MineZ: A tale of adventure and strategy (with a hint of remediation)

Hey everyone,

As I spoke about in my last blog, I wanted to delve into the specific games that I played with my friends within Minecraft that really shaped the way that I approached and appreciated games within my formative years. While we played a plethora of games and gamemodes over the years, the most salient example of a game that meant the world to us was MineZ.

MineZ was a remediation of the popular multiplayer, zombie-survival game DayZ which was released in 2013. MineZ was unique among popular minecraft games at the time because it was purely based on your own survival and could be played over days, weeks, or even months if you were skilled enough. Where most multiplayer games within Minecraft at the time were focusing on gamemodes like Team Deathmatch or the like, the idea that you could log out and “save” your progress within MineZ caused its popularity to BOOM.

Additionally, what made MineZ take off was the vast expanses of the map as well as the easy to learn yet hard to master mechanics of the game. Speaking first on the detail and expanse of the map, here is a screenshot of what an overview looks like:

While this may seem impressive in its own right, what makes this map really cool is the fact you can zoom in and click on each individual town or stronghold in order to find out what kind of loot you can find there as well as what challenges/legendary items it may hold. If you want to look at it more in depth, the link is

https://maps.shotbow.net/minez/#world;surface;-285,64,-1889;1

With the foundation of what MineZ actually is, I want to talk about the different nuances of the game that I found interesting kept bringing me back no matter how many times I died.

Firstly, this game being a zombie-survival game may make it seem like the game is solely PvE (player vs environment) but that is NOT the case. What made this game truly terrifying were the groups of players that would team up to wipe out players within both starting and late-game towns that were known as bandits. The game actually would recognize these people and give them a red nametag that everyone could see and be intimidated by. This added an element of almost paranoia to the game, where every single entity you saw (be it zombie or other player) immediately put you on edge and look for ways to protect yourself.

However, there were also the other types of people: healers. There was a sense of camaraderie between some people and it caused there to be almost a counter-bandit group that the game also recognized with a green nametag.

While this may make it seem like everyone would have some sort of indicator whether they were friend or foe, the opposite cannot be more true. Only about 5% of the player base had these indicators, which really speaks to the level of uncertainty you had whenever anyone came into your vision.

Finally, I want to speak on the easy to learn and hard to master mechanics that made it so the game was continually interesting no matter how much you played. Referring back to the map, a player who starts a life in MineZ spawns on the coast. This is important because unlike normal minecraft, MineZ adds another element of danger: dying of thirst. Because of this, the game spawns you on the coast towns so a player can theoretically gear up and find supplies and teammates necessary to advance into the more difficult and sparse late-game towns (called the North because of all the snow)

You could spend weeks just on the coast. Finding decent loot, meeting players, killing players, or just exploring the intricacies of every single coast town would be a great enough game as is. However, the element of the late-game towns made the game that much better.

The North was dangerous. Higher zombie spawn rates, lack of food and water resources, and difficult dungeons made it a high risk area. But there was also high reward. The North had the best loot in the game and provided access to legendary items such as the Heal bow (a dungeon my friends and I did) that would heal whoever you shot. This attraction led many advanced players into the North, which meant they spent days preparing for just the journey, not the mention the difficulties found within the towns.

Honestly, I never got to explore every part of the world through the years I played, and I cannot imagine anyone truly knowing every part of the world.

What I can say though, is that MineZ is the most perfect game I have ever played. It mixed difficultly with intrigue and the sunk-cost fallacy. It had social dynamics and world constraints that made it both strategy and fast paced. I truly wish I could go back to the time where I first found it and play it again. I hope you all give it a try on the minecraft server showbow.com 🙂

Crisis, Despair, Isolation, and Skype

In 2013, the absolute worst thing to happen to a young Christopher Conway occurred: he had to go to sixth grade. Now, this would not have been as big of a deal as middle-school age novels made it out to be, except for the fact that I had to leave the system that I went to elementary school in. I went to a small private elementary school (around 100 kids in K-5) named Thackston my entire elementary career, and with this, I was around the exact same group of kids every single day for the entirety of my remembered life until I was 11. Therefore, I was absolutely distraught regarding the idea of going to school without my core friend group of my boys Campbell, Whit, and Jackson (+ a few others we picked up along the way). Pictured here

These are the homies since day 1, and I love these guys more than almost anyone in the world. So we can all clearly see my issue.

However, this is where gaming comes into play. See at the time, we were all obsessed with what every single child in the early 2010s was: Minecraft. This was absolutely great (and if you read my second blog in two weeks I will explain our favorite thing to do), but we came across a simple problem. We had no idea how to communicate with each other while we played. Beforehand, it was more of a play-at-home and then talk-about-it-at-school kind of arrangement, but now we did not have that option. You wanna know what we decided? We tried to group call on a super old landline that looked like this:

How do you think that went?

The answer is terribly for all those playing along at home, and I reached the lowest of the low in my story. I thought we were all going to grow apart and I was never going to see these guys again. That is when the hero of this story enters: my mother. I was particularly bummed one sunny tuesday evening and explained my phone-woes, and she said three words I will never forget: Try Skyping them.

“HUH?” is what my peabrain said. Outwardly though, I said “Mom, what is Skype” That is when I learned about the sweet sweet programs whose purpose was solely to make calls online. Now this was before Microsoft acquired Skype, so it was still a good program, and we were absolutely LIVING. We played Minecraft every day after school, and it was one of my favorite times ever in my life because it was so innocent and pure.

As I have grown up, the group of guys I play with have moved to Discord instead and onto more recent games like League of Legends and Fortnite. However, through the years I have come to realize that it was never really the game that mattered. We had downloaded hundreds of games trying to find ones that we enjoyed and wanted to keep playing, and every single time, I was so focused on the game without realizing I was missing the most important point. I was playing with my best friends in the world at a time where I had literally nothing else to worry about. If that doesn’t leave you with any smidge of nostalgia, maybe this classic sound will:

See yall in a couple weeks

-Chris