Minecraft

Here is Minecraft  in a pretty basic nutshell.

See that? Are you confused? Read on for some basic information from a safe space full of generalized knowledge. No, you’re not on Wikipedia. You’re at TandemShock.

Just the Facts

• It is a sandbox independent video game
• There is no real objective, other than building and destroying items as well as exploration
• As of June 2015, 70 million copies have been sold amongst all available platforms
• Originally created under Mojang, Microsoft bought the property for $2.5 billion in 2014

FernGully on Minecraft

The first time I saw this, I immediately screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!?” Nothing about it made sense. All you did was get sent into a randomly created world, and you started punching trees and building cabins and exploring cave systems. I was thoroughly confused most of my first session. What joy could this possibly bring?

Apparently, a lot. Soon after, I found myselfplaying for what appeared to be hours. I would start around noon, after a light lunch of kale salad and diet coke (in reality it was probably three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and half a liter of peach tea #lunchofchampions). By the time I found a perfect stopping point, it was around 3 a.m. and I had been holding in urine for the last 7 hours. 7 HOURS! This type of dedication should only be reserved for Lord of the Rings marathons or watching Ancient Aliens documentaries.

This doesn’t even involve the fact that once you get three other people to play with you (I was playing on the PS3 system when I first started), it becomes a jumbled mess of who is trying to fuck up who and Plasma Captain building a massive tower made out of dirt (there was a lovely view at the top). I think it was called “The Tower of Fucks” or something like that. I’m not entirely sure as I’ve surely blocked it from my memory.

The point is, the game is an addictive piece of perfection. I have to actively set a timer when playing, just so I can actually be an adult and do things like make sure the dog is fed properly and hasn’t taken numerous shits around the house. I will neither confirm nor deny that this has happened.

Pop Culture

Social media played a huge role in making Minecraft popular. It has been referenced in many games, including: Borderlands 2, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Team Fortress 2. The game was referenced as well in Lady Gaga’s music video for G.U.Y.

There are approximately 45,512,584,221,123,622,157,664,579,151,273,724,313,427,876,822 different gameplay videos that you can find on YouTube. There are far too many to include in any type of post and a shit ton of people play this fucking game. But why? It’s nothing but building shit and breaking shit and then getting killed by other shit. People love it, I guess. Here, take a look at the bounty.

South Park

Season seventeen of South Park used Minecraft heavily as a plot point in their episode entitled “Informative Murder Porn.” This episode features the children of South Park using the phrase “How do you tame a horse in Minecraft” as a question to their parental lock software installed to keep their parents from watching Investigative Discovery Homicide TV Shows. This prompts the parents to learn about Minecraft, with Corey Lanskin, the child, helping the parents stating, “Minecraft, it don’t got no winner, it don’t got no objective. You’re just fuckin’ buildin’ shit!”