> Give people a blank piece of paper and ask them to “have fun!” A few might get excited and start writing a poem or sketch a masterpiece. But most will be annoyed, grow bored and give up.
Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.
Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.
Minecraft has some simple mechanics. You can collect stuff. You craft stuff. You have to survive. That makes it fun to get into. And yes the creativity and community builds on that to achieve some amazing things which amplifies the fun, and at that point you can ignore the survival/goal part of it. It's quite a bit different from a virtual world like Second Life.
The people who design and build giant amazing things in Minecraft are analagous to the poets and sketchers in the blank-paper example.
Expectation wise virtual reality is like artificial intelligence. Whatever AI solved just became "computation", while the mythical "real AI" was always just past the horizon.
During the early years, VR was 3D immersive MMO dungeon (MUD) environment. VR caves and head mounted displays aren't common place. But I'd say in most other ways, the vision for VR has been largely realized.
In the mid 90s, I worked on a blacksun (Snowcrash) inspired virtual world kinda thing. We tried to divine a collaboratively built world that would then be used as the scenes to host other games. Not too different from SecondLife. It sucked.
At no time did any one come close to conceiving something as simple and awesome as Minecraft.
[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-minecraft-generati...
WoW was popular with kids, but there were never 3 million children playing it. The majority of WoW and EverQuest players have been adults. MMOs, even kids MMOs, are unmodifiable theme parks which don't hold a child's attention for very long. Free Realms, the MMO made by Sony Online Entertainment targeted at kids, had to run TV ads to remind them to play[1]. Meanwhile Mojang has spent zero dollars marketing Minecraft (if you don't count Minecon expenses). Viral spread among children has helped make it the seventh highest selling PC game of all time[2].
MMOs have numerous specialized blogs covering them; the popular MMOs have dozens of blogs devoted specifically to each title. Minecraft has almost no blogs covering it because blogging is an activity done by adults.
In contrast, searching YouTube for "minecraft" currently yields "about 70,200,000 results." Instead of reading, most children would rather watch a video and quite a few have mastered making and uploading their own. One top YouTuber specializing in Minecraft makes enough to earn a living off it (he's young and single), and he's still gaining subscribers[3].
Minecraft is different. There's never been a game like it.
[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2009/09/john-smedley-on-free-r... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games [3] http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/sethbling