Infinite Craft is a powerful glimpse into other minds

Years 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. Their house was filled with Post-it notes on which they had written, over and over, “IS THIS A DREAM?” before plastering them to every surface, because the books and symposia had all told them that the key to this magical garden was teaching yourself to constantly question whether or not you were dreaming right now.

Reader, like my friend I have never had a lucid dream. But I imagine it’s a bit like Infinite Craft, the latest browser game from Neal Agarwal. My boss Graham dropped it into our Slack this morning, and it was exactly as if he had dropped a bunch of mentos into a communal vat of Coca-cola. We are all lost now. Do not send help.

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.

The reason Infinite Craft makes me think specifically of lucid dreams and not, say, actual alchemy, is because it’s always running away from me. This is what I imagine lucid dreaming is like: you really want to lucid dream your way to New York, but the connections just get away from you and buck and shiver and twist and before long you’re in Chertsey instead. Or you’re hanging out with a porn genie. I am not here to judge.

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. They’re global first for a handful of these things. I don’t understand any of them, but that probably makes success all the sweeter.

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.