My first experiences with Minecraft came when a friend gave me a cracked version of the game on a flash drive, which enabled me to play single player, but not multiplayer. I played and wandered around my single player world for a long time, but began to get bored with my un-creative, square houses that all looked the same. I wanted to see the full potential of the game and decided to buy the full version. When I got the legit version, I was able to play on online servers, which completely changed how I played and viewed Minecraft. I got to see so many different servers, all so different and uniquely incredible. The main game mode I played was Factions, a game where you form teams, called factions, and try to dominate all other factions on the server.
What was so great about playing Minecraft on servers was just how many different things people create. With a game like Minecraft, there are almost no boundaries on what you can do – just your creativity. Some servers had replicated full console games in Minecraft (like Portal), while others created brand new games. Minecraft servers opened this very casual, creative game, to a whole new realm of possibilities, pushing the boundaries of what a game can be. One of the great things about playing online is that the player has the choice of what kind of experience they want to have – whether they want a totally foreign experience that is far removed from vanilla Minecraft, or they want a very standard Minecraft experience. That's what made this game so special - the fact that the player never has to leave to have different types of experiences. The mechanics of the game made this possible, and made it hard to leave. This realm of endless possibility was great for me as a kid, where I got to experience a wide variety of game types, but this also inherently lacks some of the benefits of actual console or PC games, in terms of graphics, gameplay mechanics, and story. Still, though, Minecraft is a one-of-a-kind game.
Without even touching the heavier alterations that some Minecraft servers use to create more conventional metagames, such as Hunger Games battle-royale style competitions, the difference between single and multiplayer is pretty stark. I wonder how much of a metagame we can consider the difference between building a cool house no one but yourself will see and building one in a world with your friends and seeing all of their creations as you create a town.
What always fascinated me about Minecraft was the drastic difference between single-player and multiplayer. There was always the cool feeling of going out and exploring alone, creating your own houses and mines, etc, yet it always ended up calling into a general grind, a lack of excitement just surviving (of course, creative mode offered the ability to craft gigantic and interesting structures and extended playtime for the architecturally/engineering curious). But stepping into the world of multiplayer servers opened up the game to seemingly infinite possibilities and modes, in some ways making games better than the original game itself. In my mind, this was the beautiful duality that truly inspired ones own creative endeavors. There is nothing quite like building your…