I've been struggling to figure out a good one-sentence description of Minecraft for a while.
Something about a giant sandbox with all sorts of cool toys that appeals to the same part of your lizard brain that made building a fort with couch cushions so much fun when you were a kid, with just enough danger to make it even more fun...
@Brant It doesn't help that Notch completely cops out on the Minecraft website, either. "Here's a video of me testing roller coasters."
I've pointed some people to X's Adventures in Minecraft, which captures the fun of discovery and learning how to play pretty well. Of course, not everyone is going to want to watch a long YouTube series, or even a small chunk of it.
Anyone here watch Lost? I find that some of the music in Minecraft (especially the more somber piano) reminds me of the music from Lost. The little vignettes that they finished some episodes with, where it was just music overlaying scenes with no dialog.
Rockpapershotgun's series on minecraft is a good intro to the concept as well. On my private SMP server we're starting to prep for the halloween update, which includes making as many tortches as we can and throwing them up on walls to build our lantern stock
@sjohnston Yeah, I pointed my supervisor to SeaNanners' first video, which drew me into it, but he watched a minute or so of it and said "Eh it looks like any old game"
And @alexanderpas, I am in COMPLETE support of having a stackoverflow minecraft server :-D omg that would be awesome
Let's see if we can convince Jeff Atwood to host it LOL
You could always trap new users in a pergatory box, have an op put the spawnpoint inside large box of bedrock, so people can play, and only allow them out after they've proven to not be a butt
that's not a bad idea, I mean, the purgatory box would have to be fun enough so that the players could actually play and the griefers would actually grief
and then you'd sort out the good ones from the bad ones and let them into the outside world
Well I think minimal advertising, as well as just generally not being to attached to what happens on the server (as well as possible regular resets of the world). Make griefing rather useless...