easily given how simple it is to bash earth into its component bits and bytes.”
So, I kept digging. This time, at an angle.
Eventually, my tunnel grew dark. No light shone down here.
I started trying to make my way back up, but I noticed something:
The sun had gone down.
Uh-oh.
I began furiously punching and kicking the ground, making steps to get back out, but it was futile: I couldn’t really see anything. I didn’t know if I was even going up.
Then, I heard it: a phlegmy growl.
Little did I know, someone was down here with me. Suddenly, my screen filled with some awful face, and then a zombie murdered me and sucked marrow from my bones.
Well, I don’t know that those are the exact details. Mostly, I died in the dark, a zombie atop me.
Second Day Cycle
I respawned back on my beach. I thought, okay, I need to build a shelter this time.
So, instead of digging down, I dug laterally — boring into the side of the hill like a worm toward the apple’s heart. I bashed a tunnel, then a small room. When night came, I sealed myself into it.
And it was very dark.
Behind me, something growled.
Next thing I know, some monster was molesting my dead flesh.
Third Day Cycle
Fuck. Fuck. I figured, okay, I have to learn to survive here, or this just isn’t going to work. I watched the “first night tutorial” found on the Minecraft site. And by watching that, I learned a truckload of information that would help me not get mouth-raped by skeletons, spiders, zombies, and creepers. I needed a pick-ax. And a workbench. And a sword. And a shovel. And, above all else, I needed some motherfucking torches.
Thing is, to get torches, you need coal.
And on this hill, I found no coal.
I ran around as the big voxel sun slowly slid like a pad of butter toward the horizon’s end, struggling to find some way to make some goddamn light.
I did not find any coal.
Feel free to predict what happened. It probably involves words like “rectal violation,” “monster,” and “used my sweetbreads as pillows.” Goddamnit. Fuck you, coal. Fuck you big.
Fourth Day Cycle
Once more, I spawned on the beach, increasingly convinced that this was some kind of 8-bit nightmare Groundhog Day rehash: this beach was becoming my accursed birthplace into this unsettling world.
I decided, fuck those hills right there, because those hills offer me only death.
I crossed a small oceanic strait and found myself amongst other hills. There, pressed up against the cliff-face, lurked a vein of coal next to a vein of iron. Huzzah! A cheer! But no time for celebration: only time for getting coal so I do not die horribly in the night. I quick did some crafting, ensuring that I got a pick-ax (the pick-ax is necessary to get coal), and I carved myself a uterine pocket of earth. As night fell, I sealed myself into what I prayed would not be my tomb.
Then, I watched night through my window. This is a long process. Night is seven minutes, and there I stood like an asshole, just watching the blinky stars creep across the sky.
I… heard things. Out there. And above me. The hissing of beasts. The rattling of bones. The growls of zombies. Occasionally, I heard a chicken die. Poor goddamn chicken.
But eventually, as it is with all bad things, night passed. The sun arose. Morning arrived.
I kicked open my earthen door, stepped out into the light.
Where I was promptly assaulted by a fucking giant spider.
What the hell, I thought? It’s sun-up! Spiders can survive the sun? Seriously? Oh, goddamnit, they can, can’t they? Shit shit shit. I took my sword out, though, and I whupped up on that blocky fuckface arachnid until all that was left was a tapeworm-esque pile of thread. Which I quickly absorbed into my inventory.
Ha. Hahaha! Hahahaha! I survived the night!
I did a little dance.
Then I went in search of more coal. I turned the corner, and came face to face with this blockhead asshole who promptly blew himself up.
He took half the cliff-face with him.
Oh, and me.
Death welcomed me anew.
Fifth Day Cycle
The beach belched me back up onto its sun-baked sands. Once again I crossed the strait, knowing that yes, I would find my little grotto, but that all my equipment was lost.
Except, it wasn’t.
I rounded the bend and there, along the cliff-face and in the water were my blessed items: the ax, the blade, the building materials I had been carrying. I quickly swept them all up. I kissed my sword, which is not a euphemism for masturbation or self-performed blow-jobbery.
To celebrate, I murdered some cows. Which lead to the discovery that cows yield leather.
Chickens yield eggs.
I also found, mysteriously, bones and arrows. (No, not bows and arrows. Bones.) I guess some skeleton archers had a raucous party or something and… uhhh, exploded? Who the fuck knows? And really, who cares? Because now I have their bodies. Ho ho ho.
Once more, night came.
I hid. I dug more. I waited. Night came. Night went. Morning arose, and so did I, resurrected from my tomb. I heard the hissing of a spider, and I fucked that fucker up with my pixel-blade.
I was triumphant.
Thereafter
During the day, I explore. At night, I dig.
I’ve since dug myself a small labyrinth connected to my little hut. I found an underground stream. I found a cavern, too, but I sealed that back up, because I suspect that giving the sinister malefactors and undead interlopers a back-door entry into my zone of safety and comfort is bad news bears.
I carved myself a path all the way from the opening to the other side of the island. So now I have two exits and entryways if I need them. All of them lined with torches.
I don’t know what happens now. I keep building. I keep crafting.
And somehow, I stay alive.
Later in the week I might mumble about the things I think make Minecraft… well, not great, but certainly interesting. I mean, I did all of the above in an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half. Not a serious time commitment, but it felt epic. So, I have thoughts in that direction, but I need to play a little more and put them together. Anyone else play? Anyone do anything with multiplayer yet? I’ve only noodled with the one-man-world and found it surprisingly unsettling. I grow fascinated.
(Want a great fan-made trailer to sell you on Minecraft? I’ve embedded it below.)
