I told you that story so I can tell you this story so I can tell you more stories forever.

I've once again had lots of nocturnal free time on my hands and nothing to occupy me on the internet. So I've turned Klosterman-esque again, peering into my own wonderful navel in the hopes that it will explain how, in 1977, John William's "Star Wars Theme -  Main Title" managed to top out at #10 on the Billboard chart.

Does this mean that people were requesting it be played on popular music radio stations?
Were people going out and just buying the cd that much?
Where was this song getting played?


Author's Note - Uh, I realize after finishing this several hours later that this might have been better split into two or three separate "acts" like my WoW tales. This is just a warning that, you know, tl;dr is acceptable.


So.

I'm going to talk to you about Minecraft.

What that means is, I'm going to talk to you about Uplink.

Uplink was a computer game released in 2001 that - and this is quoting the Wikipedia article, which offers a more succinct and accurate summary than I am capable of - "is best described as a simulator of the cinematic depiction of computer hacking."


What it was, if you haven't played it, was a shitty hacking simulator a la rad 90's movies.
It was....cybarcryyyyyme. Possibly to the X-treme. Certainly to the max.
It was the video game equivalent of wearing fishnet shirts, crazy futuristic eye makeup, Rad Fucking Hacking Goggles....
It was this, but without any graphics effects because those cost money and anyway what the fuck even are they doing oh my god what a great film.

"Use your best viruses to buy us some time...."I can't make shit like that up.

I think I found Uplink when I was in 6th or 7th grade which, now that I look back on it, was actually pretty close to when it came out.

At that impressionable age....I cannot begin to tell you how fucking awesome this game was. Everything was a cool blue color and you could like, upgrade your RAM so you could hack better...mainframe...data....traceroute....systems?

All the hacking was automated. All you did was execute programs. It was a glorified script kiddie run of a game, and yes I'm using the verb "run" in the proper Neuromancer usage.

Did I mention I just read Neuromancer and Snow Crash back to back the other week?

I think if I had read those books and played this fucking game at the tender age of 7th grade (you do the math, I'm 23 and I don't have to), I might genuinely have become....

A 23 year old with no computer skills whatsoever, wistfully pining for the day when I can hack the Gibson based on eyeliner and techno music alone.

God I need a pair of those goggles.

When Google Glass releases a public product, I'm putting Uplink on that bad boy and going to a train station or the last remaining phonebooth in New York with rollerblades, goggles, spiked hair, the fucking works.  And I'm going to accomplish nothing at all, just like in that goddamn game.

Here's the deal - maybe it was because I was playing a cracked game (Yeah, thats right. I had a hacked copy of a game about fake hacking. Analyze that one, fuckers [and no, I have no recollection of how I obtained that copy - probably through Kazaa Lite, I think was the P2P of choice back then])

Maybe I just blew at fake hacking. Who knows.

Whatever the reason, after maybe an hour or two of invested time - I'm feeling pretty good. I'm a decent fucking hackster. I've pulled some clever backdoor....scan.....download.....security bypassing...on the CIA? Rival companies? I genuinely don't remember.
You start off doing a bunch of really shitty, small scale stuff like copying emails or changing some guys social security number, and you work up to VIRUSES THAT DESTROY ALL OF THE INTERNETS.
(Oddly, the most menial starter jobs were the most accurate portrayals of hacking at the time. Before everything was on the internet, only important documents were. So that's what you hacked, I guess. That or like, Yahoo News.)

Except you never got that far. At least, I didn't. Because all of a sudden, after you've upgraded some of your shit, you get a "LOL NOPE U GOT CAUGHT DUDE."

Just, game over. Maybe you forgot to cover your tracks? Except they never tell you how to cover your tracks. And only the higher level programs allow you to delete evidence of your backdoor anyway. What the fuck, is what I'm trying to say.

What the fuck. It was always so disheartening an experience that I would immediately bury Uplink again, only to rediscover it maybe 8-12 months later.

That reminds me, I should really download that fucker again and give it a go. Play real. real. fucking. careful. See if I still get busted like 1/3rd of the way in.
 You people need to understand how fucking amazing this game can be, if you put your role playing face on. This game could seriously impress some US Senators. I genuinely believe that if you played this game while the people who debated about SOPA watched, they would try and have you arrested.

