Your critique is almost exactly the same one Will Wright received from game execs when he proposed "Sim City".
Not a critique so much as a clarification on what makes a game. Even SIm City is more of a game than Minecraft. Sim City has a generally clear goal of growing your city (though you could create a modest farming town if you wanted. but that doesn't last long). It isn't really even much of a sandbox in taht regard because you're extremely limited by how well your city is doing and how much income you can generate. It isn't like you can just construct building at will like Minecraft.
Some people don't need to be guided and have their hands-held through from the beginning to the end of an experience.
True, they can make up their own game. Which is fine, but that doesn't make Minecraft much of a game. It is a playing field, at best.
(Though Notch is thinking about putting in one anyway to placate people who aren't satisfied)
And it is going to fail because you can't bolt on an end game to something that wasn't designed as a game. It is like the mobs in Minecraft. They are an annoyance. They don't add anything. Some mobs carry valuable materials, but they're not essential. The number of creepers you have to kill to get a useful amount of gunpowder is just crazy. Stupid design.
I believe the adventure mode would be player designed. You'd download static adventure maps and world manipulation would be turned off. My prediction though is that adventure mode will be a dud and people will just want to build stuff and use the multiplayer servers as a sort of Second Life for geeks.
No, i'm pretty sure it will still be half-assed. Notch thinks he can just add random features and call it a game. What he lacks is the ability to really tie it all together.
Notch really needs to focus and decide once and for all whether he wants the Minecraft to be a game or a virtual lego set. Can't have both. One will just get in the way of the other. I honestly can't play the stupid thing anymore because the whole mob/combat/mining thing is just annoyance when playing creative. And the creative aspect is pointless in adventure mode, which is not really all that interesting to begin with. It is going to take a lot more than just a few tweaks to make any kind of Minecraft adventure mode worthwhile.
Actually, Nethack has some very specific plot points. Not just the end game. There are some very specific things you need to complete to even make it to teh end game. It may be slightly variable in that a certain key level will be somewhere between depths 20 and 25, but it will be there. Dont' get me wrong, Nethack had me going back year after year, on and off, for a decade, but the games didn't change a whole lot. The real reason I kept coming back is because i could never win it and I couldn't save my progress, not because it was a different adventure every time.
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.
It does though, for practical purposes. You're just complaining that the universe is not infinite in size. And that's not really fair. The problem with Minecraft is not that it isn't fully destructible. The problem is that it has almost no actual game mechanics. Monsters in game are pretty much an afterthought. It was like "Hmm, we need to give the player some motivation to start... so lets create some monsters that will annoy him if he doesn't build a shelter." But after that, the monsters don't get any harder and they end up just beign an annoyance while you try to be creative. Even the whole "mining" aspect gets annoying. I got to the point where where I just gave my character infinite TNT to blow things up instead of spending hours digging holes. Next step is to give myself infinite EVERYTHING and forego all of the original game mechanics so I can focus on creating things.l
It sounds neat if you don't really think about the consequences of allowing it.
Kinda like how everyone loved to fantasize about a multiplayer implementation of Nethack until they sat down and really considered that Nethack is what it is because it is essentially turn based, not live action. To do it right, you'd have to let everyone take turns in serial. So you move one block, everyone else moves. Then you get to move one more... That would suck.
So... basically you've just reduced envirnmental manipulation to a minor detail. The point is you can't have it both ways. You can't have strong game play and make the sandbox a first class element.
Nope, that's about it. It is really just a virtual lego set. Recent updates like redstone circuits make it a little more itneresting, but really it is just a giant virtual lego set... only not the small legos with specialized parts. More like the toddler version of legos with the huge blocks.
Or just play one of the many superior adventure implementations already available. Minecraft Adventure mode will prove to be a big dud, mark my words. Minecraft without the ability to manipulate the world is pretty damn lame. The mechanics are really primitive. Minecraft is more like a prototyping tool for a better game.
it does however have the potential for players to come up with their own goals ("build a huge castle") that supplement those the game provides.
