Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Games which have other, real human beings in are often bettered simply by have a human intelligence at work in them. That’s never been more true than in the indie-multiplayer building toy/game thing, Minecraft. The randomly generated levels of the single player system are interesting, and an useful way to figure out how you can build with nine types of blocks, or delete them. But it’s only when you go onto the multiplayer servers, and see the astonishing pixel-art landscapes that people have created, that you realise what a brilliant piece of software this is. Somehow, by being limited to just nine blocks, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. The beauty of simplification, or something. Anyway, enough babbling from me, go sign up, explore, build. It’s awesome. That image above is from the Great Pyramid server (which seems to have public editing disabled?), but there’s a whole load of amazing projects. I quite like the floating islands servers for their amazing vistas.