5 ms·

He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret. I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands

by ilaksh 2y ago

He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret. I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off. It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features! Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve. And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first. Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.

npunt 2y ago
Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring. re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for. However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play. The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked. My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  For me pixel graphics is often more appealing than badly done 3d. And 3d pixel art = voxel art = sweet spot
- sdwr 2y ago
  Minecraft is the best building game ever made. It's perfect like Bach - built so simply you can see how it was done, and fits into the constraints of the medium perfectly.
  - spoiler 2y ago
    A game that has similar building (albeit less "scriptable" since there's no redstone) is Enshrouded. They use smaller voxels and a different polygonisation algorithm (seems to also differ based on voxel material tool). It's a really fun game, even if there's less variety than Minecraft. Also it's still in early access. I recommend you check it out if you enjoy building in Minecraft
- sufficer 2y ago
  There can also be too many graphics and effects going on. I played the Elden Ring dlc and a few fights there are so many particle effects going I literally have no idea what's going on sometimes.
moritonal 2y ago
The Video Reviewer Zero Punctuation summed this sentiment roughly as "it's a game which'll let you build a giant penis of gold if you wanted, but it'll make you do a lot of work and adventuring to do it".
jameshart 2y ago
Notch didn’t nail it all on his own though - Zach Barth nailed a bunch of those crafting and world manipulation and building mechanics in Infiniminer. Notch was screwing around cloning infiniminer in Java and Minecraft is kind of what popped out. Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.
- xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
  I certainly agree that Notch was standing on the shoulders of giant, brilliant Barth, and without Infiniminer we would never have gotten Minecraft. Zach's game design is so good that it makes you want to build, or build better games. You can clearly see the inspiration that took hold and the potential that Infiniminer and all Barth's other games absolutely exude. His games are worth playing not to sink time into but to simply breathe in. There's little else quite like it. But I think even then this unfairly discredits Notch. Regardless of what you think of the man, he certainly did nail it all on his own. He didn't just clone Infiniminer -- there's surprisingly little left in common at this point -- he used it as a springboard to invent what is essentially a new genre. You see the same sort of ingenuity in Fortnite and Roblox, who certainly have Minecraft and by lineage Infiniminer DNA in them, among others. The difference is that, for a very long time, Minecraft was Notch, and what he did with it is still arguably unparalleled today. It's staggeringly good for a single person. The simple core loop was incredibly ripe for iteration. But the ingenuity the game is absolutely littered with, dozens of little things, tiny decisions made between pre-alpha point releases, is all Notch. In so many ways the game made itself, like a chain reaction of features, but Notch himself is just totally engrained in the whole thing. It's nuts. To say he didn't nail it all on his own, I simply cannot agree with. Zach Barth and Notch both made something incredible. The shame is that no one ever gave Zach Barth the comically oversized sack full of money he deserves. I will surely never fire up Infiniminer again, but I could fire up Minecraft at any time and instant fall back into the engrossing loop of the game. Though it's been many years since I last played, I inevitably will again. I've struggled to think of an analogy here... perhaps the closest I can come up with is Quake and Half-Life, which are even more closely related. Did Valve stand on the shoulders of giants? Absolutely. But they definitely nailed it all on their own. We all build atop the works of others.
astrobe_ 2y ago
> The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable. And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right. > Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that. > It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features! To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone". It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player. In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon and https://www.mudconnect.com/ https://www.mudconnect.com/
sandworm101 2y ago
And youtube. The rise of youtube gaming channels made minecraft, and vice versa.
quitit 2y ago
It was also exciting to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available. Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live. The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player. Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk
Malcolmlisk 2y ago
Graphics are always secondary, no matter what. Graphics are a tool in videogames. You have impressive light management like in DayZ with graphics from 10 years ago, and you have one of the most expected games and one of the best games in the last decade which is elden ring (or zelda for the same purpose) that have normal graphics (or even cartoonish in zelda's case) and does not matter a lot.
hot_gril 2y ago
Surviving in the game isn't challenging, and while the game was getting popular early-on (say around beta 1.3), there weren't many optional challenges either. The most dangerous monster was a spider, you didn't need food, and the only dungeons were those original mob spawner cubes. It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.
turboponyy 2y ago
Minecraft was immensely popular before you could starve, but I agree.