Minecraft provides no goals. Anything you do is made up by the player. Therefore it is a toy. Minecraft is to games as a baseball diamond is to sports.
What it doesn't have is an end,
Or even a middle.
Many board games only end when all players agree they have nothing to do (consecutive passes clauses or similar), but if that is enough to satisfy your end constraint, it also works for Minecraft.
That's not really an accurate comparison. Board games prescribe very specific interaction between players and they usually have some kind of scoring system. Minecraft has no such thing. Minecraft is an envrionment where people make up their own games, but it is not a game in itself.
You can "survive" in Minecraft by digging a hole in the ground and closing it off. Anything you do beyond that is just building things. The mobs are little more than an annoyance. I suspect "Adventure" mode in Minecraft will prove to be a dud. Much like adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress. Almost everyone plays in fortress mode because that's where the game is actually interesting and creative. If you want to play a nethack type adventure, there are far far better implementations.
Like Lego, what are the gameplay elements of that?
None. That's the point. Playing Minecraft with mobs turned on is like playing with legos where every tenth piece has a chance of giving you a paper cut.
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.
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.
Bullshit. Either you had one blazing fast MacPlus or something is seriously wrong with your current computer. While it may consume an inordinate amount of RAM, my current Core2 Duo based MacBook Pro is snappier than any computer I've ever used in the past (I installed SSD, so that helps). I recall launching games and then going off to get lunch instead of waiting for it to load when I was a kid. Now I complain when there's a 5 second pause between levels in a game. It wasn't really until the P5 processor (100Mhz or so, the one before the Pentium Pro) that I thought to myself "this is fast enough." Before that, I felt that computers were still pretty clunky.
I think you may not remember correctly how slow computers ued to be because, at the time, it was state of the art. Your expectations keep changing with the state of the art.
It has been done hundreds of times outside of Java. Any app can make SOAP or RPC calls. They can even read JSON from a standard HTTP request. You don't need a web browser to make an HTTP request. RMI-IIOP or Java not required. What do you thnk all those iPhone apps are using to communicate with servers? Twitter apps that use the Twitter API. Desktop and mobile phone Facebook apps. Dropbox. Your phone syncing photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube. Standalone RSS readers. All done through native apps + various protocols. That all qualifies as using "cloud" services. A web browser is just ONE way to use "cloud" type services.
There's no reason to believe that "cloud" computing necessarily means the web or the web browser. Native apps can hit a remote API just as easily as a web browser can, and they can do so while offering the user a whole lot more functional potential. People thought that the full browser on the iPhone would be the killer feature and nobody would need anything else. But guess what? Turns out people actually prefer apps for their cloud services when they can get them. Apps are a huge industry on mobile devices. I'll tell you what, if I could have a native app that could hit the Google Apps API, I'd totally use that over the clunky in-browser version.
Aside from being shared, Google Docs is basically on par with MS Office from 1992. We're talking Windows 3.x here. That said, I do find the multi user live edit capability of Google Docs to be very useful for my work. Though I'd never actually want to work on documents from scratch inside Google Docs. Usually I write it offline and then import it into Google Docs when it is ready to be shared. And even then, you have to avoid doing anything crazy.
For those who do 95% of their stuff online and know so little about computers they couldn't find a directory on an Thumbdrive - even with OS X Finder in 'stupid-mode', let alone know where to plug it in and how to unmount it before removal (99.999% of all users), the chromebook is a viable every-day computer.
The whole WIndows ecosystem is driven by that last 5%. Telling users they are too stupid to be allowed to run a desktop application will not get you very far.
If has the form, size and weight factor of a sleek MacBook Air, costs a fraction of that, has above 8 hours of uptime on battery, has zero hassles with installation and setup, needs no worrying or even knowing about such things as backup, software installation, sane security awareness and data-migrate-ability. All you need to know is how to log into something on the web, which most people do know nowadays.
