#rtgame minecraft

best part of Minecraft Live 2024: highlighting the worst ten seconds of RTGame’s Let’s Actually Play Minecraft Again series

Watching RTGame Minecraft playthrough and Daniel's genuine fascination with vanilla experience made me reflect on how I view this game. It reminded me how I first discovered it decade ago, had the ultimate Minecraft experience of trying to figure stuff on my own (and miserably failing), then having a knowing friend behind my back teaching the basics™ and slowly getting on track from there. Surely, it's not a new game. And I feel like over the years, as I grew up, Minecraft-the-game slowly morphed into some hybrid virtual medium to hang out with friends for me. It became less of a world I get immersed in and more of an algorithm I'm really good at navigating and using its restrictions to my advantage. In a weird fashion, the only thing I can compare what modded Minecraft is to me is Hatsune Miku, an entity who functionally is an avatar with million faces and myriad stories for you to tell. In the same manner long ago modded Minecraft became a neutral base to create any game in (almost) any genre I felt like playing. It's a welcome development, but what I ultimately gave up in exchange is appreciation for simplicity of vanilla, and I became desensitized to it. Watching Daniel discover all these novelties with almost childlike wonder, I can't help but get nostalgic over how I used to see it, and how I never will be able to go back to it. That's so obvious, but so many decisions he makes I wouldn't, if I was playing. I'm probably one of those people who kept suggesting creating new world, until Daniel put effort in exploring it and discovering all those gorgeous places that I wouldn't. Seeing him roleplay and genuinely engage with the world surrounding him reminded me how decade ago I used to have a small house with a single dog on the edge of the cliff in the snowy taiga. I didn't really do anything to progress the game and was too scared to go into the caves to upgrade my tools to iron, so I tended to my little garden, fed my dog with chicken and wrote something in my only book and quill as a diary. It was all these same actions every single day, but I never felt bored. I felt isolated, but never lonely with my dog by my side, and as soon as sun had set, I was racing to my tiny hut, afraid of mobs, and my dog would feel really sad if one day I didn't return, after all. For some reason, decade later I remember everything to the tiniest detail. The layout of the house, the surrounding forest and what I wrote down back then. Since those times I had countless worlds and multiple projects, I used to speedrun Minecraft for fun and competition, but I remember so little about it all, a blurred memories of something that vaguely happened. But seeing Daniel build his tower, having beef with villagers stealing his sleeping spot, parting sea and for shits and giggles, spending two hours trying to draw a circle that functionally doesn't work for an assumption he lowkey gaslit himself into believing is true, filling out the maps of surrounding areas and looking for Bubblegum to lead home make me feel those exact feelings again. Maybe that's what it feels like to be the knowing friend sitting behind someone's back and teaching the ways of Minecraft. I never got to know what it feels like. After all, who hasn't played Minecraft nowadays?