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I played a lot of red alert as a kid, and flight simulators, but honestly, calling the first 'creative', and the second 'open world' is ridiculous. They were ni

I played a lot of red alert as a kid, and flight simulators, but honestly, calling the first 'creative', and the second 'open world' is ridiculous. They were nice games - but if you play them today, you'll see how far games have come. You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. I don't like the game, don't like that the developer ripped off the idea, and find the art obnoxious - but you have to admit, it's basically dwarf fortress for kids. That's an order of magnitude more creative than anything we had twenty years ago.

reificator 9y ago
> don't like that the developer ripped off the idea Minecraft and Infiniminer are two very different games, similar in superficial visuals and technological implementation but completely different in terms of gameplay. Besides, if you enjoy a game and then development of that game stops, what's wrong with making your own?
- pasabagi 9y ago
  I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied the implementation from the source, or indeed used parts of the source in his game - but I think these are largely small differences. The real problem I have is it seems like this is basically how our society works - somebody thinks of something cool, then somebody else gets rich / famous / tenure off it, while the person who did most of the work is lucky to get a footnote.
  - gowld 9y ago
    Isn't infiniminer just a computerized copy of Lego. As the old saying goes, "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
    - pasabagi 9y ago
      I generally agree. To be honest, I wasn't so much making a general moral judgement about copying. Hamlet was a copy. Bach was a music kleptomaniac. Execution is way more important. I just find minecraft a particularly uncreative copy, and personally like zachatronics - so I 'don't like that he ripped it off'. Which he did. I don't think this dislike could or should extend to other copied pieces of work, games or otherwise.
      - reificator 9y ago
        I like Zachtronics, but I really, really don't get how you view Minecraft as a ripoff of Infiniminer. Infiniminer is a competitive class-based game in a constrained arena. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponents. Minecraft is a survival game in an infinite world. The goal is to build a base and progress through a tech tree, or to build things for fun. Ace of Spades is closer to being a ripoff of Infiniminer, though with more of a focus on combat. Minecraft is a game that has a similar (but more polished) aesthetic but with completely different rules. Star Wars is not a ripoff of Star Trek just because they're both set in space. They're fundamentally different at every level.
        pasabagi 9y ago
        Well, the explanation is probably that I've been taken in by a meme. I should have added a disclaimer that I've not actually played infiniminer a good deal earlier in the thread, and my feeling that Minecraft was derivative was almost entirely based on its timing, visual similarity, and my understanding that the basic mechanic (digging through voxel based terrain) was the same. An additional factor that made me extra-specially susceptible to this meme is that when I played minecraft, I immediately thought it was essentially a dumbed-down version of dwarf fortress with better graphics. What I saw at the time as the basic innovation - which I think is still what makes dwarf fortress exceptional, is a game that uses a tiling or cubic grid to allow for real creative play, with an attendant focus on mining, survival, and craft. I don't think Star Wars is a rip-off of star trek, but it absolutely is and was always intended as a derivative work. All the ideas and content was developed in earlier sci-fi. Star Wars was an interesting contribution in terms of execution - and that's exactly why I like it. It had genuinely new ideas about set design and special effects. Minecraft, on the other hand, has no new ideas I can think of. I still think it's a good game - and I'm very happy that when my kid hits the age where they wanna play games, I can point them to Minecraft and be pretty certain they're not going to be loading naked kidnapped people into a sausage factory (I played GTA2 when I was a kid), or squashing people with tanks, or irradiating them until they turn into mush. I mean, I guess they'll do those things at some point to, but it's nice that there's an actual honest-to-goodness kids game out there that doesn't suck.