The point is, that almost guaranteed out-of-the-blue game over (before you could build up enough money to buy an emergency REMOTE SELF DESTRUCTION OF YOUR HACKING DECK upgrade, thats right the game had that) totally ruined the game. You began to expect it, and cringe knowing about it.




Now. I said I was going to talk about Minecraft, and that's because I've been playing Minecraft again lately.

We're going to gloss over the last few patches that Notch has pooped out (or I guess Notch is off that project now, isn't he. Explains a lot.) because they're dumb as fuck. HEY. You know what this beautiful indie wonderscape of a videogame with fairly unique crafting mechanics and limitless imagination potential needs?

BORING STALE RPG-ESQUE TROPES.

Oh, man, remember when you could just pick a direction and run, exploring randomly generated geographical wonders, constructing rude shelters to survive the eerily unexplained zombies that emerge?
DID YOU ENJOY THAT?
Here's a Hunger bar! Now you have to eat food to stay alive at regular intervals!

Oh, and here's ENCHANTING! Utilizing a completely meaningless "LEVELLING" system, you can spend EXPERIENCE POINTS to upgrade your TOOLS into GEAR you can CARE ABOUT AND LOSE.

God, I'm not getting my point across at all here.

A pickaxe used to just be a pickaxe. Now, if you GRIND to a certain level and put your enchanting table a certain way, you can make it a REALLY GREAT PICKAXE that like, mines faster and doesn't break as fast. It introduced only bad RPG elements to a system that was already functioning perfectly for no reason.


In short, these last few patches have served the exact same function for Minecraft as the Prequel Trilogy films of Star Wars has to the greater Star Wars canon.

But it's fine, because I just ignore the ones I can and adapt to the ones I can't avoid.

Because here's the thing about Minecraft.

You can fart around in single player, and it's fascinating for a while. This strangely stark, infinite world that you have to start from scratch in. You can build sand castles and learn the basic mechanics of the universe on your own (How to grow trees. How to survive a lava surge. So on.), and it will be a satisfying experience.

But.

Multiplayer is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Once you've played multiplayer, and built these phenomenal...masterwork constructs as a testament to mankind's dominance over the cyberworld, or explored the strange phenomena that arise from complex behavior being determined by overtly simplified coding, you can never go back.

Single player Minecraft is 100% weird and creepy now. I don't have anything else to say about that matter.
People have for some reason connected this Minecraft game to various points along the Autism spectrum and, while that's a completely ignorant and internet thought process to have, I TOTALLY GET WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

Playing single player Minecraft is like choosing to play World of Warcraft on a private server where it's just you, in Stormwind, alone and safe and empty and meaningless.

(Tangent - Wow, that's a strange feeling. My mind had a half second lapse where I actually didn't know the name of the human stronghold city, but my fingers just powered on through going "Dude, come on, it's Stormwind.")

AND, once you open the mind boggling Pandoras box that is MODDING Minecraft, there's DOUBLE no going back.

It's strange, because every iteration you encounter blows you away.

At first, I played it just because it was a very unique, interesting game at the time - maybe a year or two ago, when it first came out.
Then I went online, and Gabe and Co. had me building reverse waterslides and rudimentary, rectangular towers.

Then shit hit the fan, and we found out how to get infinite anything.

This was a very interesting time, because we had a built in awareness that we could very easily spoil this game forever if we just infinitely spat diamonds out of our assholes and steamrolled this pristine universe into a Dyson sphere of our own immeasurable power.

So we sort of pretended to act "surprised" whenever we needed a fresh stack of Obsidian and it serendipitously shot out of one of our chests. If somebody new came onto the server, we tried to protect their innocence as long as possible re: the Santa myth of Minecraft. Let them spend an enjoyable day tunneling to the earths core, crowing about their handful of diamonds.
It was fun for them. Who cared about the truth.

Part of this, I do not deny, came from the fun of sitting on a throne of solid gemstone while others crawled in the dirt. But this is a fleeting, petty joy and it just got fucking old. Eventually we were just hemorrhaging diamonds willy nilly, and building stupid Byzantine structures. Floating sky islands made entirely of glass, full of snow and golden apples. Like some bullshit Greek pantheon, we were decadent assholes accomplishing nothing.