Right, except all of that comes at the cost of, you know, not being able to run apps. You can't justify it by tellign people they are stupid. You're an arrogant fool.
And let's face it: I - and I gather most of you too - would take a Linux+Web based Google lockin over an Apple or MS lockin any time. No?
Compared to ChromeOS, Apple and MS don't lock me in. I can install whatever I want. But on a Chromebook, you are shackled to the web browser,,which I can already run on Apple and MS products. Why in the WORLD would I choose to be locked inside of a web browser if I don't have to? I can get the same cheap hardware as a netbook. CHromebook is a netbook with less functionality.
Chromebooks, at this point, don't seem to be targeted at anyone that reads slashdot
Honestly, slashdot users are just geeky enough to buy the device simply for novelty purposes. Otherwise, it is mostly useless compared to a netbook.
. I could easily see giving this laptop to my mom so I wouldn't have to deal with windows updates and antivirus software.
But you would have to deal with questions like "Why can't I play this video?" or "Why can't I install this minigame?" or "Why can't I use MS Word or work with photos from my camera?" If you think she could get away without the typical crap that Windows users install, why wouldn't you get her a netbook and install Linux on it?
I could see some specific cases in business where non-techy people need internet access with not installed apps.
Non-techy people use apps too.
This is an easy to manage solution for IT managers.
Easy to manage because it doesn't do anything useful for a business. There's a reason why Windows is so entrenched in business environments, and it isn't because it can run a web browser. Business is probably the place where a Chromebook would be LEAST useful.
Face it. Chromebooks bring absolutely nothing to the table. They are crippled netbooks, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Your critique is almost exactly the same one Will Wright received from game execs when he proposed "Sim City".
Not a critique so much as a clarification on what makes a game. Even SIm City is more of a game than Minecraft. Sim City has a generally clear goal of growing your city (though you could create a modest farming town if you wanted. but that doesn't last long). It isn't really even much of a sandbox in taht regard because you're extremely limited by how well your city is doing and how much income you can generate. It isn't like you can just construct building at will like Minecraft.
Some people don't need to be guided and have their hands-held through from the beginning to the end of an experience.
True, they can make up their own game. Which is fine, but that doesn't make Minecraft much of a game. It is a playing field, at best.
(Though Notch is thinking about putting in one anyway to placate people who aren't satisfied)
And it is going to fail because you can't bolt on an end game to something that wasn't designed as a game. It is like the mobs in Minecraft. They are an annoyance. They don't add anything. Some mobs carry valuable materials, but they're not essential. The number of creepers you have to kill to get a useful amount of gunpowder is just crazy. Stupid design.
I believe the adventure mode would be player designed. You'd download static adventure maps and world manipulation would be turned off. My prediction though is that adventure mode will be a dud and people will just want to build stuff and use the multiplayer servers as a sort of Second Life for geeks.
No, i'm pretty sure it will still be half-assed. Notch thinks he can just add random features and call it a game. What he lacks is the ability to really tie it all together.
Notch really needs to focus and decide once and for all whether he wants the Minecraft to be a game or a virtual lego set. Can't have both. One will just get in the way of the other. I honestly can't play the stupid thing anymore because the whole mob/combat/mining thing is just annoyance when playing creative. And the creative aspect is pointless in adventure mode, which is not really all that interesting to begin with. It is going to take a lot more than just a few tweaks to make any kind of Minecraft adventure mode worthwhile.
Actually, Nethack has some very specific plot points. Not just the end game. There are some very specific things you need to complete to even make it to teh end game. It may be slightly variable in that a certain key level will be somewhere between depths 20 and 25, but it will be there. Dont' get me wrong, Nethack had me going back year after year, on and off, for a decade, but the games didn't change a whole lot. The real reason I kept coming back is because i could never win it and I couldn't save my progress, not because it was a different adventure every time.
