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Can Minecraft Change the Gaming Industry?
An anonymous reader writes "Is Minecraft really changing the gaming industry fundamentally? This author certainly thinks so, and even goes so far as to consider Minecraft's world manipulation a paradigm shift along the lines of 3D-gaming during the early '90s. 'Every block in the game is available to pick up and reallocate. We can tear down and build up. The neat thing is that future games does not need to be as liberal, but they will need to consider how they can make the environment a hell of a lot more manipulable. Now, this is quite a bit too simplified and the vast majority of games must not feature a shovel worthy of digging to the center of the earth, but giving the user power over everyday things (still in game worlds) will be a worthy challenge to consider.'"
Minecraft may give us power over everyday things in the real world, too.
Next paradigm shift:
Sally needs help moving blocks, sign up and earn 5 facepoints!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Minecraft is just a copy of the Gnomish Mines.
What I find great about Mincraft is the the fact that it keeps things sweet and simple. No flashy graphics bringing your machine to its knees, no DRM to fuck the legitimate consumers over, no crap gameplay with a shitty ending. It's just you (and maybe some friends), the world, and your imagination.
Minecraft is definitely evidence that sometimes, less is more. My personal opinion is that game producers have lost the plot - too often, we get served a steaming pile of flashy crud (*cough* EA), and sometimes even non-flashy crud (Duke Nukem Forever, I'm looking at you here!). Perhaps these people need to sit down, take a look at what people are enjoying playing and why they enjoy it, and get back in touch with their market.
If you want stuff blowing up realistically (i.e. destructible environment), you have to simulate it offline, as it's really computation intensive. So it will be "scripted". Minecraft can only get away with it because everything is a cube. Also I don't expect a sudden surge in cubic 3d games. Minecraft is a one time wonder, and it could be only pulled of by an independent developer.
While I have nothing against Minecraft as a game, the level of world manipulation isn't just some incidental feature that the gaming industry Must Take Note Of.
The level of world manipulation is pretty much what makes the game what it is; but also makes the game weird and idiosyncratic in ways that wouldn't obviously transfer very well to other sorts of games. Anybody remember 'Red Faction', that old FPS with the zOMG Destructable Environments!!! It sucked. Faced with the fact that they'd either have to break environmental destructability at certain plot-points, or just have players nibbling in a straight line through the level, the environmental destructability was reduced to little more than window dressing.
Really, in any game that isn't largely about metagaming emergent behavior in the game's rules(y hello thar, Dwarf Fortress, we were just talking about your much shallower and more popular kid cousin...), being capriciously arbitrarily limited sucks("Why can I pick up some books and not others?" "Oh, because some books are 'Quest Items', and you need to collect 143 of them; but the art team couldn't be bothered to actually model the rest, so all non-quest bookshelves are just textured rectangles.") but world manipulability beyond a certain level is useful pretty much exclusively for breaking the game's mechanics(acceptable in singleplay, if not obviously worth the tradeoff in developer effort, pure death in multiplay, unless you are the griefer who is currently grinning in anticipation...)
What gameplay elements are in there anyway?
Engineering/red stone wiring. Spelunking. And patch 1.8...
Every single game for the last 20 years has claimed "destructible environments" (some of them erroneously, with the word "fully" as a prefix). It's the same thing, in essence.
It's been a want of gamers for decades, since voxels were around at least, and it's never really happened how we expect, despite being promised with every big hit.
Even Minecraft doesn't have a fully destructible environment - some blocks can't be moved or changed, and there are depth and height limits, not to mention width wrap-arounds through the use on fixed-length int's on map indexes.
Unfortunately, such a thing would fundamentally change a game. Imagine a 3D FPS. You want to take out the enemy base. Hell, with enough time, you can just move the local mountain across on top of it, or tunnel up into it, or punch a window through the local mountain to make an inaccesible sniper-spot, or literally just flatten the whole place with artillery so you can walk through the ashes and collect all the pickups. It doesn't make for a fun game, necessarily, but it just one of many features that a good games developer can add to a game to make it more interesting. It's the same category as realistic physics, proper ballistics, or better AI teammates. Useful in the right hands, game-ruining in the wrong ones.
Yes, it would be really cool to have zombie/aliens game where you arrange the furniture to build barricades, but in playability terms it can create a nightmare, especially multiplayer. Hell, people whine that they (or the AI) get stuck on map objects that took years to position in the ideal place - what makes you think a billion random objects that can all move everywhere, combined with overpowered abilities to move the earth, will make it easier to get from A to B?
