Minecraft Wins Gaming Arts Award 87
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Minecraft has won a new arts award for games, beating the likes of Portal 2 and Ilomilo. The prize was announced at the finale of the GameCity videogame culture festival in Nottingham. From the article: 'Minecraft does involve traditional staples of gaming, including night-roaming monsters and the chance to fight multiplayer battles online. However, it was ultimately selected on the basis of its mood and ability to encourage gamers to become creative. "It's the broadest definition of art that you can have," said Mr. Hall.'"
Re:Legos on a screen? (Score:4, Informative)
Minecraft is a sandbox game. As the name implies both mining and crafting are important parts of the game. Mining is necessary to get the ingredients to build the strongest and most resilient tools. Crafting is necessary to produce most of the materials in the game. There is no point or goal at the moment other than any goals you set for yourself (or in an MP server, you can take part in large projects together).
The latest update coming up is actually going to add real mineshafts complete with train rails and archways. But for now you get caves with goodies marking the ceilings, floors, and walls at various points.
There's a lot more to the game too... enemy monsters for example. Flowing water and lava (not entirely physically accurate, but it's easy enough to predict how it will act... most of the time), day/night and weather system (monsters come out at night!), different biomes, near-infinite world. Oh, and you can create portals to hell which allow you to quickly cross large bits of the normal-world map in shorter time. I'm not joking (it's called the Nether).
There are plenty of videos on YouTube. look some up. It's really quite fun, especially online with people you know (strangers tend to be destructive and not fun to play with).
Also there's a subreddit on reddit (/r/minecraft) if you want to see pictures of peoples' creations.
Re:Legos on a screen? (Score:4, Informative)
The game runs perfectly fine on Linux and Mac OS X.
Get your facts straight.