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.
It does though, for practical purposes. You're just complaining that the universe is not infinite in size. And that's not really fair. The problem with Minecraft is not that it isn't fully destructible. The problem is that it has almost no actual game mechanics. Monsters in game are pretty much an afterthought. It was like "Hmm, we need to give the player some motivation to start... so lets create some monsters that will annoy him if he doesn't build a shelter." But after that, the monsters don't get any harder and they end up just beign an annoyance while you try to be creative. Even the whole "mining" aspect gets annoying. I got to the point where where I just gave my character infinite TNT to blow things up instead of spending hours digging holes. Next step is to give myself infinite EVERYTHING and forego all of the original game mechanics so I can focus on creating things.l
It sounds neat if you don't really think about the consequences of allowing it.
Kinda like how everyone loved to fantasize about a multiplayer implementation of Nethack until they sat down and really considered that Nethack is what it is because it is essentially turn based, not live action. To do it right, you'd have to let everyone take turns in serial. So you move one block, everyone else moves. Then you get to move one more... That would suck.
So... basically you've just reduced envirnmental manipulation to a minor detail. The point is you can't have it both ways. You can't have strong game play and make the sandbox a first class element.
Nope, that's about it. It is really just a virtual lego set. Recent updates like redstone circuits make it a little more itneresting, but really it is just a giant virtual lego set... only not the small legos with specialized parts. More like the toddler version of legos with the huge blocks.
Or just play one of the many superior adventure implementations already available. Minecraft Adventure mode will prove to be a big dud, mark my words. Minecraft without the ability to manipulate the world is pretty damn lame. The mechanics are really primitive. Minecraft is more like a prototyping tool for a better game.
Minecraft has rules.
But no goals.
it does however have the potential for players to come up with their own goals ("build a huge castle") that supplement those the game provides.
Minecraft provides no goals. Anything you do is made up by the player. Therefore it is a toy. Minecraft is to games as a baseball diamond is to sports.
What it doesn't have is an end,
Or even a middle.
Many board games only end when all players agree they have nothing to do (consecutive passes clauses or similar), but if that is enough to satisfy your end constraint, it also works for Minecraft.
That's not really an accurate comparison. Board games prescribe very specific interaction between players and they usually have some kind of scoring system. Minecraft has no such thing. Minecraft is an envrionment where people make up their own games, but it is not a game in itself.
Survival.
You can "survive" in Minecraft by digging a hole in the ground and closing it off. Anything you do beyond that is just building things. The mobs are little more than an annoyance. I suspect "Adventure" mode in Minecraft will prove to be a dud. Much like adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress. Almost everyone plays in fortress mode because that's where the game is actually interesting and creative. If you want to play a nethack type adventure, there are far far better implementations.
Like Lego, what are the gameplay elements of that?
None. That's the point. Playing Minecraft with mobs turned on is like playing with legos where every tenth piece has a chance of giving you a paper cut.
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.
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.
It is plenty only because the internet connection is the bottleneck. Start doing any LAN transfers and you'll feel the hurt of 10Mbps.
And who still uses 10Mbps??? 100Mps has been standard for well over a decade. You'd have to be using one seriously old hub.
Bullshit. Either you had one blazing fast MacPlus or something is seriously wrong with your current computer. While it may consume an inordinate amount of RAM, my current Core2 Duo based MacBook Pro is snappier than any computer I've ever used in the past (I installed SSD, so that helps). I recall launching games and then going off to get lunch instead of waiting for it to load when I was a kid. Now I complain when there's a 5 second pause between levels in a game. It wasn't really until the P5 processor (100Mhz or so, the one before the Pentium Pro) that I thought to myself "this is fast enough." Before that, I felt that computers were still pretty clunky.
I think you may not remember correctly how slow computers ued to be because, at the time, it was state of the art. Your expectations keep changing with the state of the art.