  - reificator 9y ago
    Again, that both games are made of blocks (not voxels, for the record) is a sidenote. They are completely different styles of game. When a game comes out with a 2D tilemap it's not thought of as a clone of the games that came before it. Why does extending the concept to 3D and making it user-editable make it a clone?
  - zhynn 9y ago
    It's true they make less money, but I think ToadyOne is happier than Notch is. I don't know that Notch is as happy with the way things turned out as you imply.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    > I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. Infiniminer is a class-based team FPS in a closed arena. The only thing Minecraft shares with it is the block mechanic. There's a mental quirk that seems to happen with game mechanics. Do something first, you're a genius; do it for the 100th time, you're iterating on classic gameplay; but do it for the second time, and you're a thief. I don't think it has to be that way. > It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. Last I heard, Toady was making $100,000+ a year off of Dwarf Fortress donations. Zach Barth has been making games full-time since SpaceChem, cranking out successful titles once every year or two for most of the decade. Notch, meanwhile, appears to be miserable, bitter, and directionless.
    - pasabagi 9y ago
      I think the thing is, you give Zach money, he uses it to make even better games. He's clearly had a good artist helping him out with some of his recent stuff. You give ToadyOne money, he uses it to say 'I'm gonna spend the next ten years developing the magic system'. That's because they're exceptionally creative people. Notch comes across as more of an ordinary guy - smart, sure, capable, also, but fundamentally ordinary. So while if you gave Zach Notch-level money, I'd expect him to make Zachatronics into a game studio, or if you gave ToadyOne - I can't even imagine where that would lead. On the other hand, if you give most ordinary people shitloads of cash, it just makes them directionless, and puts them in a nasty position where they don't work on other people's projects because they don't have to, but they don't enjoy working on their own, because they're fundamentally not too good on new ideas. So that's why it'd be nice when somebody who's come up with a really new idea meet some success - they'd probably have some ideas about what to do with it.
      - reificator 9y ago
        See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591278 for why I think that's maybe not true. It's not due to the people involved or the money. I think it's the community around Minecraft.
- stagbeetle 9y ago
  I believe the OG is referring to "CastleMiner Z," the other, not-so oft mentioned, precursor to Minecraft. The investigative should also take note, that Infiniminer is also based off of CastleMiner Z. And that CastleMiner Z itself, was based off of another game.
  - reificator 9y ago
    I was playing Minecraft in 2009. CastleMiner came in in 2011 and the sequel CastleMiner Z came out four months later. I don't believe that your timeline is correct here.
ekianjo 9y ago
> You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. It's not because you can that everybody is using it in this way. I mean technically you can make a piece of art with brushes and paint yet almost nobody can. > That's an order of magnitude more creative than anything we had twenty years ago. Wow, you just brushed off like 30 years of video games in one sentence, without any argument. Well done.
slavik81 9y ago
RAedit (the Red Alert game editor) was simple enough for a child to use, and powerful enough to basically build your own RTS. I spent hours designing maps for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as a kid. It was really not that different from how I played Minecraft as an adult.
- pasabagi 9y ago
  I used the same editor. You could draw like, cliffs. Water. Trees. That's not a RTS. That's a picture and some pathfinding. Actually, I don't know how Red Alert did their pathfinding - perhaps it's just a picture. Building a RTS implies making your own gameplay - not just playing the same game on a different geometry.
  - slavik81 9y ago
    I made my own units, too. And you could write events in their scripting language. I think you could make a basic mod without much trouble. I mostly made a lot of giant bases and scenarios, but the tooling was quite powerful. The move to 3D basically killed that for me. Editors became much more complicated. In a way, simplifying the interface for building things in 3D was one of Minecraft's great successes.