The real fun came when we would cast off all of this glorious, meaningless power and enter a strangers world, just to look around and cause general mischief.

Oh my god, we absolutely were Greek gods. "Oh hey no don't mind me I'm just a poor old traveler, draped in rags, totally not a deity in disguise who's slumming it because I'm bored of throwing lightning bolts into herds of ignorant lesser beings for no discernible reason. Now answer me these riddles three, passerby. WHOOPS JK JK now your grandmother is a fine fat goose! Btw I fucked your wife. Have fun with that baby."

Random IP's dredged up by Gabe were invaded by  jaded trickster entities....
only to find that these new worlds were already inhabited by gods far more powerful than us.

Never get cocky on the internet. That's a good rule.

People had found out how to import externally-generated files into Minecraft servers, allowing complicated 3D models to be magically converted into precious blocks. We would load up inside fantastically large structures built of bricks that never touched a virtual avatar's hand.

Tremendous structures, recreations of real-world chapels done at absurd magnification, filled to the brim with limitless "precious" materials.

Completely bereft of any sense of meaning or accomplishment.
Most often, these remarkable structures weren't even the product of the people who ran these servers. They had just found them elsewhere and, thinking they looked cool, imported them into their own private/public spheres of influence.

It was a first hand proof of what happens when you remove all effort from an undertaking that generates meaning solely by how fucking colossally difficult it is.

It was lifting weights in zero gravity, and worse, it was bragging about it to your friends who were also doing it.

These worlds we entered invariably had the same template - a centralized "spawn" location full of massive, impressively unoriginal and meaningless structures, populated with signs laying down the meaningless glazed "rules" of that server and containing a half dozen twelve year olds begging for diamonds, building 1x1 stacks of dirt into the clouds, or slapping each other with empty pixellated hands.

Outside of the spawn in all directions was the same thing in various forms - it was as if these magnificent structures had - shock of all shocks - just been warped in from some more civilized planet into a wilderness full of shitty, cuboid sod huts and one or two fantastic mansions obviously owned by the Admins of the server, who spent their time split evenly between building up their own personal incredible castles and keeping everyone else out of them.

We began to develop a contempt for these worlds and their inhabitants.

This is where the magic started happening.

Soon, new server-side mods were being put down that allowed for greater theoretical working of wonder - stuff like a server-based meaningless currency construct that allowed people to earn and spend completely incorporeal money in exchange for items that were freely and infinitely generated by the server admins.
Stuff like physical, massive "runes" that allowed for personal teleportation and invisible doors and all sorts of pointless psychological bullshit that masked any actual cool creative advancements (and don't get me wrong - the Rune system is really cool, it gives weight and meaning while retaning the "in-game" magic that used to exist)

People began to COVET things in a thousand identical virtual Edens.

So the game began to change, for us.

Gabe was more overt. He was the hot headed revolutionary. You can find his youtubes, I'm sure you've seen them - worlds ransacked in late night raids, glorious structures ground down into their base components and rebuilt into massive, hilarious pirate ships smack dab in the middle of the shambles of the remaining metropolis.
Giant trollfaces of obsidian and sand.
Built by hand, god damn it.

If they could have put a burning happy face on the side of every reconstructed office building, I'm sure they would have.

I was more personal, more quiet.
I began to reverse engineer teleporter "keys" - see, since the rune had to physically exist in the world, the way you kept it private and personal was by "keying" the waypoint with up to four distinct blocks, making a 4-unit key out of any combination of obtainable materials, arranged in a direction-dependent pattern.

This acted as both a fast-travel option that allowed you to warp across the map to your remote home base, and as a personal security that meant nobody could come in and nab your sweet carats or (more likely and less elegantly) hack your base apart, ransack it for precious materials, and fill it with lava swastikas and 1x1 dirt towers forever ascending skyward. Maybe, if you got a particularly clever griefer, a signpost with "FUCK UR SHIT PWNED BY SESSHOMARU93" would be left in the wreckage.

If the golden age of Minecraft was innocent imagination unleashing, the silver age was bitter mind games against random strangers.

Truth be told, it was almost as fun.

See, the concept of security was nonexistent. We were all equal in power - anyone could build a pickaxe and "brute force" their way into your complex.

