Minecraft (2014)

He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret.

I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off.

It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features!

Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve.

And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first.

Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.

I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play.

It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too.

Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.

I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011.

To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them.

For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.

> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.

This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta.

Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more.

They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into.

My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.

One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.

Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him.

I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol

For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time.

I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates.

Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time.

While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.

I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment.

There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map.

Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation.

And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game.

To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.

Something else vital is that it ran on almost everything. Even before it expanded to every smartphone and console available, you could get it to run on a cheap and old laptop. Even 10fps was serviceable if you played on peaceful :)

I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha.

When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover.

I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)

For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).

This secret knowledge is common to older competitive games like Counter Strike. The game does not explicitly tell you about recoil control, or economy, or any of the other aspects that are crucial to surviving even entry-level ranked play.

I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game.

Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.

The "secret" knowledge isn't necessary if you're persistent enough. Japanese Youtuber PiroPito has an ongoing series of videos (with English subtitles) of an almost entirely unspoilered playthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd...

Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.

If you are looking for a more customisable and open source version of a "minecraft engine" there is https://www.minetest.net/ with lots of mods, where the most Minecraft'ish is https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/.

I've never played Minecraft as such but have great memories of spending time with my nephews while they built things with this digital Lego.

We also built loads of cool things with [my old] Lego too :-)

The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.

Besides the lack of an ingame manual, a few things about Minecraft that might seem bad actually made it successful since the alpha:

- time-consuming resource collection

- lack of objectives

- low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res

- one-click sword combat mechanics

- no official multiplayer server

- Java (not common for games at the time)

- glitches that don't completely break the game

The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.

> The genius of Minecraft is that the game does not specify how this is done.

Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.

Call me a hater but I think Microsoft ruined Minecraft. The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes. There are way too many blocks now so there's not as much need for creativity in building.

Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.

> Where do you learn them? Not in Minecraft.

As of 1.12, click the green book in the crafting screen to be shown a list of recipes, which you can filter by what you can actually craft

i remember when the first demo of minecraft was released on a forum thread. the handfull of people who tried it didnt think very highly of it. one would imagine they all would have been excited that the most popular game in history had been released… they were too stupid to see what was right in front of them.

I have used the chat function, to steer children with very serious problems, into therapy.

The secret of Minecraft is that it's the Lego game without Lego corporate involvement.

Or at least it was before MS bought it.

These days you have to find servers that disable the chat censorship if you're an adult that plays with adults.

And no, it's not kids only, as 90% of the other comments probably say.