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I always find articles about Minecraft interesting. I live off of Minecraft's success at the moment (I created the linked Minecraft wiki and also the Minecraft
by citricsquid 15y ago
I always find articles about Minecraft interesting. I live off of Minecraft's success at the moment (I created the linked Minecraft wiki and also the Minecraft forum) and I often find myself disagreeing with articles about why the game is so successful.
I think the single biggest reason Minecraft has such success is completely accidental, something Notch never consciously caused: Minecraft is a creative game, a game that you need to be creative to enjoy properly, and what do creative people do? They share their creations.
Minecraft came at the perfect time, it came when indie games were becoming more popular, when Youtube video series about video games ("Let's Plays") were rising in popularity and at a time when the internet had become very social, it's so incredibly easy to share content now. If I want 100 people who don't play Minecraft to see a creation I've made in Minecraft it's very easy for me to do that, 5 years ago it would have been close to impossible to do this because the only real place to share content would be the forum for that game, and everyone on that forum would already know about it, so spread of the game would have been severely limited.
Minecraft is a fantastic game and of course if the game was bad it would never have been popular, but the success is in my opinion entirely an accident and a matter of being in the right place at the right time, nothing Notch could ever have expected or intended.
- extension 15y agoI think it's the combination of creativity and struggle against nature. There have been many games about one or the other but I've never seen one that combined them as Minecraft does. Natural resources fuel your projects and your projects help you control nature. It's a game about the very essence of humanity.
- chipsy 15y agoI do think there is kind of a "perfect storm" effect around this game. It isn't so unique that you can't find a game to compare it to. In fact, two of the biggest influences are already present in Notch's previous work: Procedural landscapes: Infinite Mario Bros. Multiplayer wilderness survival: Wurm Online And the voxel terrain concept - the feature which surfaces most visibly - was already demonstrated in many other games. In light of this I've charted a path for my own games which doesn't seek to ape the specific concepts or technologies of Minecraft, but instead aims to achieve the same level of intrinsic "I want to share this" and supplements it with a dynamic that adds some explicit rewards for doing so(the social game virality model - not necessarily tied to FB or any "social platform" though). This comes at some risk of sucking out the intrinsic joy, but the potential reward is to have even faster growth than Minecraft - assuming the game is equally good.
- FeministHacker 15y agoWhat I find interesting is the ultimate heratage of MineCraft: If I recall correctly, Wurm Online directly owes it's existance to RuneScape, a Fantasy MMO with skills instead of classes, and a strong crafting system. RuneScape started originally as a project to recreate Utima Online in java.Ultima Online has a crafting system, player housing, skills instead of classes, and is the second-oldest MMO, and the first that most people would recognise as such. Ultima Online is closer to a MUSH or MOO, unlike most modern MMORPGS. On the whole they follow a similar style of game as designed in DikuMUD, one of the most popular MUD engines. As far as I am aware, there are few major competitors to Ulima Online and RuneScape. The DikuMUD model of classes and limited interaction with the world is far similar to develop and market (see World of Warcraft et al). Yet MineCraft's appeal clearly shows there is a huge demand for something else.