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.

re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for.

However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play.

The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked.

My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.

Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.

But I think even then this unfairly discredits Notch. Regardless of what you think of the man, he certainly did nail it all on his own. He didn't just clone Infiniminer -- there's surprisingly little left in common at this point -- he used it as a springboard to invent what is essentially a new genre. You see the same sort of ingenuity in Fortnite and Roblox, who certainly have Minecraft and by lineage Infiniminer DNA in them, among others.

The difference is that, for a very long time, Minecraft was Notch, and what he did with it is still arguably unparalleled today. It's staggeringly good for a single person. The simple core loop was incredibly ripe for iteration. But the ingenuity the game is absolutely littered with, dozens of little things, tiny decisions made between pre-alpha point releases, is all Notch. In so many ways the game made itself, like a chain reaction of features, but Notch himself is just totally engrained in the whole thing. It's nuts.

To say he didn't nail it all on his own, I simply cannot agree with. Zach Barth and Notch both made something incredible. The shame is that no one ever gave Zach Barth the comically oversized sack full of money he deserves. I will surely never fire up Infiniminer again, but I could fire up Minecraft at any time and instant fall back into the engrossing loop of the game. Though it's been many years since I last played, I inevitably will again.

I've struggled to think of an analogy here... perhaps the closest I can come up with is Quake and Half-Life, which are even more closely related. Did Valve stand on the shoulders of giants? Absolutely. But they definitely nailed it all on their own.

We all build atop the works of others.

I'm really someone paying attention to soundtracks. I care and think about the music people put into games. Minecraft definitely has one of the best, most recognizable and iconic soundtracks. And I've been gaming since the 90s.

The second mover advantages Apple enjoyed went beyond just the cellphone design too - they completely rearchitected the relationship between a carrier and a cellphone OEM. People forget that pre-iPhone, virtually all cellphones had to carry crappy software insisted on by the cell carrier - the iPhone was one of the first ever handsets that shipped with the OS completely under the control/design of the handset vendor with no network involvement. Just getting AT&T to agree to this alone was massive, and hadn't been figured out by any of the pre-existing smartphone manufacturers on the "first move" either. We take this for granted now across the industry that cellphones can easily arrive this way in carrier stores with little/no carrier interference.

Heck, pre-iPhone, it was close to impossible to buy a phone in an AT&T/"Cingular" store that didn't have AT&T/Cingular's logo custom printed on it, such was the extent of the carrier choke-hold on the OEM handset supply side. This was true of virtually all the carriers in North America at that time. Again today, it's rare a phone is branded with the carrier logos, and smartphones rarely ever now have bundled carrier software/OS changes at the user application level.

There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available.

Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live.

The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player.

Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk

IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable.

And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right.

> Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program

I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that.

> It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features!

To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone".

It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player.

In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon and https://www.mudconnect.com/

Not to mention that once you could add your own texture packs it became a user choice as to which graphical style they wanted.

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 have always struggled with balancing my desire to create with my capability to create, in and out of Minecraft. I would get so inspired by all the awesome things people built, that I could never graduate from my barebones cave-with-chests because my desire to make something great made any attempt feel crummy in comparison. The most I would accomplish was making redstone contraptions because -- to be a little reductionist -- those either work or they don't.

I hope you will pardon my digression, but the point I'm getting to is that in beta 1.7.3, the goals you set for yourself, and therefore the reasons for you to keep playing, were largely creative in nature, like building a cool house. Updates past this point gave players the opportunity to make simpler, game-directed goals. It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to obtain a fully enchanted set of diamond armor, kill the ender dragon, explore all the new generated structures, etc. In later years they've codified these goals in achievements, including crazy ones like getting every positive and negative effect at the same time or exploring every biome. With these updates, the people who enjoy building cool things also got more cool things to build with, but this has in my opinion been a little more secondary.

