Minecraft: request for explanation

So I downloaded Minecraft demo to see what is it what is it what all the kids around rave about. Call me a “late adopter”.

Alright, I get it. Or so I think. You can destroy stuff and thereby “mine” materials, sometimes you can find something and get it. I learned how to dig myself out of a deep hole, how to drown, get killed by a zombie, how to build some simply blocky structures. So far, so good.

What I am not getting is what is the whole point. Where’s the fun part?

I know, this is a silly remark. I grew up in a world of Princes of Persia, Doom, various flight and car simulators, etc. Those games have a clear hook, a clear objective, etc. You start it, you get it, you go on. I now see kids playing Roblox and what I think is this: if anybody would tell me 20-30 years ago that this would be a thing, I would laugh my head off (same way as if anybody would tell me in 2005 that phones won’t get smaller, but rather larger - whatever, I tend to be wrong mostly 😐 ). Still in Roblox you can interact with characters and some of the games have a competitive spin, so I still grok those. But Minecraft? I feel like a stupid old fart who’s just staring at the screen not having a clue how this could have become the “best-selling game of all times” (c.f. Wikipedia)

Can somebody enlighten me on how to play Minecraft so as to “get the point quickly”?

I mean, I want to play it a bit with fun and perhaps have fun with my kids with it too, I just want to “get it” sooner then they will :-).

This is be probably one of my more embarrassing posts :-D.

@FailForward

I like to think of the game as a virtual LEGO world. (There have been attempts in making virtual LEGO worlds in the past, but they were way too complex to generate any hook to continue.) You can basically make anything you want with the material provided. Everything else in the game is just fluff or an appeal towards perfection.

Back in the day, you would throw multiple LEGO sets and build arbitrary scenarios. You were happy with what you had and cared more if you could create that what you pictured with the material given.

Now with the aspect of never having to scrap your old project to start a new one, you can let your imagination flow.

Many of the other users have already mentioned most of the scenarios, though I prefer the simplicity of being able to shape the environment provided to your liking.

From creating the maximum size pyramid possible in survival mode to creating pathways that exceed thousands of blocks long. There is something meditative in digging up thousands of blocks to create an underground rail system. Or creating contraceptions that you thought out from scratch.

In the end it's a fairly simple sandbox game.

@barefootstache @piggo @trinsec Thanks for interesting inputs. I am slowly getting somewhere. What I did not know yesterday is that one can create new things out of raw materials and that by doing so new recipes appear. So that makes building, mining and dealing with the world much more interesting. At this point (still in the demo) I would still appreciate to get some "objective", but I guess that might come when (if) I buy the real thing I can probably see what other people do - is that correct? Also, when some mob harms me, I did not figure out how to heal myself. Or is the experience so odd only the demo version?

@FailForward @barefootstache @trinsec I'll admit I never heard of a demo until you mentioned it exists... Objective wise, there is nothing but what you set for yourself. There are achievements you can complete though. Maybe that's missing in the demo version?
To heal, eat food and when your food bar is full, the health is slowly restored. This is always tricky in the beginning, the best option is to kill animals for meat. There are also apples that drop when you cut down a tree and the leaves break, but they're too rare to be useful. If you find a river, salmon are easy to hunt and nutritious. All meat requires cooking, either in a furnace or on campfire. ... And you need a pickaxe to mine stone to make the furnace. a lot of the early game is about technological upgrades

@piggo That is useful advice. It’s interesting how barebones the intro game experience is. Without you telling me, I would either drop out of the game, or would have persist long enough until I would discover it myself. From my PoV not a very good on-boarding experience, but then again: millions of kids get it quickly, so who am I to complain?

@barefootstache @trinsec