You could build doors, yes. Doors that only opened when you pulled a lever right next to them, in fact! This strategy just managed to confound the incredibly shitty (yet murderous in all the right ways) AI undead that shambled around mansions and huts alike (Zombies - the original equalists)

But a fellow player would just - if he was nice, like me - bring his own lever and jam it into the wall next to the door. It was like carrying the key to the city.

If you were a douchebag, you just pickaxe'd a gaping goddamn hole right next to the door.
We were all Juggernauts capable of carving a 1x2 tunnel through earth, stone, and fucking solid bricks of iron if need be.
The only thing that stopped anyone was Obsidian, mainly because it took like 30 seconds for a Diamond axe to cut through.
Except even if you were insane enough to carve enough obsidian out of the earth's fiery heart to encircle your compound like a giant, black physical manifestation of Sakoku itself...the fuckers would just either tunnel under it like mole men or abseil over it like self-erecting cranes made out of 100% dirt.

The only solution was to put as much distance between yourself and other people as possible before attempting any undertaking of meaning - avoiding the same people who made the game fun in the first place.
It was a time of complete insanity and ingenuity. The two often sync up like that.

So you built a teleporter miles away from civilization and lived in constant fear of logging on and finding the contents of your meaningless treasure chests magically transformed into a big cock made of lava on your front lawn.

(Once, I logged on and Gabe had relocated our pirates booty chests to another part of our deserted steppe hideaway. I was convinced we had been masterfully fucked with, as nothing else in our compound [slowly growing more ornate with the spoils of half a dozen bourgeoisie bastard's bases] was disturbed in the slightest. I freaked out for a solid day until he remembered to tell me where the treasure was hidden. If this was an Edgar Allen Poe story I'd have throttled him to death before he'd said a word.)

The game stopped being about building anything new. It became entirely about raiding tombs of those who had gone on to other servers, and hacking the warp mechanism of the fools who remained.

See, there was that brief but beautiful moment when new technology was introduced but the layman didn't fully understand the ramifications of using it.

This was what the first hackers felt, when they cut to the core of the first operating systems and found front doors of streaming code hanging invitingly open.

Everyone's first warp key set was the Minecraft equivalent of setting your password to "1234".

4 of any one block type was a good one. That lasted about a day.
Or one of any type and 3 blank spaces.

The beauty of it was the perceived (and actual) amount of security the system offered, and the completely idiotic way most people used it.

So while one of us was thinking up new and maddening maximum security combinations we would "reserve" by constructing the first of its kind and linking it to nowhere (okay, uh, North Glass, West Stone Pressure Switch, South Pumpkin, East Lapis Lazuli! Lets see the fuckers work that one out! NOBODY has pumpkins!), the other one of us would be laying down potential outgoing runes and just brute forcing different combinations with frightening speed.
(Okay, 4 brick. Nothing. Write that down. Uh, 2 brick 2 glass. Other way. Bingo. Mark that with a sign. Build new one.)

The resource-based warpkey mechanic also provided a tangible gap between the meaningless day to day 12 year olds with chests full of stacks of dirt (a surprisingly useful find, when you're busy building a perfect floating sphere of dirt to live in - but that's another story to ask me about: the Shapes program) and the obviously-friends-with-the-admin rich fuckers with literal golden thrones.

It takes 9 diamonds to make a solid block. Four blocks means if you want to use that warp key combo, you need 36 goddamn diamonds.
But the glorious thing about it was, if you did have those diamonds....a 4-diamond key is just as insecure as a 4-wood key. It was like having a giant cartoon safe locked with the padlock from a gym locker.

Whats worse is that they invariably did it anyway, to flaunt their wealth to nobody since it was a secret combo anyway.

The higher-up resources like gold and obsidian were the easiest to crack. They were the most predictable.
The hardest combos to crack were the most obscure, mundane, least used items with a recurring element. (Cactus Lever Water Water? FUCK that guy.)

I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned from that somewhere.
We learned it by being the most paranoid motherfuckers on the planet. We had decoy chests full of just enough treasure to dissuade the most persistent of Indiana Jonesing motherfuckers.