I understand why people might be disappointed, or at least confused, by Minecraft's updates now pushing it toward "pesudo-RPG" status, but I have at least welcomed these changes because they gave me and my friends a reason to reboot our server every few years to try out the new stuff.

Although I will add that if your gripe is regarding combat/pvp changes (e.g. shields) then yeah I have nothing to add to that discussion.

EDIT: I also agree with sibling comments about more content = more enjoyment, at least for me. I enjoy playing games where there are just a lot of things to learn and know.

Although I didn't discover them, water ladders and cart boosters were so much fun. That feeling of almost cheating, using the bugs in the system to do magic things was so much fun.

I'd definitely credit Minecraft for rekindling some love for hacking, in the classic, non crack sense, but, matrix like, bending the rules to do NEAT stuff.

Then mods, pipes and auto crafting, bigger stuff.

I remember when tool damage was introduced. I was annoyed, but it was ok. I think around the time of food/hunger it started losing its luster. grow potatoes or butcher cows and pigs. it was ok. But that's the time I started drifting away.

Just an amazing game that brought me joy. good stuff.

And of course redstone. What a lovely idea in retrospect.

Thank you for helping me revisit these memories.

> It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to [do so...]

I think this may actually be the most important point. It is also not true, but also is at the same time, I feel.

If "resource satiation" refers to the ability of the player to build/do whatever they want, then it is true. If "resource satiation" means "having enough resources", then for some people it is impossible by nature. There's always a temptation to do more and build more.

For me, I think this temptation was independent of the game itself. Looking back at my childhood, I don't feel like there was any sharp distinction between my creations in Minecraft and any of my other creative pursuits, including programming; it all sort of blended together. The game was less a game, more like yet another creative medium.

Just to clarify my point, when I refer to satiation I mean it in the same way one might feel about MMOs. OK, let me be honest here, I don't play any MMOs but my understanding is that after you "beat" the game and max your level, one thing that might bring you back outside of new content is obtaining all the best gear, different skins, whatever you might want to collect. In the same vein, in Minecraft you could imagine wanting to obtain the best armor, weapons, food, etc. In some of the servers I played on, there were players who lived in a ramshackle hut and spent most of their time mining to get enough diamonds for gear -- and after a certain point they ran out of things to improve upon for their player character so they started looking for rare items in dungeons (remember when mossy cobble was a rare item?). At some point, they had gotten enough, and saw no further reason to keep playing. An extreme case, but not completely dissimilar to my own.

  And Metallica ended at kill'em all

How do you feel about modern Minecraft?

I'm old. But to be fair, I got into Minecraft by helping my kid set up a server - and then he moved on and it became my server. At least it wasn't a puppy.

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.

It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

Roblox (talking in past tense; not sure how much of this is still true) allowed you to create "Places", which were basically 3D interactive universes that consisted of a few primitive parts (rect. prisms, cylinders, etc.) arranged and connected to each other, as larger solid objects, or with hinges. It was, in other words, a multi-player physics sanbox. Also, the use of the word "place" instead of "game" is interesting to note; as a child, it felt like they could really be anything, with no particular expectations.

I don't remember when Lua scripting was added - I think it was around 2008-2009 or somethng - but it allowed you to perform simple event-based programming, registering clicks/deaths/collisions/etc and manipulating the game world. As a child I saw this as a form of magic. What would otherwise be a physics sandbox with inanimate objects interacting in a strictly mechanistic fashion became one in which anything could happen. You know, magic. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking.

So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard. I am still pursuing this goal. Also, RIP Erik Cassel. His tutorials were one of my first - if not my first - introduction to programming ever. He died too soon.

You may have already found it, but Fred Brooks's little essay on why programming is fun has always resonated with me [0]:

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]

> Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

[0] http://www.grok2.com/progfun.html

It follows that, maybe we programmers should see ourselves as working class poets or writers.

Weaving our magic words like wizards casting their spells, with every line written, we watch as our work of fantasy hardens into reality.

Our faithful computer always does our will.