The only way to do it is realistically, which is gameplay-hell. If you want a tunnel into the enemy camp, you'll run out of food and die before you get anywhere, the sounds of digging will be heard, you'll kill yourself through exhaustion and you'll have to put the soil somewhere (which will draw attention). And if you don't get caught by the enemy, it'll still take MONTHS to get there.
(Offtopic: How cool would a well-made free-form Great Escape game be, though?)
It barely works in Minecraft. Yeah, it can make for a pretty cliff, waterfall, cave basin, forest, etc. but it's still an empty world that relies entirely on the player to populate and to differentiate from every other area that was randomly generated as well.
Minecraft, as it is, no more a game than a set of legos is a game. It's neat. It's fun. It allows impressive works of creativity, but is it a game like Mario? No. World of Warcraft? Halo? Need for Speed? Madden? Amnesia? You could make it a platformer but what's the point when you can just build/dig to where you need to go? Where can Minecraft go as far as game opportunities go? Considering how deep it is now, it would be better off as a platforming game set inside a computer so you can dick around with redstone because that's the only deep thing about Minecraft right now.
Some mods do better but in the end, it's still lego pieces. Here's short list of ones that I feel really expand upon the game:
Better Than Wolves
Industrialcraft
And there's tons more that increase variety of mobs, items, terrain and foliage.
I love Minecraft but it is hardly going to change the gaming industry. Minecraft isn't the first game that allowed players to manipulate the terrain*, I was digging tunnels and building fortresses back in the mid-90's with the Worms series. Hell, Minecraft is based off Infiniminer, there isn't much real originality or ground breaking in it. What I think Minecraft did was capture the zeitgeist. There is a large retro movement going on at the moment, and many Gen-X and Y gamers are nostalgic for the simple games of the 8-bit era. Minecraft took that 8-bit styling and gave us a box of blocks to do whatever the hell we want with.
It isn't ground breaking, and it won't change the face of gaming because people still want those other gaming experiences. You don't need two different "box of blocks" games. Even if the terrain manipulation craze took off it would be quickly stopped by the technical limitations of current consoles (which are the target for most games).
Also don't forget that people like nVidia have been banking on physics heavy games taking off (eg with their system where their GPU's can also do physics processing) for years and it simply hasn't happened. Partially because game developers focus on the consoles, which have limited processing power by modern standards, and partially because most people simply don't care that much.
* Red Faction was doing this in 3D in the 2001.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
There have been construction games before, the Sim series comes to mind. Transport Tycoon. Granted these games had more of a goal in their world construction but still.
It is like saying that since Up! was such a succesfull movie, every movie must now be 3D rendered. Or indeed that since Terry Pratchett made a hit by not using chapters, books no longer should have chapters.
Stop saying "X is good, everything should be X". Secret sauce on a McBurger is great so they should put it on EVERYTHING.
And as for adjustable, the world is very square in minecraft, should every game have this simpistic view?
For that matter, do I really want a totally user transformable multiplayer game for every game type? Forget teamkillers now you get people bricking their team in.
The author needs to get out of 10yr old mode, things can be different from each other. I know that is a hard concept but someday you will realize that the A-team is NOT the answer to entertainment you once thought it was.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Every single game for the last 20 years has claimed "destructible environments" "
Don't forget non-linear gameplay. Which in practice means there's some variety in the order you play linear subplots. Until we got a human level AI a computer cannot create a compelling story, so you have to put up with the pre-baked ones. (Or go full sandbox like multiplayer FPS/RTS games.)
I think Minecraft is the antecedent to more user generated content. FarmVille is psuedo user generated because it lets you choose . Minecraft takes it to extremes and lets you build the individual items by manipulating the elements of an item, rather than an a prefabricated item.
I can see FPS games introducing more customizable 'bases'. We already have turrets in some games but maybe they can extend that and make the bases actually constructable.
It's why games like SimCity, Civialization and Command & Conquer games are fun - you are making choices and generating content by yourself. Personally Minecraft goes too far in one direction - I am not particularly bothered about the components, I just want to see the big picture of interactions. (Economy, macromanagement, Ascendancy game, city building)
I can see Minecraft being helpful in 3D printing. Imagine creating real life items in a minecraft like interface and then printing it? It would bring 3D to the messes.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
p>All we need now is $100 3D printers for home printing!
Why? How much do you really want to print? At least, right now, how much stuff do you really want to print? is a pretty good workaround to actual ownership of a 3D printer. I suspect it's a lot like photo printing: it will turn out to be a fair bit cheaper not to have the printer at home and just shop out the print jobs to a specialist. At least, for the time being, anyway.
