As Mr. Mark Rosewater notes on occasion, “restrictions breed creativity“. Minecraft has a somewhat restricted visual design thanks to a lower global resolution (almost everything is built from 1 meter cubes), but it’s precisely that restriction that has led to a minor renaissance among gamers with an itch to create rather than consume. (Also seen here with Azeroth in CivV, tangentially.)
Doom was a significant First Person Shooter game some years ago, but for all its impact on the genre and gaming industry, it had some constraints due to then-modern technology and game design. As this interesting article notes, those constraints made for a very different game from modern FPS games. Doom effectively played in two dimensions; there were bits of the level that had different elevations, but weapons autoaimed to compensate, and you couldn’t ever have a level where you could traverse the same X/Y Cartesian space at two different Z elevations. (So no bridges you could both go over and under, no spiral staircases, no multilevel buildings.) That’s a huge limitation for a game that gives an impression of 3D, but the Doom guys managed to work wonders within that canvas.
Also importantly, the lower “resolution” of the game tools helped the modding community take off, and there were a TON of player-generated additions to the game. Modders didn’t need to work in true 3D and have hugely expensive tools like Maya or 3DSMax that took years to master. They could get by with some simpler tricks and more streamlined level design, leading to faster development with quicker iteration that could lead to better design in shorter order.
Minecraft is a modern iteration of this pared-down design ethos. The game world is actually 3D this time, but the lower resolution, both geometric (the world of cubes) and textural (16×16 textures for said cubes) means that potential modders can focus more on the bigger picture rather than burning their time on normal mapping and pixel shaders. They might make a few relatively simple changes (to the textures or peaceful/monster mode) that affect the whole game world.
Of course, players don’t have the ability to tweak values as easily as Notch might, as the programmer of the game. Even thinking of his tools, though, depending on how he has the simulation code set up, he could theoretically tweak a few variables and quickly have some very different worlds. We see a little of this with his biome design, where segments of the world take on different climate properties and block generation ratios (a desert area with dunes and cacti neighboring an alpine mountainous snowy area, for example). Imagine if players could tweak those variables and make their own biomes. (This isn’t to say that said biomes were just a few lines of code, but rather that they could be controlled by a few variables that could provide significant changes with little input, one of the beauties of procedural content generation.)
Perhaps more importantly, though, players can do a ton within the game itself. You can tear apart the world with your bare hands and rebuild it almost any way you want to. Maybe you prefer big buildings or maybe you’re a Star Trek devotee or Lord of the Rings fan. Maybe you love BioShock, its sequel, simple computers or just want to go see the sights that the terrain generator churns out, always providing “just another mountain” to see. In the highly malleable Minecraft world, you can scratch a lot of different itches. Play it multiplayer, and you can even show off. (It scratches an itch that MMOs haven’t bothered with, despite having firm footholds on the tactical terrain.)
In a way, it’s like a piano. The instrument only has 88 keys, but the music that has been made over the centuries with it is incredibly varied. Or better, a guitar or violin; six or four strings can do miracles in the right hands.
Of course Minecraft won’t appeal to everyone, and it won’t win a beauty competition with Source and better out there in the wild. Still, coloring with crayons sometimes can bring out a lot more creativity than working in Painter, simply because it’s easier to work with the tools. Like building with LEGOs, there’s a fairly simple learning curve that allows for more time creating, less time gearing up to be creative. Even though I work all day with high high end art tools, I still love just whipping out my sketchbook and a ballpoint pen to do my own work and see what crazy ideas pique my interest.
When all you have is an ore pick, the whole world looks like a mine to be dug. When you can build with the stuff you dig up and put your own stamp on the world, crazy, wonderful things can happen.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I kept trying to write a post something like “would minecraft work with better graphics?”, expecting to say no, but I guess you beat me to it. 🙂
I’m sure I’ve mentioned Escape Velocity before, a late 90s top-down space game. It had some pretty simple mechanics, but with plug-ins, which the game really encouraged, modders could do all kinds of neat things. One of my favorites was a bomb that had no absolute velocity (regardless of my ship speed) and after a short time would explode on its own with a massive knockback effect. This made it useful for repelling fighters, or if dropped in a series, imitated the Atlas Project.
Actually, there is a mod that allows the player to tweak numerous biome-related variables.
Nice! Thanks, Hirvox. Tipa over at West Karana did mention that she had been tinkering with Python scripts and modifying base values, so there’s that option, too. Looks like I should have done a bit more digging.
Klep, I really do need to check out Escape Velocity. It’s on that big list of mine.
I do think that Minecraft could work with higher resolution textures, and I’m sure Notch will set up that option at some point (if it’s not in already, come to think of it), but the 1-meter block nature of the world really is fundamental to how the game works at present. Perhaps someday we’ll have something a bit more malleable, like going from DUPLO blocks to basic LEGO, then to the expert LEGO, but for now, there’s still a lot that can be done. Also, upgrading that world “resolution” with smaller “pixels” will bump up the learning curve and time sink. Tradeoffs in everything, really.
Also, as Shamus over at Twenty Sided notes on occasion, Minecraft might *look* simple, but it does require a fair bit of horsepower. My five year old laptop, for instance, has some real problems running the game, and it was close to the top of the line at the time. Smaller blocks and tighter world resolution would require more horsepower, I believe.
Avoiding analysis paralysis with the simpler options? Indeed avoiding analysis so much it becomes a fun, instinctive actions game.
It scratches an itch that MMOs haven’t bothered with
Doesn’t city of heroes have a mission architect in it? It’s actually that that sometimes draws me to try city of heroes, despite the subscription model.
The mission architect does a bit for creativity, yes, but it’s not as freeform as Minecraft’s world-altering ability, and it doesn’t affect the world at large, it’s an instanced beastie.