With infinite patience, it takes our every instruction until each one has been precisely executed, down to the last word.

A bit idyllic, true, because there is always the dark side, the bugs. But otherwise, pure magic.

And, nothing wrong with other professions, but, more that 20 years after starting out, I can still remember why I wanted to be a programmer.

>So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard

that's a classic MIT AI lab idea.

"We'll actually see that Computer so-called-Science actually has a lot in common with magic."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY 0:40, and a lot in the SICP textbook

all your rblx info is still true, by the way. there's a lot more you can script with too, including internal and external API integration, inter-game info transfer, transactions, all kinds of stuff.

It's getting there, though. They recently introduced the framework for more advanced mods. Heck, Create Mod is even available on Bedrock now.

I started programming with Bukkit and hMod in Minecraft, so I am so happy to help others learn to program with Minecraft!

> Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure.

First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way.

Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.)

> It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security.

[0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/

[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...

Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.

I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!). I still occasionally break out an old version of Java Edition and play some of the old mods that I liked back in the day. Many of those aren't maintained any more because the creators have moved on, but many have stuck around (Biomes O' Plenty and Iron Chests have a 1.21 release, and Applied Energistics has one for 1.20 that was last updated today). Plus we still get amazing new mods like Create.

I don't think it's that the old Minecraft has really gone anywhere, it's that, like the internet as a whole, it got so popular that geeks and nerds stopped being the majority. The existence of Minecraft Bedrock brought Minecraft to a bunch of kids who would have never grokked the wild west of Minecraft Java. But its existence hasn't taken away from everything that Minecraft Java still is.

Contrary to the point of view that somehow Microsoft changed everything, what surprising is how much they didn't change or might not be different at all... Jens Bergensten is today's Chief Create Officer at Mojang... but he's not a Microsoft plant, he's been there since 2010 and, moreover... " After the full release of Minecraft (1.0.0), Persson transferred creative authority of the game's development to Jens Bergensten, afterwards continuing to help out with Minecraft while also working on new projects." (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Markus_Persson) That happened in 2011 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition. As far as I can tell, there is a significant representation of pre-Microsoft Mojang staff that still exists within the company; sure there are many more people that have only been there since the Microsoft acquisition, but that seems to be a function of growth and resource availability more than some imposed change of direction.

So actually, I'm not sure what we've lost here. Pocket Edition, later to become Bedrock and upon which Minecraft Education is based, was well underway prior to the Microsoft acquisition. That ship sailed while Notch still owned the company. Outside of the Microsoft account and chat reporting requirements, which clearly were Microsoft driven, it's difficult to really see how different things would be. Arguable Jens might have been reeled in more by Notch, but my bet is that Notch was paying more attention to his 0x10c by 2012 and Jens would have had pretty substantial creative discretion by that time.

If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.

I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?

As I noted in my comment, I'm still subscribed to YouTube channels of people who are still playing on the same server with the same group (with some changes over the years, of course). I don't play Minecraft as often as I did in 2012, but that's because I have a career and a family, not because I can't. I'm now introducing my son to Minecraft Java and he's loved it every time we've played it.

I'm just not seeing the loss, and those who are bemoaning it here haven't actually pinned down what's now missing from Minecraft as a result of Bedrock (or even Microsoft in general).

And before they merged ownership, the gap between casual play and a custom java server went from "some setup time" in the earlier days to to "more setup time, also more than a hundred dollars purchasing copies of java version even though everyone in the group already owns minecraft". Surely you can see the lost opportunities there.

To be fair, it's on a long slow Yahoo!-style death path - Microsoft have not been good stewards of the game. They've owned it for 10 years and we're still having to rely on 3rd party mods monkey-patching the game for basic optimisations and QOL improvements. The bug tracker is awash with things that should be fixed but are ignored in favour of "mob vote of the year" and forcing in things they can tie to merch / media and IAPs.