For instance, if the materials are the larger part of the expense, then the equipment that can produce the thinnest walls will be able to print your 3D art for the least money. But that equipment may cost far in excess of what a $100 printer is capable of, for a long time.
Regardless, you can be printing stuff right now with one of the many only 3D print jobbers. Shapeways being one which seems to specialize in one-off's which is what hobbyists would be most interested in.
Stuff that needs to be more durable probably won't be printed on the kinds of materials you can feed into a 3D printer anyway. The machines that handle more durable materials are also going to be more expensive than a RepRap-level 3D printer for a while as well.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Apologies. I have learnt my lesson.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
You've said a mouthful.
Why can't anybody just make a moderately successful product any more without having to "change the industry" with their "new paradigm"?
First it was big important really life-changing things like the Sears Catalog or erasers on the end of pencils. Maybe cellular phones. Now every single consumer success is a "game changer".
I just heard a guy on the radio interviewing the guy who came out with Tito's Corn Vodka. Now, people have been making corn licker since before Columbus, but sure enough, the otherwise pretty smart investment guy whose local radio show it was said "This is a game changer". Fucking CORN VODKA is a "game changer"? The only game corn vodka is going to change is the slow-pitch softball game that turns into a blind melee after the participants partake in several bottles of said corn vodka. The liquor store where I am proud to have a store account has a liquor display containing what appears to be several hundred vodkas, including those flavored with marshmallow and (I'm serious) whipped cream. Besides 17-22 year old females with lower-back tattoos, I really don't know who drinks marshmallow-flavored vodka, but apparently, enough of them have boyfriends trying to relieve them of their britches that these vodkas are very good sellers. So I am told. So when the types of vodka include such exotic offerings, how is CORN VODKA going to be a "game changer" unless you're a corn farmer and the US suddenly drops the ethanol subsidies and a potato blight hits the Midwest.
OK, I've got to stop right there, because my wife has forbid me from having any more Slashdot rants because she says I make a funny noise when I'm writing them and it's only 7:21am here and if I wake the dog I'll have to walk her. The dog, I mean.
(Oh, by the way, the whipped cream vodka really isn't that bad).
You are welcome on my lawn.
The correct answer is Yes, but not for the reason stated in the article.
Minecraft is a huge moment in the gaming industry because it demonstrated that Gamers are interested in being shown a tech demo that's fun, and paying for the tech demo now in return for a full game later.
This is huge, because if a game developer takes money from a publisher there's a conflict between 'Make a profit on that loan' and 'Make the best game possible'. If a game developer takes money from a gamer, their interests are aligned to 'Make the best game possible.'
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
And Cornish Game Hens are just small chickens. Yet they cost more ?????
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Yes, it's much much better than a game. It's a toy.
Monopoly versus lego.
I also question what makes Minecraft a game, but that's not really the point. The point is that Minecraft proved that many people will use a game environemnt as a sandbox completely independent of any actual gaming elements. While other games have provided a sandbox, they never went to far as to provide ONLY a sandbox. The sandbox was only the context for the game. And even then, you couldn't fundamentally alter the landscape (and have it persist) like you can in Minecraft.
None of which is really very game-like. There's no objective. No goals. No "winning" condition. What game elements there are (mobs, weapons) are really just bolted on. I got to the point in Minecraft where I simply turn off mobs. They were nothing more than an annoyance.
Your critique is almost exactly the same one Will Wright received from game execs when he proposed "Sim City".
Some people don't need to be guided and have their hands-held through from the beginning to the end of an experience. Sometimes the experience is what matters more than the existence of a winning condition. If you've put months, or even a year or more into a Minecraft world - who cares if the game has an end? (Though Notch is thinking about putting in one anyway to placate people who aren't satisfied)
Minecraft is the natural extension of the legacy beginning with playing in the sandbox, building things with LEGO, and burning through an entire night on Sim City.
minecraft isn't for you. at least, not yet. it's for people who are able to conceive their own goals, and derive satisfaction from achieving those goals. people who understand there's more to the game than someone arbitrarily turning around and saying, "oh, that's it, you won!"
kinda like life, really.
I read an interesting blog years ago about the difference between a game and a toy. A game, as you suggest is goal-oriented with rules and often scores. A toy is open ended which can be applied towards one or more games or can be used for other purposes altogether which are still "fun." I think by that logic minecraft is a toy.. If you're looking for a pre-built game, it's probably not right for you.