New Storytelling

I look at my to do list, not the daily one I have in Remember The Milk, which reminds me of Bible reading and phone calls I need to make, but my broad one in Evernote. It includes things I'm hoping to do in the next few months, bake a loaf of bread (not in a bread maker), make homemade ice cream and a bunch of others. The one that catches my eye is write a story in Minecraft.

I have designed games and wrote stories for a long time. I don't know what it is about these activities I find so appealing, but I do. I have disks and computers in my basement that are full of stories I have written. It s common for me to run into print out of older stories when I'm cleaning out boxes packed long ago. As you probably know, I have a story that appears here every Friday.

In addition to these stories, I have game modules for Dungeons and Dragons that go back to middle school. Some of these are on my book shelf in the garage. In addition to the games I have bought, Empire, the board game I published, sits on the giant wooden shelving unit in my basement. The boxes of this game in my parent garage is a different story for a different time. My thumb drive has several versions of the game Domination, which I ran as a play by e-mail game for a long time. I also gave notes for a ton of games, Paradox, Curse of the Pharaoh's Tomb, Orcs in the Boardroom and others. It is in my blood.

So, my hope is to bring these two things together with this goal. Writing a story in Minecraft is part game, part story. It will be probably as close to computer game design, as the way I imagined it, as I will ever be. I sip a little coffee from my "I do the things the voices in my wife's head tells me to do" cup and consider what this is going to take and what set of story to tell. I am there, in the light of my desk lamp and the monitor, but I am not there at all.

I want the players dropped in a functioning city, walled. They should get jobs and live safely for a while. That is until they find out a man has been framed for murder and the clues lead them to a larger and larger conspiracy. The story need to unfold and draw them in, in needs to change the world and move them to supposing fantastic locations. By the end, the very operation of the town might change.

This is a tall order for Minecraft. I don't even know if I can tell the whole story there, but it seems worthwhile just to try.

I leave the walled city in my mind and start up my Minecraft server. I then start up the client and double click on multiplayer. I select my server and on my screen I hop into the world. A smile on my face, I pick a site for my city and begin clearing the land.

The best part of a story is not knowing how it will end.