Tell Me a Story

Heyo. Zed here. There’s a reason I am starting off this blog’s posts with Minecraft. I’ll probably get to talking about other games and maybe some tips for them but Minecraft happens first here. There is a reason for that and I’m going to try to explain it. The game tells a story. I don’t mean that it has a story in it. In fact it has no plot whatsoever. It actively avoids ever telling the player a story. I mean it has a story it makes. The story of you, making things and the landscape those things are in around you.

I mostly play Creative mode so I can build things from my stories. Here we see part of Ascala from the Astral, built in Creative mode. But even when I go into one of these with a narrative in mind to inspire a build I end up coming away with more story ideas and not fewer. This shot in particular is telling. Who uses this subway? Are there newsstands nearby or little shops selling coffee? Could I retrofit one of the houses on the street to be a cafe?

Who lives in these houses? What do they do? Can they walk to work in the little shops and cafe or do they take the subway? How far? For how long? How often? And who runs the subway for them? All of these questions come from simply putting some blocks together and building a thing. Building something of this scale is slow, really slow, but that gives time for more story ideas to happen. Then those inspire more building projects and the cycle repeats.

This is my attempt in a separate map to make a model of the inside of a grocery story from Ascala in the Astral. It took work to arrange things like this within the space I have here for it. I made multiple versions of this build in different sizes with different lighting and materials. This is a known grocery store chain in Ascala called Food-Mart. Food-Mart factors into some of the stories of Ascala I’ve written or will write.

I learned things from trying to build it. You can’t fit all that much produce in such a small space. A few watermelons and pumpkins and I ran out of space. I wanted more drink coolers in the back but I couldn’t fit them in. Along the side there are potion bottles filled with alchemy. I wanted them to be a mix of warm colours and blue. But that’s all I could fit. I learned that Ascala needs a second kind of store that is larger and can contain more food. And what about shelves full of crackers and chips? Where are those? This is why I like the game. It tells a story without meaning to at all.

Zed