The thrill of Minecraft, the net’s newly viral, crudely sadistic sandbox game
It’s hard to imagine this pitch going over well at, say, Activision or EA headquarters:
I’ll construct a really punishing computer game, with dreadful graphics and no goals or story whatsoever. Players will spend most of their time making stuff out of other stuff they find and trying not to die. I’ll release a buggy alpha version early on, let players fiddle around with it for free online, and make millions off of €10 downloads while still developing the game.
So much the worse for Activision or EA, then: Swedish game developer Markus Persson, better known as Notch, has singlehandedly accomplished exactly that this past year. His strange sandbox-construction game, Minecraft, has gone completely viral, with over 1.25 million registered accounts and sales around $100,000 per day since early September; he’s now building a company and hiring a team to bring the game to completion.
The basic mechanics of Minecraft are simple. You appear as a roughly rectangular person in the midst of a randomly generated environment, populated by trees, mountains, lakes, and peaceful animals. Everything in the world is composed of cubic blocks, and anything you see can be collected by breaking it apart — first with punches, and later with tools that you craft. The most useful resources are ores found in deep underground caves, but wherever there is darkness, there are monsters. As the pixelated sun sets at the end of your first day in Minecraft, you must scramble to dig yourself into a shelter of some kind, lest roving hordes of zombies, skeletons, and other creatures find you. And they’re there for you alone; a crude multiplayer mode is available, but in the default you are the sole human occupant of your world.
The game provides no story and has no overriding goals; you can spend your time collecting materials, fighting monsters, building ridiculous things, or exploring the endless landscape, generating new terrain wherever you go (Notch calculates the maximum size of Minecraft’s map at eight times the surface area of Earth). It’s disorienting at first to be playing a fundamentally aimless game, but Minecraft — a.k.a. “Minecrack” — turns out to have a peculiarly seductive appeal. After playing it for a couple of weeks, I have some ideas about why that might be.
My character, wearing a costume called “Epictetus.” As it turns out, playing Minecraft requires considerable stoicismOver the last few years, the video game industry has increasingly shifted its focus toward “casual gaming.” Nintendo drove much of the shift with the release of the cheap, accessible Wii in 2007*; the mass appeal of simple games that require little investment from their players helped make it the best-selling console of the current generation. On top of the proliferation of casual games on consoles, mobile devices, and websites, even the game genres that once harboured quite unforgiving challenges have morphed into kinder versions of their former selves — health bars regenerate, lives are limitless, “Game Over” screens are virtually a thing of the past. The children of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s who loved and bashed their heads against classic games have been reveling in nostalgia for them lately: chiptune music is gaining popularity, ancient video game franchises and genres are undergoing a renaissance, and references to yesterday’s games are filtering into mainstream pop culture. While the major game studios have been attempting various awkward balancing acts between appealing to the casual market and to hardcore gamers, a number of small indie developers have been winning popularity online with low-cost, old-fashioned games that cater to the desires of hardcore gamers. Minecraft is a perfect exemplar of this trend: a hitherto one-man project, its graphics are obstinately primitive, its workings are simplistic, and it is almost sadistically punishing. That these traits appeal to the retro gaming crowd is clear from the Minecraft website’s photo gallery, where players showcase their in-game constructions: a huge number of the entries are reproductions of pixel art from old video games.
Nostalgia aside, what’s the appeal of subjecting oneself to sadism? The makers of survival horror games have known for a long time: imposing steep demands of difficulty and scarcity on players is a surefire way to create genuine fear and investment in the game world. Minecraft is fairly brutal: the only weapon players have easy access to is a sword, which provides little defense against monsters without careful timing and positioning. A few monsters can always overwhelm an unprepared player, and the nighttime outdoors and underground dungeons crawl with them. Death in Minecraft is generally horrific: wherever you get killed, every item you are carrying is scattered across the ground, and if you can’t find your way back from your original starting point (where you now stand unarmed) and deal with whatever threat killed you in the first place, the items will eventually disappear. Even with careful precautions, running into a baddie or simply falling off something always threaten the player with death. The game’s most iconic enemy, the Creeper, is a putrid-green stick-monster that ambles over to you, announces itself with a hiss, and then explodes, wiping out whatever scenery, structures, or innocents are nearby. The skeletons, zombies, and spiders are less explosive but equally deadly, and suddenly hearing one of their assorted gurgles or hisses while in the confines of a dark mine shaft is enough to make one’s blood run cold.
Out of these ordeals spring gradual learning and real involvement. Once death after maddening death had cost me untold quantities of work, I began to realize that I couldn’t simply dash into the caves in search of ore, which inevitably ends in me getting lost and eventually dying; I had to hollow out and civilize the underground spaces, posting monster-repellent torches, opening up passages and chambers to make them navigable, and slowly creeping deeper down while saving in a stash whatever resources I could. I suddenly had the sense that I was engaged in making something, battling entropy, crafting a habitable space; basically, I was doing what a real person would do if he had to explore a monster-riddled cave alone and had a real person’s aversion to getting himself killed.
