Exploring the Minecraft Phenomenon
I first started hearing about Minecraft on twitter. The messages were cryptic, describing some sort of game involving mining for ore or some such thing. They were little snippets of “Finally, I found coal. Now I won’t die at night!” and “ZOMBGWTF ZOMBIES!!!” or “How do you make bricks?”. I had no idea what kind of game they could possibly be describing.
Then videos started being linked. I passingly glanced at a few of them. The blocky aesthetic of the game was neat, but I couldn’t really tell what the heck was going on in the actual game. What finally pushed me over the edge was listening to our friends over at the Joystiq Podcast discuss the game on their show. Justin McElroy’s experience with Minecraft really got me wondering just what kind of game this is.
Before I get into my own thoughts on Minecraft, I just want to make it clear that this is not a review of the game. Minecraft is still in its alpha form and new features are being worked on even as I type this.
My adventure started in the hills, with large mountains off in the distance. It was snowing, a whether effect I wasn’t even aware was in the game. I had looked up a few videos on how to get started and knew that step one was to cut down trees for wood. This was easy enough, as the area I started in had plenty of trees. While you can use an axe for chopping down trees, you can actually just use your hand. Its a necessary mechanic as you need wood to make the axes. Otherwise it would have lead to an infinite loop of needing thing A you can’t get to make thing B, which you need to get thing A.
Next I had to find coal. Coal leads to torches, which allow you to not have monsters spawn in the darkness, including your house.
I wandered around for a little while, noticing the sun was rapidly starting to go down. I had heard that night brings monsters, and with no defenses that quickly leads to your demise. I then saw a huge archway of stone that cut a path through the side of one of the mountains. I was impressed with how cool it looked being made completely out of randomly generated terrain. Minecraft’s blockiness lends itself well to this mechanic.
As night descended upon me, I desperately dug out a small hole in the side of the mountain. I created some torches and placed them in my hovel. Soon I became the equivalent of a Tolkien dwarf. I had a very small opening to what became an increasingly elaborate chain of mines. New Moria, some might call it.
As I descended, I would come across huge caverns full of treasures and baddies. Fortunately, by this point I had been able to fashion some swords and armor. My mines were expanding, and I was becoming increasingly powerful.
"The Long, Long Tunnel"
So what does this all mean? What is the real “game” here?
That is a very interesting question, and it leads to why I think Minecraft has become such a phenomenon among gamers.
Even within the spectrum of “open world games”, there are almost always things designed to keep you playing. Story, sidequests, etc. are all there to push the player forward. In most games, this completely fits the experience players are looking for. Sure, there are those out there that play Grand Theft Auto games for hundreds of hours without completing a single mission, but the majority of gamers talk about the game’s story and play mechanics.
Minecraft, on the other hand, is completely open ended. There is no story or quest givers trying to push you forward. You are dropped into a world and not told what to do, or how to do it. The easiest analogy I can think of is being given a vanilla bucket of Legos. You don’t have instructions telling you what to build. You have the ability to build whatever your imagination can come up with.
And that is where the big appeal is. Most gamers I know are creative people. Given the tools to do what they want, their imaginations run wild. This is why Minecraft leads some people to build computers inside the game, or the U.S.S. Enterprise. It was the same phenomenon we saw when Little Big Planet came out. Some saw the game’s mechanics as a challenge to push the limits of the game engine and see just what kind of crazy stuff they could come up with.
I think Minecraft is an important game. It challenges the player to make their own fun. This is unheard of in most games, and I think it has lead to a lazy mentality. Granted, there are mechanics where you can fight off monsters, but it’s not the focus of the game. Unless you want it to be.
Tags: Minecraft, Mojang Specifications, open world games, PC, sandbox game
This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2010 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Articles, Indie Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 17th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
The Mega Man Network » Rockman DASH? More like Blockman DASH! says:[...] are pretty good that you’ve heard of this whole “Minecraft” thing. If not, here’s a primer. Despite being in Alpha, the game is blowing up huge. The game might not be in a finished state, [...]
October 17th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Meta says:I’m learning about the Minecraft phenomenon too. I am surprised that few reviewers compare it to Second Life. SL is also open ended with no goals or game type formalities. And you can build to your heart’s content anything from jewelry to clothes to shops to planets.
October 19th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Michelle says:I think the thing I love most about Minecraft is how satisfying the world is; be it the goals that you make for yourself or how each randomly generated world is yours, unseen by any other, just waiting to be seen and explored for the first time.
It’s utterly unique experience, so between the genius of it’s design and the freedom affords you, I can completely understand why so many gamers are so enamoured with it.
October 25th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Adam "Heat Man" Anania says:Wow, dunno how I missed this article about my favorite game currently!
Though actually, I have to disagree with your conclusion. While many people do find creative things to do with Minecraft, that isn’t necessarily the purpose of the game. If you start up in Minecraft and decide to just make a replica of the Eiffel Tower, you’ll probably get killed once night falls. Notch himself has said he would rather make the game harder than easier, and I’m sure he intends to make it tougher to fend off monsters. Eventually, making a well-lit box you can put yourself inside of isn’t going to be enough. A lot of the “creativity” I see isn’t in the game letting you build what you want, but in how players learn to build things to overcome the threats in the Minecraft world.
I think the real key to Minecraft, well, there are two. One is that the game lets you do what you want, which you summed up as it is. But the other is the sense of surprise, or “emergent gameplay” as some would call it. With how the game is made, events and circumstances will always come up that you may or may not be prepared to handle, and these events are unscripted. You never know when you’ll run into a monster, or if that next block you dig will unleash a sea of magma. You may go out to gather meat, and then run into a totally wicked looking cave. These surprised are great because they’re unscripted, and they don’t rely on the user to create them, as games like LittleBigPlanet do.
I think you do “feel” what makes the game so special, and indeed important, but it’s not just the creativeness or the sandbox nature of the game. So we in a sense, we just see the same thing with different terms. Though I’ve yet to see any evidence that LittleBigPlanet was anything of a phenomenon.
October 25th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Jonah "spambot" Gregory says:The phenomenon I’m referring to with Little Big Planet is how the users started making unusual things within the game mechanics, like music boxes and fully functioning calculators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRgYBHoAoU
I think I actually play the game myself more in line with what you are talking about, but for those that do just want to build stuff, there are settings you can change on the server side to completely remove enemies, damage, etc.