Baldur's Gate 3, Street Fighter and Lost Ark developers discuss.Read our editorial policyYears back I knew someone who was really into lucid dreaming. They had never actually had a lucid dream, but that inevitably only made them more into it. They read books on lucid dreaming and probably attended symposia on lucid dreaming.
Infinite Craft is a highly evolved version of those games where you combine items to get better items. I think these used to be called alchemy games? But anyway, you combine WATER with FIRE and you get STEAM. That kind of thing. But twenty minutes later you're staring at PORN GENIE, and you know that somehow this all started with WATER and FIRE and you decide you need to step away from it all for a while and do something else.
But better than that - better than a game about lucid dreams, not simply better than a porn genie - is that you get to confer. The secret ingredient to Infinite Craft, I think, is that because you play it in a browser, the cost of entry is incredibly low. You fire it up for two seconds, you're hooked, you share it with a bunch of people and voila: the whole game is secretly massively multiplayer.
So it's sort of a metaverse of lucid dreams, where you can slip out of your own dream and see what everyone else is coming up with. I just got LAMP. Great! But our editorial director got OZYMANDIAS. Graham, who started all this, got BATPOPE. One of our writers has turned out to be an Infinite Craft genius. They are forging new ground, and we know that because Infinite Craft tells you when you're the very first person to uncover a new item.
What a pleasure to be able to peer into others' imaginations like this. Infinite Craft really does feel like a chance to see how your friends' brains truly work. And not just your friends. Online there are people just combining numbers, or just combining diseases. Meanwhile, I combine PLANT and WIZARD and make DRUID, which feels accurate but rather basic really. Oh well. At least I got rid of that genie.