Everyone who plays video games can always recall their toughest challenges. Myself for instance remember playing Megaman X for the first time and finally beating both of Sigma’s forms after painstakingly dying at his hand countless times. It was frustrating, but in the end the fun of it and the satisfaction I felt after finally completing the game was well worth the frustration. You’ve felt it too, the madness of being stuck and then the joyous feeling of finally accomplishing something. However, when a video game is too hard that feeling goes away. If you’re left trying to figure out something more complex or doing something extremely time consuming the fun goes away. The game then becomes a chore, more appropriately it becomes drudgery. You’re very tempted to just go and search Google for some cheat codes to help speed the process but don’t want to because “that’s not how you’re supposed to play video games”. Yet it is, dear readers, that is exactly how you are supposed to play video games.

Recently I’ve been doing some recording for my Ember Inferno channel on Youtube. Going with the big fad that’s so two years ago I decided to mess around in Minecraft and record my misadventures. To make things even more fun I have been using the Technic Pack to play around with all the neat mods and what not. However, a lot of the recipes require extensive amounts resources. Take for instance the quarry. This little device will mine a section of land that you have squared off with land markers and the aid of some engines. Leaving out the engines and land markers, let’s take a look at what goes into making the quarry. So the quarry machine requires three iron gears, two gold gears, one redstone, two diamond gears, and one diamond pickaxe. One iron gear requires a stone gear and four iron ingots. One gold gear requires one iron gear and four gold ingots. One diamond gear requires one gold gear and four diamond ingots. As you can already tell, actually making this device is going to take hours, even days of your time. I find mining in Minecraft extremely boring unless I’m running into caves at a constant rate or finding ores occasionally. So what do I do? I turn to the in game item editor that comes with the Technic Pack to grab a quarry, plop it down along with some engines, and go about my business.

What really peeves me though is that some of these modders want to hide certain things from you. They leave you to figure out the recipes for various things in their mod. Understandably that’s what people did for vanilla Minecraft, however Notch made crafting so that you could figure it out. A pickaxe looks like a pickaxe when being crafted and so do various other things. However, a lot of these modders don’t realize that their are countless combinations that could be used to make their “mystery” items. Recipes for these items can probably be found…with a little bit of digging around the internet but why bother playing if you can’t easily figure out how to make the item? Also, why bother playing if you can’t figure out how to make an item work easily?

I can hear you all know saying “Oh, you’re just too lazy to figure it out.” or “It’s so simple, you can figure it out.” However it’s not. Sure, I’ll eventually figure how things work and how to make certain items but I don’t have the time nor do I want to spend that much time figuring it out. It’s boring and ruins the game for me. Just like in the Sims. Yes I’m going to use the motherlode cheat to get rich quick, otherwise it would take me a month or more to reach the amount of money required to buy that fancy pants house I made which by the way costs over a million dollars.

Games are meant to be enjoyed, they aren’t meant to be drudgery. If the only way to enjoy a game is to cheat then do so. Use that infinite gold cheat you know is out there, exploit in game defects to your advantage, have fun in video games anyway you want. Now on that note, MMORPG’s are a different story. Yes, you should play to have fun however these games have this thing called a Terms of Service which you have to adhere by. If you cheat then you get banned, simple as that. Generally MMO’s aren’t that much drudgery though.