Why Minecraft Works (Design Concepts)
hobbygamedev.com
hobbygamedev.com
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.
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.
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.
I remember seeing a 3D visualizer for DF a while back. After a quick trip to the Wiki (an invaluable resource), here it is: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63484.0
But I love DF, too, in spite of the incredibly steep learning curve. It has, indirectly, caused me to learn about the soil triangle, material densities, farming, geology, bee keeping, soap making and quite a few other strange things. I think I've posted on that before, but there are a lot of interesting things in that game.
It's weird seeing yourself go from wondering what on earth you're doing to getting to the point where you barely have to think about designating all the goblinite for melting or smelting limonite into iron or setting up an auto-locking magma death chamber with an easy reset switch.
As if you are building a giant simulation, where a very complex software system is interacting with unpredictable human players, and nobody, including the creators of the system, knows the limits of the simulation. This is the most interesting part of this type of games. This is why we get full working computers inside Minecraft, all sort of unpredictable scenarios in Dwarf Fortress, and also some really surprising glitches like the virtual epidemic that plagued the servers of WoW in 2005, almost like a real disease:
I recently got training in a volunteer neighborhood emergency response organization (CERT, in case you're interested) and they showed a video of how quickly a fire can spread. It's truly frightening.
I found my heart racing when I watched that Minecraft fire just like when I watched a real fire on video.
The firefighters pointed out that - unlike in the movies - the smoke becomes so thick so quickly that you can't run out of a burning house. You usually have to crawl. They themselves usually crawl if they really must enter a burning unit, so they can somewhat see where they're going. In some cases, even that's not possible. So they'll keep one hand on the wall and slowly make their way in. Frightening. I give firefighters a lot of credit.
Post-Mortem (or maybe a different house, but still hilarious): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MuM61RKtcs
Minecraft is all that.
Mining for resources is quite a boring grind and I don't like to do it a whole lot. Thankfully you don't have to do a whole lot of it to survive if you don't do crazy builds with a lot of iron (like minecarts).
It's also worth noting that Minecraft didn't spring fully-formed from the mind of anyone— the alpha version was out and in development for a year and a half before you heard of it. It's a beautiful demonstration of the power of an early MVP.
At the same time, it wasn't just a fluke; Notch was already an award-winning indie dev.
Citation needed on awards and indie work prior to MC; Notch was a developer for King.com, a large Flash game producer and publisher, prior to founding Mojang.
If you check out http://www.mojang.com/notch/ , he's made a few (dozen) little Java games, and he's been doing it for many years. The only awards mentioned on that page are a win at Java4k in 2006 and a third-place at Ludlum Dare in 2008. I could have sworn there were one or two more, but since GDC 2011 it's become pretty impossible to research :P
Incidentally, that win in 2006? That was for a Java Lemmings clone called... Miners4k. I'm sticking with "not a fluke."
MC is great, but it's far from perfect.
The rationale for the article is that Minecraft works (9,000+ copies per day sold) and that it is consequently very worthwhile to explore why it works.
Your prejudices (NDF and all) seemingly colored your interpretation of this article and you consequently completely misunderstood it.
That really baffles me. The article is completely consistent with your interpretation. (The author may not agree with your interpretation but he doesn’t tell and we just don’t know. Maybe he would agree with you, maybe not, there is no way to tell.)
I guess your comment shows the evils of confirmation bias.
The article has a long, subdivided section with the heading "What Works" and no corresponding analysis of any flaws or problems with the game's design. It is full of only praise and not criticism.
Whether or not something works is orthogonal to whether or not it sells.
This article sets out to explore factors in Minecraft’s design that make it successful, that make it work. The author uses those two terms synonymously (as you can see in the very last sentence of the article). You might have a different definition of “works” – and that’s alright – but the author clearly doesn’t share it.
Please don’t argue about definitions, it’s pointless. The author of the article simply thinks that games that work are games that are successful, i.e. that can attract a lot of players. That makes sense, considering the context. (The article is published on a website targeted at hobby game developers, not art critics.) Again, there is nothing wrong if you have a different definition of “works”, you just will have to accept the author’s for the duration of the article.
To repeat: The whole premise of the article is to list factors in Minecraft’s design that make it successful. It doesn’t set out to also list flaws, it never claims that the game has no flaws and, considering the premise (which is clearly and transparently laid out in the very first two sentences), it doesn’t need to waste one word on Minecraft’s flaws. Criticism is not the article’s purpose.
Where did you get the crazy idea that an article with the title “Why Minecraft Works” that mentions in the first sentence that it’s not a review and that is targeted at hobby game developers must also contain criticisms of the game?
I also want to note that the article doesn’t use very flowery language and mostly just describes features. I don’t really see any praise in that article. If you do please quote (correctly, please), I’m lost otherwise.
Oh, and regarding your funny “design choices” misquote, that phrase is actually only used once in the whole damn article, as “design choice” (singular) in reference to water and lava sources. I just want to note that “design choice” is not at odds with your interpretation. Making water and lava sources behave a certain way is objectively a design choice. (Except if you think that Notch codes by randomly smashing keys.) That language doesn’t tell you anything about intent. If the author had written “and Notch in his infinite wisdom had great foresight in designing water sources a certain way” you would have a point, as it stands you certainly don’t.
Confirmation bias indeed. A nasty one that blinds completely. I really am baffled this time.