by ilaksh 2y ago

npunt 2y ago

Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring. re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for. However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play. The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked. My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.

p0w3n3d 2y ago
For me pixel graphics is often more appealing than badly done 3d. And 3d pixel art = voxel art = sweet spot
sdwr 2y ago
Minecraft is the best building game ever made. It's perfect like Bach - built so simply you can see how it was done, and fits into the constraints of the medium perfectly.
- spoiler 2y ago
  A game that has similar building (albeit less "scriptable" since there's no redstone) is Enshrouded. They use smaller voxels and a different polygonisation algorithm (seems to also differ based on voxel material tool). It's a really fun game, even if there's less variety than Minecraft. Also it's still in early access. I recommend you check it out if you enjoy building in Minecraft
sufficer 2y ago
There can also be too many graphics and effects going on. I played the Elden Ring dlc and a few fights there are so many particle effects going I literally have no idea what's going on sometimes.

moritonal 2y ago

The Video Reviewer Zero Punctuation summed this sentiment roughly as "it's a game which'll let you build a giant penis of gold if you wanted, but it'll make you do a lot of work and adventuring to do it".

jameshart 2y ago

Notch didn’t nail it all on his own though - Zach Barth nailed a bunch of those crafting and world manipulation and building mechanics in Infiniminer. Notch was screwing around cloning infiniminer in Java and Minecraft is kind of what popped out. Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.

xyzzy_plugh 2y ago
I certainly agree that Notch was standing on the shoulders of giant, brilliant Barth, and without Infiniminer we would never have gotten Minecraft. Zach's game design is so good that it makes you want to build, or build better games. You can clearly see the inspiration that took hold and the potential that Infiniminer and all Barth's other games absolutely exude. His games are worth playing not to sink time into but to simply breathe in. There's little else quite like it. But I think even then this unfairly discredits Notch. Regardless of what you think of the man, he certainly did nail it all on his own. He didn't just clone Infiniminer -- there's surprisingly little left in common at this point -- he used it as a springboard to invent what is essentially a new genre. You see the same sort of ingenuity in Fortnite and Roblox, who certainly have Minecraft and by lineage Infiniminer DNA in them, among others. The difference is that, for a very long time, Minecraft was Notch, and what he did with it is still arguably unparalleled today. It's staggeringly good for a single person. The simple core loop was incredibly ripe for iteration. But the ingenuity the game is absolutely littered with, dozens of little things, tiny decisions made between pre-alpha point releases, is all Notch. In so many ways the game made itself, like a chain reaction of features, but Notch himself is just totally engrained in the whole thing. It's nuts. To say he didn't nail it all on his own, I simply cannot agree with. Zach Barth and Notch both made something incredible. The shame is that no one ever gave Zach Barth the comically oversized sack full of money he deserves. I will surely never fire up Infiniminer again, but I could fire up Minecraft at any time and instant fall back into the engrossing loop of the game. Though it's been many years since I last played, I inevitably will again. I've struggled to think of an analogy here... perhaps the closest I can come up with is Quake and Half-Life, which are even more closely related. Did Valve stand on the shoulders of giants? Absolutely. But they definitely nailed it all on their own. We all build atop the works of others.

astrobe_ 2y ago

> The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable. And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right. > Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that. > It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features! To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone". It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player. In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon and https://www.mudconnect.com/ https://www.mudconnect.com/

sandworm101 2y ago

And youtube. The rise of youtube gaming channels made minecraft, and vice versa.

quitit 2y ago

It was also exciting to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available. Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live. The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player. Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk

Malcolmlisk 2y ago

Graphics are always secondary, no matter what. Graphics are a tool in videogames. You have impressive light management like in DayZ with graphics from 10 years ago, and you have one of the most expected games and one of the best games in the last decade which is elden ring (or zelda for the same purpose) that have normal graphics (or even cartoonish in zelda's case) and does not matter a lot.

hot_gril 2y ago

Surviving in the game isn't challenging, and while the game was getting popular early-on (say around beta 1.3), there weren't many optional challenges either. The most dangerous monster was a spider, you didn't need food, and the only dungeons were those original mob spawner cubes. It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.

turboponyy 2y ago

Minecraft was immensely popular before you could starve, but I agree.