Microsoft bought Minecraft to milk it dry for money - and they are doing that amazingly effectively - but they did not buy it to make the game better or their users happier.

I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.

Not condoning it per se, but the game could be way more draconian in its implementation of auth.

Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.

Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.

Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25...

So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :)

And my kid loves creative.

So maybe not the best example.

Elytras have been around for a long time too, but they really are OP

In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby.

† I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.

No zombies? That is mind-blowing. I love the vision you outline at 13:40-15:40, will play when I get a beefy enough computer for Minecraft mods ;-)

But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.

Yeah, it really kinda surprised me that Minecraft went in that direction. What got me hooked was 100% the need for shelter and some landscaping to make sure you wouldn't have eg. a bunch of skeletons standing under each tree on your front lawn every morning, a creeper waiting around the corner of your house, etc. Being able to skip night completely means there's basically never monsters on the surface unless you want there to be, and without that sort of ever-present threat, there's just that much less pressure that the game can put on you towards cautious gameplay and 'functional' protective structures and so on. Of course people keep themselves entertained with amazingly extravagant builds and ridiculously complicated redstone machinery anyway, so I'm not saying it's a bad direction for the game, it obviously worked out well for them etc. I just really wish there was more gameplay directly motivated by basic survival, instead of progressing past survival in the first five minutes.

Conversely I think flying is entirely fine. Unless you're, like, speedrunning, flight is only available once you've progressed through basically the entire game, and I think at that point it's reasonable that there's a more convenient way to explore distant areas.

Now, shields, those are just too powerful for how early they're available!

You can make a shelter in less than a minute, so eh.

> you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you

Just?? They don't have that much variety and it's a lot of work, more work than collecting most resources on your own.

> you can get a bed

Beds, from beta 1.3? You're really pining for a specific couple months there.

I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine.

That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode.

Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house.

And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles.

Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.

"Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.

If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode.

Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.

When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them.

That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.

I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows).

My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in.

As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like.

There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works.

But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.

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.

Yup, absolutely. It's very easy to get carried away with just adding more.... stuff, but more stuff isn't necessarily better if it doesn't improve the gameplay.

The game doesn't become better by adding another type of tree or new random building blocks or whatever, only if they actually offer something unique and cool.

Current Minecraft really suffers from this. Do we really need like 30 types of copper blocks?

I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.

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

Pray tell, where are the Mac and Linux versions of Bedrock?

Have they removed the limitations on world and redstone updates in Bedrock yet, or is it still only updating right around you in the name of rendering distance?

I guess my original thought was really that Bedrock is a great Trojan horse for kids who would otherwise not discover the game because it runs on Windows, iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch etc (and by extension, possibly get into computers, coding, game design, etc as a result)

Mac / Linux really ought to be supported too, but the vast majority of kids are elsewhere.

Yes, one of the things that ticks me off :) See my other downmodded comment on this thread.

Don't restrict this only to kids, people...

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 :)

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.

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.

But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.

There's one category who say "this is just like work, but I'm not getting paid to do it; why would I do this?"

Then there's the other who say "this is all the bits I enjoy of work, with a faster and more direct feedback loop and without all the admin/management/other-people bullshit; I want to do this for the rest of my life"

I am very much in the latter camp, but I can absolutely understand the former.

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.

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.

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

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

Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”

That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.

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.

Community is a huge aspect, shared learning, collaboration, cooperation

Imagination also plays a big role. You have to create your own story and see things not as they are, but as what they are to the story. It's reminiscent of childhood and play. HermitCraft is the most notable example of this, but it's pervasive, especially among builders. (i.e. put a railroad on a smoker to make a grill, flower pot as a cup, extended piston as a table, or a fence post with a pressure plate as a table)

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.

I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company.

But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.

I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.

It probably wouldn’t be balanced but it’d be fun.