reificator 9y ago

> don't like that the developer ripped off the idea Minecraft and Infiniminer are two very different games, similar in superficial visuals and technological implementation but completely different in terms of gameplay. Besides, if you enjoy a game and then development of that game stops, what's wrong with making your own?

pasabagi 9y ago
I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. I've no idea about the exact mechanics of the copying - whether he just copied the idea, or copied the implementation from the source, or indeed used parts of the source in his game - but I think these are largely small differences. The real problem I have is it seems like this is basically how our society works - somebody thinks of something cool, then somebody else gets rich / famous / tenure off it, while the person who did most of the work is lucky to get a footnote.
- gowld 9y ago
  Isn't infiniminer just a computerized copy of Lego. As the old saying goes, "If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.
  - pasabagi 9y ago
    I generally agree. To be honest, I wasn't so much making a general moral judgement about copying. Hamlet was a copy. Bach was a music kleptomaniac. Execution is way more important. I just find minecraft a particularly uncreative copy, and personally like zachatronics - so I 'don't like that he ripped it off'. Which he did. I don't think this dislike could or should extend to other copied pieces of work, games or otherwise.
    - reificator 9y ago
      I like Zachtronics, but I really, really don't get how you view Minecraft as a ripoff of Infiniminer. Infiniminer is a competitive class-based game in a constrained arena. The goal is to get a higher score than your opponents. Minecraft is a survival game in an infinite world. The goal is to build a base and progress through a tech tree, or to build things for fun. Ace of Spades is closer to being a ripoff of Infiniminer, though with more of a focus on combat. Minecraft is a game that has a similar (but more polished) aesthetic but with completely different rules. Star Wars is not a ripoff of Star Trek just because they're both set in space. They're fundamentally different at every level.
      - pasabagi 9y ago
        Well, the explanation is probably that I've been taken in by a meme. I should have added a disclaimer that I've not actually played infiniminer a good deal earlier in the thread, and my feeling that Minecraft was derivative was almost entirely based on its timing, visual similarity, and my understanding that the basic mechanic (digging through voxel based terrain) was the same. An additional factor that made me extra-specially susceptible to this meme is that when I played minecraft, I immediately thought it was essentially a dumbed-down version of dwarf fortress with better graphics. What I saw at the time as the basic innovation - which I think is still what makes dwarf fortress exceptional, is a game that uses a tiling or cubic grid to allow for real creative play, with an attendant focus on mining, survival, and craft. I don't think Star Wars is a rip-off of star trek, but it absolutely is and was always intended as a derivative work. All the ideas and content was developed in earlier sci-fi. Star Wars was an interesting contribution in terms of execution - and that's exactly why I like it. It had genuinely new ideas about set design and special effects. Minecraft, on the other hand, has no new ideas I can think of. I still think it's a good game - and I'm very happy that when my kid hits the age where they wanna play games, I can point them to Minecraft and be pretty certain they're not going to be loading naked kidnapped people into a sausage factory (I played GTA2 when I was a kid), or squashing people with tanks, or irradiating them until they turn into mush. I mean, I guess they'll do those things at some point to, but it's nice that there's an actual honest-to-goodness kids game out there that doesn't suck.
- reificator 9y ago
  Again, that both games are made of blocks (not voxels, for the record) is a sidenote. They are completely different styles of game. When a game comes out with a 2D tilemap it's not thought of as a clone of the games that came before it. Why does extending the concept to 3D and making it user-editable make it a clone?
- zhynn 9y ago
  It's true they make less money, but I think ToadyOne is happier than Notch is. I don't know that Notch is as happy with the way things turned out as you imply.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > I guess I think it's a bit of a tragedy that the most successful game since Doom was a copycat. Infiniminer is a class-based team FPS in a closed arena. The only thing Minecraft shares with it is the block mechanic. There's a mental quirk that seems to happen with game mechanics. Do something first, you're a genius; do it for the 100th time, you're iterating on classic gameplay; but do it for the second time, and you're a thief. I don't think it has to be that way. > It's also a shame that really creative game-makers, like ToadyOne or Zach, tend to not do that well - while Notch, who basically copied an entire game, presumably having even read the source code, is now made out of money. Last I heard, Toady was making $100,000+ a year off of Dwarf Fortress donations. Zach Barth has been making games full-time since SpaceChem, cranking out successful titles once every year or two for most of the decade. Notch, meanwhile, appears to be miserable, bitter, and directionless.
  - pasabagi 9y ago
    I think the thing is, you give Zach money, he uses it to make even better games. He's clearly had a good artist helping him out with some of his recent stuff. You give ToadyOne money, he uses it to say 'I'm gonna spend the next ten years developing the magic system'. That's because they're exceptionally creative people. Notch comes across as more of an ordinary guy - smart, sure, capable, also, but fundamentally ordinary. So while if you gave Zach Notch-level money, I'd expect him to make Zachatronics into a game studio, or if you gave ToadyOne - I can't even imagine where that would lead. On the other hand, if you give most ordinary people shitloads of cash, it just makes them directionless, and puts them in a nasty position where they don't work on other people's projects because they don't have to, but they don't enjoy working on their own, because they're fundamentally not too good on new ideas. So that's why it'd be nice when somebody who's come up with a really new idea meet some success - they'd probably have some ideas about what to do with it.
    - reificator 9y ago
      See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591278 for why I think that's maybe not true. It's not due to the people involved or the money. I think it's the community around Minecraft.
stagbeetle 9y ago
I believe the OG is referring to "CastleMiner Z," the other, not-so oft mentioned, precursor to Minecraft. The investigative should also take note, that Infiniminer is also based off of CastleMiner Z. And that CastleMiner Z itself, was based off of another game.
- reificator 9y ago
  I was playing Minecraft in 2009. CastleMiner came in in 2011 and the sequel CastleMiner Z came out four months later. I don't believe that your timeline is correct here.

ekianjo 9y ago

> You can literally build a computer in Minecraft. It's not because you can that everybody is using it in this way. I mean technically you can make a piece of art with brushes and paint yet almost nobody can. > That's an order of magnitude more creative than anything we had twenty years ago. Wow, you just brushed off like 30 years of video games in one sentence, without any argument. Well done.

slavik81 9y ago

RAedit (the Red Alert game editor) was simple enough for a child to use, and powerful enough to basically build your own RTS. I spent hours designing maps for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 as a kid. It was really not that different from how I played Minecraft as an adult.

pasabagi 9y ago
I used the same editor. You could draw like, cliffs. Water. Trees. That's not a RTS. That's a picture and some pathfinding. Actually, I don't know how Red Alert did their pathfinding - perhaps it's just a picture. Building a RTS implies making your own gameplay - not just playing the same game on a different geometry.
- slavik81 9y ago
  I made my own units, too. And you could write events in their scripting language. I think you could make a basic mod without much trouble. I mostly made a lot of giant bases and scenarios, but the tooling was quite powerful. The move to 3D basically killed that for me. Editors became much more complicated. In a way, simplifying the interface for building things in 3D was one of Minecraft's great successes.