The gorgeous part was, since we had all the top key combos under lock and....key *shades*, the first step upon cracking somebody elses base key was to establish a hidden waystone of our own, usually directly under the existing gate. That way, even if they changed their combo later on, we had an actual, physical, mother fucking back door hidden in their program.

I mean house.

Even then, our "protest" was futile.

The general modding community never stopped churning out innovative ways to ruin fun.

Server information was stored in logs, At any instant the admins could just roll back to a time when shit wasn't wrecked.
Then they started just warping to people, completely disregarding the suspended disbelief caused by the physical rune gate system.
Eventually we got banned for something stupid like ignoring the coded in rules about "not using programs that give your character literal no-clip flight, x-ray vision, super speed, godlike powers used only for trolling", something something.
We didn't have the fight in us anymore anyway.


I logged on today, for the first time in a little less than a year.
It's fucking awful. Every server and its grandmother is 'roided out with these bloated generic laundry lists of mods. No flight, obviously.  You can just straight up type /lock and lock any chest or block you don't want anyone else to touch.
Strange artificial RPG elements. Stock markets. "Abilities".

You can place special blocks that prevent anyone from disturbing anything within a massive radius of that block.
Admins can immediately identify WHO moved WHAT block just by clicking on it.
Everything that used to be "Deathmatch" or "Survival" is now named "Hunger Games", for some inexplicable reason.
Doors just wont open if you aren't the person who set them down. And it's all obviously third party because the actual game itself just goes "Yeah dude, just open that fucking door? What's the problem." and then glitches and warps you a half second backward in time because it's being told what to do by a 3rd party security monster.

Ugh.

I managed to break in anyway, of course.
And I made a decent afternoon of it, it almost had the magic old Minecraft had.

Not old old Minecraft, of course. We'll never have that again, and that's a sad fact.
But I was creeping around some rich fuckers underwater compound, trying to figure out how to get myself in and set up a base warp somewhere in his storage cellars.

See, if you have to choose between some little dipshit griefer or me breaking into your house, you want me. I'm a conscientious burglar.

If you have a beautiful, original, or at least time-invested structure? I respect that.

I swam the length of this asshole's underwater tunnel system, looking for a way in that didn't involve breaking glass. I carry reserve batches of common items so I can replace anything I break. Sure, I might bash down the wall directly NEXT to your door, but I will patch it up when I get to the other side.
Eventually I got in by swimming straight up an ornamental fountain, then building a floating bridge of dirt (that I politely shoveled away as I crossed) across to the  nearest balcony.
Fuck, I built myself a portable furnace to lug around just to smelt sand so I could replace a few glass panes I broke
(What fucker puts person-locked doors INSIDE his own house with an actual sign that says "Security Check"???)

I accidentally flipped a switch in a guys automated farming room, with contained torches shedding 24/7 light on rows of cultivated plants - it was a gorgeous facility, and he had this marvelous system wired up to a single switch that flooded the whole room and pushed all the grown wheat with flowing water directly up to your feet. Never seen anything like it, and it was already ruined because I knew he had just found the plans online and built this thing from a blueprint.

But you know what? I went back and replanted every fucking square of wheat I disturbed.
Did I end up with bushels of spare wheat stuffed down my trousers? Fuck yes, I'm a gentleman thief and I just spent like 10 minutes planting your crops, shitbeard. I just earned that. You just payed me.

The reason for my anger is the fact that half an hour later, after I've squirreled myself away up in a corner of his floating cloud garden (deep in the inner shell of the hollowed-out island, like a stowaway on the Titanic), I get a message from this fucker going "BREAK INTO MY HOUSE AGAIN AND I'LL BAN YOU."
"Listen, buddy, I didn't know what that lever was going to do. And I replanted everything, anyway."
"DON'T CARE. READ THE SIGNS. YOU'RE LUCKY I'M NICE"


So. A way to have fun that focused on breaking arbitrary rules is no longer an option.

Boo fucking hoo, I know. I'm fully aware that my stance is that of the cranky old man complaining that things were more fun back in the day, even if the day in question was mere months ago when the "rules" of the video game in question were less strictly laid down.

I guess I'm just glad I was there for a part of it, when the predecessors to these strange, alienating plastic worlds were just forming and you could get away with jacking into a phone booth, strapping on some goggles, and hacking the Gibson.

Even though that was never a real thing anyway.