My deep and abiding hatred of Minecraft has been no secret around these parts. I tried it on PC, I tried it on the iPad, I even picked up an Xbox copy at the Redbox and played it for a night to get some cheap achievements, but it just didn’t hold me. And then the unthinkable happened…Pea asked me to teach her to play Minecraft and being the good gaming mama that I am I got her a copy of the and set about trying to best figure out how to teach her to play the game. When I thought that I had it figure out I sat down with her to make it happen. I skinned the blocks to make them appear more smooth and Lego like (ok, that was probably more my preference than hers) and we decided to have a bit of a building party. For the most part she sat, directed, and watched for the grand total of about half an hour and then she slowly slid away to go play with actual Legos.
While I immediately felt a bit of a reprieve, I have to admit that I also felt compelled to figure out what it was about Minecraft that seemingly left her a bit cold even though it help the promise of all of her favorite things: building, narrative, talking to Jack on XBL, and killing things. The best I could figure out was just that there wasn’t enough there there. While the same can be said for Legos and the little programming games that she plays and loves there seems to have been a different level of expectation with the console itself. And then it happened. The Project Spark beta for XBox One launched.
Project Spark is a world/game building game by Microsoft that allows you to either build in straight creative mode or to build in game mode with built in narrative and games based situations. The best way that I can think to describe it is Fable meets Minecraft.
I have been playing around with this game for just a smidge more than an hour and I have already built and played through one full adventure that I created. Project Spark allows me to choose my protagonist, the backstory, my quest, my goal, who I fight where and how many, and a number of different RPG game elements. I, of course, built a female protagonist who had to journey to a distant land to find a magical elixir to save the communal tree that bound my town together after it had been attacked by the necessary bad guy. And while I initially questioned how it was possibly going to be fun to play through an adventure that I had just created, since the element of surprise was going to be totally non-existent, I was pleasantly surprised and the creation and play through part of Project Spark were equally entertaining.
The only thing that I could think while I was playing this game was how much Pea is going to love being able to build her game the way that she wants, including princess warriors, castles, large sprawling areas with bad guys, and even larger sprawling areas free from them so that she can explore without worrying about being placed in peril. And the drag and drop interface seems to lend itself well to teaching young ones the basics of game/narrative design. This is definitely one game that I can’t wait to introduce her to. Minecraft be damned. Unfortunately, I can see this game doing some definite damage to my wallet with all of the purchasable theme upgrades for building.
