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Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

Could Minecraft be that little thing that teaches kids about logic? Maybe Jeb and co. should consider adding even simpler logic based building blocks, more akin to Lego's Mindstorm as an alternative to relays and switches.

I find it fascinating to think in 10-20 years many will be looking back fondly on how they learned to hack with an unassuming little game: Minecraft.

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There is an unbelievable amount of potential in Minecraft that is completely untapped. It's really an amazing environment and I'm surprised it hasn't spawned "sandbox games" as a completely separate and significant genre, especially since a big reason Minecraft remains "untapped" is Notch's reticence to open the platform up and push the game forward.

Just thought I'd mention CraftStudio (http://craftstud.io/), the multiplayer game-making platform I'm working on. You could say it's a Minecraft-style engine but you get to make your own models, paint your own map blocks and (soon) write your own game rules (so you'll be able to make any kind of games, not just first person stuff).

Video of CraftStudio in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1QbJO3y_O0

Hacker News thread from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3751455

It is steadily becoming a lot more open - Jeb's the lead developer now and a big focus has been put on adding mod support. They've hired the guys behind Bukkit (a popular third-party mod manager for servers) to help with that, I believe.

Clones have also started to appear but it's still small indie companies making them, meaning it'll take time before many are at the same level as Minecraft.

However, the bigger companies do seem to be paying attention (an EA bigwig spoke about Minecraft in a Gamasutra piece the other day [1], though he was saying fairly obvious things), so it'll be interesting to see what the genre's like in 5-10 years' time.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167137/Minecrafts_future_...

Have a look at Spout[0]. Its an open source server that generalizes the minecraft concept. They are actually supporting 'minecraft' as a plugin called vanilla which communicates with the stock minecraft client. They also have an improved client which is currently a modded minecraft client but I believe the eventual plan it rewrite the client from scratch also.

[0]http://www.spout.org and https://github.com/SpoutDev

    I'm surprised it hasn't spawned "sandbox games" 
    as a completely separate and significant genre

Maybe you haven't noticed, but "minecraft-like" is a a burgeoning young genre - every week I see a new one on the /r/gamedev subreddit or tigsource forums.

And there are already a dozen or so commercially successful ones on steam and XBLIG.

That's where mods like Redpower comes in.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/365357-123-eloraams-mods...

The mods are really what set Minecraft apart.

Buildcraft[1] and Industrialcraft[2] are also good for teaching automation, logistics, and resource management. For example, buildcraft+redpower will let you build a machine that digs a giant hole in the ground, smelts the ores, incinerates the useless cobble, and sorts everything into the proper chests for easy access.

[1]: http://www.mod-buildcraft.com/ [2]: http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

Redpower is fantastic! I built an 8 bit ALU with it and its so much more pleasant (and faster) to work with than the standard redstone

Have you read Seymour Papert's book Mindstorm? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert

You might be on to something there.

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