Like here Hades has a wiki list of all "Keepsake" items and their bonuses and abilities [0]. So you can always know the Old Spiked Collar always gives 25/38/50 HP bonus. What if instead of 25 at the first tier, it was a random range from 15-35. What if there was a chance it gave a damage boost instead? Or resistance against physical damage. Or it gave lightning a 30% bonus, or....

Basically everything shuffled and procedurally generated to the degree that 2 players discussing the game would barely have an overlapping experience aside from the general genre being the same.

It would be really hard to make it so every playthrough has some semblance of balance though, and for things to narratively make sense, e.g. Iron items should always be stronger than copper items etc.

[0] https://hades.fandom.com/wiki/Keepsakes#List_of_keepsakes

If it's a "random range from 15-35" that's what the Wiki will say. Worse, if you've coded this slightly wrong and it's actually 15, 18, or 20 to 35 with no chance of 16 or 19, that will be on the Wiki. If you have much better shot at 30+ if you were holding the "jump" button as you picked the collar, that too finds its way to the Wiki if there are enough players.

The exact same thing which drives humans to find out how the hell it's possible for some atoms of the same element to be heavier than others (more neutrons) will also drive players of a very popular game to figure out the fine details of how it works.

Don't add balance by the way. In single player games it's probably futile (players will break it anyway) and you may destroy the fun elements in the game in a quest to "balance" it properly, like taking a delicious tart and turning it into mush fit for a baby. Even in a multi-player game, prefer to make everybody unbalanced rather than trying to homogenize them. If rock smashes scissors, but paper wraps rock, and scissors cut paper we've got a game, it's not a very good game, but it's at least a game.

Similarly with Minecraft, an online community got built around these wikis, figuring out stuff much beyond simple crafting recipes. We’d never get the cart boosters, water elevator or optimal mining techniques if everyone just played off the tutorial.

But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.

Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.

  Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.

- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore

- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back

- Never played Minecraft again

It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.

The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.

Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.

This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.

But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.

They need to get a handle on inventory management, probably the most complained about thing. 100s of new blocks but inventory is still largely the same

That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.

So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.

In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy. In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.

There is value ot be had in sticking to that stance: It encourages social interaction, but more importantly for the bottom line, people are talking about your game. That Minecraft is now a multi-generation thing, there's a lot of people to talk to about it!

Don't know what you mean. People use new single click automatic crafting all the time, including professional streamers on twitch. Do you enjoy brute forcing bow or fishing rod for the 100th time? Just click it to fill it in.

All hail microsoft for making it easier for us.

I bet next they will disable mob spawning unless it is exactly zero light level lol. Oh wait...

Simplicity has never been a key element of Minecraft - redstone circuits were added years before the acquisition.

The sheer quantity of weird and delightful stuff they've added has kept Minecraft new and interesting for over a decade.

Check out the Create mod

If Microsoft ever adds anything as cool as that to Minecraft, I may agree with you that they are keeping it new and interesting

I think Mojang and Microsoft have been very good at sketching in new ideas, enriching the concept rather than refining all the details.

They've also been good, because it's easier for a corporation, at completion. Anybody still waiting for Jaded's Agrarian Skies 2 ? How about for a meaningful end to Twilight Forest ? Modern packs tend to play the non-ending of Twilight Forest as if that's normal - gating further progress on the Magic Lamp for example, or just putting everything after the Trolls as optional - but wandering around the final castle it's obvious this just isn't finished.

I play almost exclusively modded, mostly ascend-to-godhood type packs, and it's still very noticeable how different a modern pack is (based on modern Minecraft) than the 1.7 era packs we started out playing, because the base game is significantly better.

Yeah, you can only say that if you've never ran across Java edition mods :)

Incidentally, a good chunk of stuff that has been added across the years was present in mods first.

See also: bands pivoting from niche to mass market genres

It does show the recipes you have unlocked (e.g. by mining a particular one that makes them), I'm glad they did that, it's much less painful for a new player and for the viewers of that new player (I like watching people play a game they've never played before).

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.