Do you find yourself thinking about Minecraft more often than is normal? Do you stack blocks in your mind when you’re bored at work, and go to sleep thinking about what your current Minecraft project? Don’t worry – you’re not alone, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson has been sapping gamer hours away like some kind of productivity vampire since the smash-hit indie’s release. He’s now decided it’s no longer enough that he costs you your job and your girlfriend – he wants you to be terrified as well. Enter then Endermen.
Notch recently blogged about a new mob he had created, dark, creepy characters called Endermen which will exist alongside you in the Minecraft universe. Notch has clearly put a lot of thought into these guys, talking about utilizing the reticle as a means of tapping into “the psychology of control”.
From his personal blog post, here is his description of the creative process behind the Endermen:
“Suddenly you could walk up to these looking beasts [sic] (they’re three meters tall) and watch them as they moved their blocks around, but as soon as you happened to look straight at them, they’d attack. And by ‘straight at them’, I mean putting the reticle on top of them. You can keep them visible on screen and actually look straight at them in real life, but as soon as your in-game character looks straight at them, boom.
“Still, that was more scary than creepy…. I wanted something a bit more psychological. So to really drive home the point of looking at them being bad, I made the Endermen freeze and turn towards you when you look at them. As long as you look straight at them, they stand perfectly still and look straight at you. As soon as you look away, they will run (very fast) towards you.”
“And they teleport.”
If left to their own devices, they’ll just amble around moving blocks.
That does sound pretty terrifying. You can see the ingenuity of the way they have been designed, with, as he says, you being in control of whether or not they attack you – the nagging desire to look at them, but the horror of having to deal with the consequences when you do. As he says so himself, it’s your fault: “When they attack, you know it’s your fault. When you happen to look at one, you can keep looking at it to figure out how to deal with it, but you know it WILL reach you very fast once you stop looking at it.”
