Something funny happened a few weeks ago: I got addicted to the ugliest computer game that has been released in the past few years. The damn thing is ugly. And that’s how it gets you.
After a friend keeps bugging you to check it out, you take a look at it. First reaction? It’s fugly, but you still decide to click around a little bit.
The next thing you know, it’s 4:45 AM ON A WEEKDAY and you are desperately building up defenses trying to fend off the critters that come out whenever the game switches to night time. The worst thing is that this cycle is very repeatable, everywhere I look I find people that got sucked in the exact way. You are not truly addicted to a game until you skip naps or real sleep in order to play it.
Alex Esoterica calls it a “sickness.” Here’s an example of one of my very first rudimentary structures:
That started as a wall in front of a hole in a mountain. Then I added a roof, then a second floor, and then it got crazy:
Notice how the damn thing is now taller than some of the clouds, and I actually dug underneath and built a whole atrium. The lake? It has a glass dam. I thought that by then I had it out of my system, but I was wrong:
This was generated with the Minecraft Topographic Survey tool, it shows my tower and the area behind it. Notice the elevated walkways with glass handrails, and a frickin pyramid. And then it got even crazier:
I dug around the pyramid and built DOWNWARDS, plus the transportation network now reaches the pyramid (and many more points on the map), plus two more buildings. And a diverted waterfall, which now rides a glass viaduct.
And these are only the things you can see from the outside. I am not even showing you the mines that reach down to the very bottom of the map.
So yes, a sickness it is.
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