
Why Minecraft Works (Design Concepts) - sorbus
http://www.hobbygamedev.com/beg/why-minecraft-works-design-concepts/
======
citricsquid
I always find articles about Minecraft interesting. I live off of Minecraft's
success at the moment (I created the linked Minecraft wiki and also the
Minecraft forum) and I often find myself disagreeing with articles about why
the game is so successful.

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.

~~~
chipsy
I do think there is kind of a "perfect storm" effect around this game. It
isn't so unique that you can't find a game to compare it to. In fact, two of
the biggest influences are already present in Notch's previous work:

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.

~~~
FeministHacker
What I find interesting is the ultimate heratage of MineCraft:

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.

------
lutorm
This isn't really about the post, but after the article about Dwarf Fortress a
couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it a try. I find the gameplay fun and
there's definitely a lot to master, but the UI and the difficulty of
visualizing what's going on are big obstacles. (There's a program called
_Stonesense_ that does isometric drawing of the world, but that seems to be
it.) The Minecraft graphics are pretty basic, but even such a simple movable
3D view in DF would do wonders for situational awareness.

~~~
sorbus
Yeah, UI/graphics are a big learning curve for DF. It's great for people who
were into roguelikes before they found it, but even so. Tile-sets make
visualization a lot easier (although if you've gotten into the game without
one then they might be unbearable), but they're not perfect. The main problem
I have with Stonesense is that, whenever I've tried it, the latest version of
DF wasn't supported - as I understand it, the memory offsets change with each
version, since all of these tools work by looking at what DF has in memory, so
with each new release someone has to go in and figure out the changes.

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>

~~~
lutorm
Nice, that looks exactly like what I wanted. Unfortunately it seems to be
Windows-only, so I can't try it for a while.

------
Ygor
One of the best things about this type of games is the unexpected results you
can get. And I am not talking about Easter eggs or different endgames some
mainstream games boast themselves with. I am talking about really unexpected
game situations (or even incidents).

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:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood>

------
mikeleeorg
I've never played Minecraft before, but that video of fire spreading through
that Minecraft structure & surrounding trees is frighteningly realistic.

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.

~~~
kd0amg
This one?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4W82HIzUcc>

~~~
mikeleeorg
Ah yes, exactly like that.

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.

------
Maro
When I was younger and played games I always thought that it'd be nice to make
a game that isn't about killing, instead it should be about building stuff. I
also thought that it'd be nice if it'd be as general as possible, so you can
build anything you like. But also simple, because simple is beautiful.

Minecraft is all that.

------
presidentender
I'm stuck on the randomized rewards right now, looking for enough iron to help
my friend finish his ambitious minecart rail system, and simultaneously for
'enough' diamond.

~~~
ubernostrum
Branch mining is your friend -- start doing that down around level 11 or so
and you'll have all the iron, diamond and any other type of ore you'll ever
need :)

~~~
presidentender
I'm branch mining at the bedrock right now, finding about 1 diamond for every
2 iron. Of course, I'm finding very little iron.

~~~
ubernostrum
Move up a bit. Ore concentration isn't all the high right at the bedrock
level. Typically, layers 11-16 is where you want to be.

------
MostAwesomeDude
This reads like NDF to me. Minecraft was not engineered to be all of these
things; it just happened. Notch had a vision of what he wanted to do, tempered
by time and skill constraints, and the resulting game is an accidental
success, not a carefully constructed pillar of solid game design.

~~~
orborde
What does NDF stand for?

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Yeah, "Notch Defense Force." It's a meme born of the obsequious fans of MC who
refuse to acknowledge any problems with the game or anything MC-related.

MC is great, but it's far from perfect.

