Minecraft enters real world with $110M global theme park deal
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/8/18215682/super-nintendo-wor...
Like is it regular construction with a bunch of plastic "boxes" covering the outside, with some kind of printed vinyl coverings? How is it made heavy-duty enough both without cracking as well as without the printed texture scratching off or fading?
What do you do about all the rain that collects on the top of every box? Is there some kind of drainage system?
I'm sure these are solved problems -- I'm just curious what the solution is.
The whole thing kinda makes me queasy.
Minecraft as a brand is now much more than just a blocky PvE game. I have young kids and they'd love to visit a Minecraft themed park. (So would I!)
How it'll turn out in reality is anyone's guess, but it's a reasonable bet.
It's cheaper for a parent to get their kids a device they can play Minecraft on, than to keep getting new Lego sets.
Kids today almost never get raw brick sets and let their creativity loose.
Instead, the focus is on specific sets, which you complete, then play around with as ordinary plastic toys. Yeah you could disassemble and do crazy stuff but in my experience that doesn't happen as often.
Compare with Minecraft creative mode. Kids and I logged hundreds of hours doing silly stuff, goofing around and embarking on "impressive" (for us) builder projects.
I'd say for current kids Minecraft is what LEGO was for us a few decades ago.
Lego used to be such a big part of my childhood, a creative outline bar none. The amazing realization that with a few basic blocks, you can build so many different things - letting your creativity go wild and build your own worlds.
But like you said, today, you buy a box set and it comes with a whole bunch of super specific pieces. Sure, the result will perhaps look much more real if your race car model now has an appropriately bend fender piece instead of a step approximation. But you'll never be able to reuse that piece for anything else.
But what's worse is that I do not see any desire in my kids to even try and come up with their own creations. It's exactly like you said, they enjoy following the instruction and build the exact thing this box was meant to be, and that's it. Play with it and then it gets dissambled again after a while. They might build it again, yeah, sure, but always exactly like it was predesigned by the company. Instead of fostering creative kids, we're breeding robots. I thought it was just my children so I'm very interested to read someone else having had the same experience.
No wonder that Minecraft then has taken over that niche. My kids are too young and don't know the game yet, I've been trying to reduce screen time. But if the real world and tangible toys aren't inspiring them as much as they did when I was young, it makes you wonder if you shouldn't allow them to express themselves at digitally at an earlier age.
The sets were filled with space pieces like satellite dishes, city pieces like garage doors, medieval castle pieces, and so forth.
Once you built the set you got bored of it within a few days and its pieces went in the pile that you built new things out of. That was your raw brick set. The garage door became the ceiling of a spacecraft.
I don't see why it would be different with the sets now. They're just as themed as they were 30 years ago, the only difference is that they've gone from generic themes like "space" to branded themes like "Star Wars".
And if there are a few more custom pieces per set, I don't think that prevents their reuse in other ways.
If anything has changed, it's just that kids have a lot more options now. If kids play less with Legos, that's not because the sets have changed.
They're trading one set of skills for another. They get good at moving things around on a tablet, with a mouse, and a joystick, but they lack the practical motor skills of placing blocks ontop of each other and imagining how to build a house from bricks IRL.
If delicate motor skills are something that needs developing, it seems like handwriting and drawing and painting are going to be infinitely more effective than building with Legos, no?
But realistically a lot of kids today are getting much less practical motor skills building things, and a lot more specific fine motor skills controlling video game interfaces.
I think building things has a much wider range of motor skills than using UIs.
There is absolutely nothing unfortunate about it. Like you said, Minecraft is a better value for the money. And it's also far more freeing.
As a kid I've entered Lego competitions via school. Lego Technic kits were amazing, Mindstorms was wicked cool, and I spent hundreds of hours playing the old Lego flash and Shockwave games and generally being a part of the online community. Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident is still one of my all-time favorite puzzle strategy games.
But Minecraft still blows it all out of the water. When tedstone was introduced, my entire world opened up. I was implementing clocks, CPUs, registers, screens, not to mention all the standard redstone engineering. The game is very deep and can be very technical.
That said, I haven't played it in a decade now. Been considering getting back into it.
Consider that a a lot of video games are crowing about having a few 10K's of concurrent online players. Minecraft, 180M per month, been doing numbers like this for years.
This generation (20somethings and younger) generally loves selfie opportunities with their favorite characters, that drives a huge amount of interest in existing parks like Disney, Universal etc. Of course the Minecraft characters don't have brand recognition like Mickey or the Minions. Yet. But those 180M are way more deeply engaged with Minecraft than they are with any movie character.
If you were going to pour money into building that character recognition, or try any number of other tweaks to the theme park formula, Minecraft's a viable place to start just due to the scale.