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- 2010.12.02 - indiepubgames.com - Et Tu, Minecraft?
- TIGSource forum discussion
- 2010.12.02 - Reddit discussion of the indiepub article - What Minecraft and Farmville have in common
- A very interesting article.
consider a common experience in the game: you’re deep underground, digging a tunnel, hoping to find something valuable. And for every block you hack away, you have some small, pre-randomized chance of uncovering something valuable. Re-read that, and let the horror dawn on you: even in Minecraft, the messiah of indie games, there’s a slot machine hidden in the core mechanics!
I’ve felt its hypnotizing allure firsthand. I spend hours chipping away with a pickaxe, happy to find resources that I’ll never use and thrilled to discover ore that’s both extremely rare and *explicitly useless*. The best find is diamond, which will let me play the slot machine even faster. Awesome! And if I grind for long enough, I get to customize the game world. Sounds almost like Farmville!
there's undeniably some aspects of grinding and gambling, and I find it fascinating that a game that I so love can contain design techniques that I so loathe. I’m left wondering: what would happen if we removed the time sinks and the slot machines? Could Minecraft be made pure?We can already get a taste of that with the game’s Creative mode, in which the player gets an infinite pile of every resource and is set loose to build whatever he or she wants. There’s no need to spend time digging, so you escape the need to gamble for the good stuff. And people have fun with Creative mode! But not as much fun, usually. I played primarily in the default mode. My castle is a pretty significant piece of work (or at least a ridiculous time investment), built from tens of thousands of blocks lovingly collected one by one. Any idiot could build that castle on Creative mode, I snort derisively, but it takes an especially *dedicated* idiot to build it under default settings. And for some reason, the fact that I spent (read: wasted) so much time on that castle makes it more special to me.
Notch's Twitch.tv casts
http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts
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