It has been done hundreds of times outside of Java. Any app can make SOAP or RPC calls. They can even read JSON from a standard HTTP request. You don't need a web browser to make an HTTP request. RMI-IIOP or Java not required. What do you thnk all those iPhone apps are using to communicate with servers? Twitter apps that use the Twitter API. Desktop and mobile phone Facebook apps. Dropbox. Your phone syncing photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube. Standalone RSS readers. All done through native apps + various protocols. That all qualifies as using "cloud" services. A web browser is just ONE way to use "cloud" type services.
There's no reason to believe that "cloud" computing necessarily means the web or the web browser. Native apps can hit a remote API just as easily as a web browser can, and they can do so while offering the user a whole lot more functional potential. People thought that the full browser on the iPhone would be the killer feature and nobody would need anything else. But guess what? Turns out people actually prefer apps for their cloud services when they can get them. Apps are a huge industry on mobile devices. I'll tell you what, if I could have a native app that could hit the Google Apps API, I'd totally use that over the clunky in-browser version.
I would expect it to be much cheaper than it is. Only a fool would pay for a $500 web browser in this day and age.
Aside from being shared, Google Docs is basically on par with MS Office from 1992. We're talking Windows 3.x here. That said, I do find the multi user live edit capability of Google Docs to be very useful for my work. Though I'd never actually want to work on documents from scratch inside Google Docs. Usually I write it offline and then import it into Google Docs when it is ready to be shared. And even then, you have to avoid doing anything crazy.
Apps. Games. 'nuff said.
not too bad.
A ringing endorsement if I've ever heard one.
Get a netbook. There's no reason for you to even consider a Chromebook.
For those who do 95% of their stuff online and know so little about computers they couldn't find a directory on an Thumbdrive - even with OS X Finder in 'stupid-mode', let alone know where to plug it in and how to unmount it before removal (99.999% of all users), the chromebook is a viable every-day computer.
The whole WIndows ecosystem is driven by that last 5%. Telling users they are too stupid to be allowed to run a desktop application will not get you very far.
If has the form, size and weight factor of a sleek MacBook Air, costs a fraction of that, has above 8 hours of uptime on battery, has zero hassles with installation and setup, needs no worrying or even knowing about such things as backup, software installation, sane security awareness and data-migrate-ability. All you need to know is how to log into something on the web, which most people do know nowadays.
Right, except all of that comes at the cost of, you know, not being able to run apps. You can't justify it by tellign people they are stupid. You're an arrogant fool.
And let's face it: I - and I gather most of you too - would take a Linux+Web based Google lockin over an Apple or MS lockin any time. No?
Compared to ChromeOS, Apple and MS don't lock me in. I can install whatever I want. But on a Chromebook, you are shackled to the web browser, ,which I can already run on Apple and MS products. Why in the WORLD would I choose to be locked inside of a web browser if I don't have to? I can get the same cheap hardware as a netbook. CHromebook is a netbook with less functionality.
Chromebooks, at this point, don't seem to be targeted at anyone that reads slashdot
Honestly, slashdot users are just geeky enough to buy the device simply for novelty purposes. Otherwise, it is mostly useless compared to a netbook.
. I could easily see giving this laptop to my mom so I wouldn't have to deal with windows updates and antivirus software.
But you would have to deal with questions like "Why can't I play this video?" or "Why can't I install this minigame?" or "Why can't I use MS Word or work with photos from my camera?" If you think she could get away without the typical crap that Windows users install, why wouldn't you get her a netbook and install Linux on it?
I could see some specific cases in business where non-techy people need internet access with not installed apps.
Non-techy people use apps too.
This is an easy to manage solution for IT managers.
Easy to manage because it doesn't do anything useful for a business. There's a reason why Windows is so entrenched in business environments, and it isn't because it can run a web browser. Business is probably the place where a Chromebook would be LEAST useful. Face it. Chromebooks bring absolutely nothing to the table. They are crippled netbooks, nothing more.