…though given MMOs, maybe that compromise is better than letting players mess up the world. *shrug*
I’ve always thought artists make better works when they’re not saddled with money and fame. whether it be music, movies, paintings or whatever.
never thought about it in terms of video games before.
For some reason, that came off sounding like what has to be the most beautiful review of Minecraft I’ve ever written. Wonderful angle to use and so thought-provoking!
There is definitely something elegant about low requirement games and your Doom example is perfect. I was 11 or 12 when it came out and I would never have been able to mod it in the way I had if it had been a lot more complicated or sophisticated game. Keeping stuff simple can reduce the barriers to entry and actually generate a lot more interest and success than something hugely hi-tech and advanced yet ultra complicated.
You are an artist, so you don’t see that most people don’t care about the ability to create or customize gameplay. Not everyone is creative or values creativity and expression in games, and that has always been a niche.
Not everyone wants to tinker with a game. That’s why Call of Duty Black Ops sold a lot, and Little Big Planet keeps muddling along. It’s a blind spot: the same time doom and its mods came out, people were perfectly happy playing Goldeneye with its lack of modding on the N64.
A well-shaped experience will reach far more players that giving them the tools to try and make their own because of that.
Tesh, but in minecraft you can’t affect ‘the world’ either, can you? You can affect your own, yeah, but not someone elses (unless you go visit it). They are essentially instanced as well. I was thinking the same with mission architect – the mission(s) you make are your little world.
Granted I’d imagine mission architect wouldn’t be nearly as mallable, but I think it’s good to appreciate it’s there, still.
Nope. In multiplayer, the entire world is shared with everyone playing on the same server. And when Notch fixes the portals you can even travel between different “realms”.
*shrug* those servers strike me as instanced as individual missions from mission architect. The servers just aren’t connected in terms of any data, so they are instances.
I’ve gotten a bad rap for trying to convey stuff before, so I’ll wrap up at this point.
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means. The CoH servers Freedom, Justice, Pinnacle etc. are not connected in terms of data either. But you wouldn’t call those instances, now would you?
Yes, I would. With Eve they have all the servers linked up, which is a very different arrangement from wow or coh servers. And even there, I’d even call eve one (big) instance, but that’s where the big instance actually aligns with the ‘world at large’ as Tesh put it. So this overall, uber instance is synonomous with ‘the game’ or ‘the world at large’. It’s where the technical size of something aligns with the idea of where the games boundry is. Servers, though made a big deal of, are just a technical component, not a setter of boundries. Eve shows that.
Well, there’s a blog subject for everybody – how do you (as in you, the particular blogger) define (for yourself) ‘the world at large’?
To me, an instance is a non unique entity derived from an archetype that has no persistent state, can be replicated easily and is disposed of after the players are done with it. The world is everything else.
For example, an Eve solar system is not an instance, because each one is unique and has a persistent state which is shared with all who travel to it. If you travel to a specific solar system, you end up in the same one as everyone else; At any time, there is only one Jita per world.
A specific Mission Architect mission is an instance, because it’s created from the (user-defined) template and maintains it’s state only as long as the players are in it. There can also be multiple instances of the same mission in progress at once.
A Minecraft server has a persistent state, is wholly unique and is shared by all players connecting to it. There is no template from which Minecraft worlds are created from, each one is generated from scratch. Therefore it is not an instance.
As I understand it, people with a copy of minecraft can choose to run a server. And when they are done with running a server, it’s gone.
A mission architect mission doesn’t reset when your half way through. It remains until your done with it.
The only distinction I can see in what your saying is that a minecraft ‘instance’ is kept for alot longer. That’s what I see, for what it’s worth in reporting it.
I’d touch on other stuff, but I’m wary of writing too much.
You are never “done” with a Minecraft world. When you explore a cavern, it stays explored forever. If a complete stranger connects to the server, the cavern will stay explored for him as well. But if a complete stranger connects to the same server and tries to take the same Mission Architect mission as you did, he’ll get a brand new version of it.
It doesn’t stay explored forever? At some point the person hosting a particular minecraft world will turn the server off and the data gets deleted. Perhaps that takes months, instead of the hour or two a mission architect takes for someone to eventually turn it off.
How about I phrase it this way – just hypothetically, what would it look like if each hosted minecraft actually was an instance (albiet a months long instance)? What would it look like and….how much different would it be from what minecraft is currently?
If the world is deleted, it will stay deleted. There is no in-game way to reset that cavern to unexplored state. You can generate a new world, but it will not contain the same cavern.
If Minecraft supported instancing, then the server would have to include a way to manage world templates. From these templates, a new instance of a world would be created and run concurrently with all other instances. Minecraft, as it currently, is, doesn’t support that. It expects that there’s only one world per server.
One could write an addon that would handle the management of world templates by backing up and restoring the world savegames. It would allow the player or the admin to start new instances of the server on demand which would use one of the chosen server templates as a starting point. You could even have a separate hub world set aside which would contain the portals leading to the separate instances. But none of this is currently supported by Minecraft, nor even planned to be supported.
That just makes it instancing that fails to have those qualities (there’s nothing about an instance that means you have to be able to run multiples of it on one server). If I take two wheels off a car it doesn’t become a motorbike/something else.
But look, a rocks a rock, but if the rocks big enough people call it a planet, so I’ll just pay you the difference based on that sorta differentiation and finish here.
Calling a motorbike a car because it has an engine and wheels doesn’t work either. You yourself included the inability to change the world in the definition of an instance; That inability to change the world is implemented by routinely resetting the world to a specific template. Minecraft in itself does not provide any ways to reset the world. The only way to do that is admin intervention.
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