The blocky appearance and cartoonish physics of the game belie this shocking way it has of conjuring up a feeling of realism. One of many gushing online reviews puts Minecraft‘s appeal down to “tap[ping] directly into that part of your mind that made it so fun to build forts out of sofa cushions as a kid.” It certainly does have the free-wheeling openness of childhood make-believe play — but the reason we’re frolicking in this virtual sandbox rather than in pillow forts is because it also offers something equally important: restriction. Philosopher J. David Velleman pointed out the crucial fact that the constraints of virtual worlds are what makes them more involving than mere fantasies. I can instantly imagine my sofa fort into being a castle, but if I want a castle in Minecraft, I will need to get the right set of tools, collect a whole lot of stone, and do some careful designing and hard labour. The world of Minecraft has determinate laws that make creating large structures from scratch challenging, and thus rewarding. Likewise, everything occurring in a make-believe game does so with the knowledge of its players. While it’s impossible to be surprised by something you made up — say, that your castle turns out to be right on top of a dungeon — the contents of a virtual world can be vastly many, and vastly unknown to you. It’s only exciting to find a vein of diamond in some deep cavern because of the rigidity of Minecraft‘s laws and the scarcity of the mineral. Which is more or less why we value it in real life too, battles with the undead aside.
Minecraft‘s physics are, in a way, exceptionally advanced. Thus far, the contents of pretty much every environment in a video game have been divided between objects in the foreground — significant people and items with which one can have certain limited interactions — and those in the background — walls, furniture, trees, and other static pieces that are inert and often impassible. Nowadays, you can pick up and toss around foreground objects in Half-Life 2, or kill an enemy in Halo: Reach by blasting a heavy box into him. But, by and large, the improvement in realism since Super Mario Bros. has been incremental: the foreground-background model persists. Minecraft, conversely, approaches game physics from the bottom up: even though the atom of its world is a cubic-meter-sized block, and even though the laws governing those blocks are rudimentary, they’re applied consistently — and that makes the world feel astonishingly unartificial. The unintended consequences that can arise out of its law-governed interactions create some of the game’s most precious moments: the reason a guy burning down his own house by mistake is so hilarious is because it was a lifelike, unexpected result of the world’s physics chugging along as they’re supposed to, treating the walls and ceilings of the house just the same way they treat the log in the fireplace.
What impresses me the most about Minecraft, though, is that it takes this use of determining laws even further than most games: not only is the world governed by a simple set of natural laws rather than by the whims of people, it’s designed by such laws as well. When you break through into a new cave or reach the top of a new peak, you are exploring territory that human eyes have never seen before. You have no idea as you dig underground if you will find a many-chambered treasure trove of valuable ores, underground rivers, lava floes, and terrifying monsters, or a dreary little patch of coal in a wall. The overwhelmingly common standard in video games has always been the creation of carefully curated environments, through which the designers guide the player along a more or less linear path (one bolstered ever-more frequently nowadays by waypoints and arrows that lead you by the nose to the next encounter). In most RPGs, for example, you can generally guarantee that avoiding the main path in favour of a less obvious one will lead you to some sort of hidden treasure — the player constantly (and, almost always, easily) second-guesses the intents and expectations of the designers. In Minecraft, as in nature, it’s impossible to do so, and so the surprise and delight of finding a rare formation or valued resource feels genuine. By the same token, when you encounter a roomful of enemies you have cause for real fear, as there are no assurances that you’ll be able to handle them — they were put there by chance, not by someone calibrating a series of challenges to an appropriate difficulty.
Some games have you discover their worlds more or less on rails; other games provide for you to abandon the beaten path a certain distance in order to discover more. But no game has created this sense of genuine mystery for me before, because the mysteries weren’t planted there for me by anyone. The only beaten paths in this world are the ones I myself have beaten, and since the game saves every change made, they will stay beaten for good.
One section of a mass multiplayer world shared by the denizens of the Penny Arcade Forums. Click the image to see what they’ve done in (enormous) detailThat said, the world is not entirely randomized — it’s designed to form up into a plausible series of mountains, valleys, lakes, and flatlands; underground cave complexes, it turns out, aren’t hard to come across. After playing a few times you begin to sense the orderliness underlying things, and, having reached that point, my exploratory interest has sloped off a little. In the end, the stuff you can do, environments you can inhabit and creatures you can encounter are still fairly limited. But remember that the game is only in alpha, and new content is on the way — Notch is planning to implement a system of different biomes in an upcoming Halloween update, and ideas like changing seasons and weather patterns are often discussed on the incredibly busy Minecraft Forums. Many other half-finished features promise to make the world feel more fleshed-out: it’s currently possible to milk cows with a bucket, but milk does nothing; sheep can be whacked for their wool, which is nearly as inert. The update is supposed to include fishing, some new monsters, and perhaps some sort of fast transport (a role awkwardly filled at the moment by glitching minecarts).
We don’t have to wait to know this: the more deep and complex the world, the more novelty there will be to find in it, and the more engaging the emergent gameplay will become. We can only hope that big game studios will notice the success of Minecraft and take lessons from it — or, perhaps even better, we can hope that more gamers will turn to supporting indie developers like Notch and make innovative games like Minecraft flourish. Meantime, I need to come up with a better-sounding excuse for staying in this Halloween than “I have to see what the ‘hell world’ is like!”
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