He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret.
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.
Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring.
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.
Minecraft is the best building game ever made. It's perfect like Bach - built so simply you can see how it was done, and fits into the constraints of the medium perfectly.
There can also be too many graphics and effects going on. I played the Elden Ring dlc and a few fights there are so many particle effects going I literally have no idea what's going on sometimes.
Notch didn’t nail it all on his own though - Zach Barth nailed a bunch of those crafting and world manipulation and building mechanics in Infiniminer. Notch was screwing around cloning infiniminer in Java and Minecraft is kind of what popped out.
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.
I certainly agree that Notch was standing on the shoulders of giant, brilliant Barth, and without Infiniminer we would never have gotten Minecraft. Zach's game design is so good that it makes you want to build, or build better games. You can clearly see the inspiration that took hold and the potential that Infiniminer and all Barth's other games absolutely exude. His games are worth playing not to sink time into but to simply breathe in. There's little else quite like it.
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.
When Apple released the iPhone, several smartphones were in existence. But the iPhone created a much more cohesive and simplified experience compared to those. There's merit in that.
It was also exciting to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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.
The Video Reviewer Zero Punctuation summed this sentiment roughly as "it's a game which'll let you build a giant penis of gold if you wanted, but it'll make you do a lot of work and adventuring to do it".
Graphics are always secondary, no matter what. Graphics are a tool in videogames. You have impressive light management like in DayZ with graphics from 10 years ago, and you have one of the most expected games and one of the best games in the last decade which is elden ring (or zelda for the same purpose) that have normal graphics (or even cartoonish in zelda's case) and does not matter a lot.
Surviving in the game isn't challenging, and while the game was getting popular early-on (say around beta 1.3), there weren't many optional challenges either. The most dangerous monster was a spider, you didn't need food, and the only dungeons were those original mob spawner cubes.
It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.
> The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned
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.
> 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.
Not to mention that once you could add your own texture packs it became a user choice as to which graphical style they wanted.
I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play.
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 hard not to mourn what was lost though. 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. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox.
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.
I can't even imagine what it's like now, but Roblox is how I first learned programming when I was 11. This was well over a decade ago.
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.
Lost? Nothing has been deprecated, Java edition is still supported and kept in feature parity with Bedrock aka MS Edition. Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java, but the modding community hasn't stopped.
And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.
This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience.
> 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.
Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers.
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.
I dislike the auth changes as well, but it hasn’t had any impact on server hosting in my experience. It’s still just as easy as getting the right JVM and running the jar. The only thing new is the EULA you have to accept on first launch
There are still entire ecosystems of minecraft mods. Launchers are popular that hook into these systems and essentially give you specific minecraft package environments for each just like software environments to manage multiple conflicting sets of dependencies on a single machine.
I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more.
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:
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.
I can recommend checking out Vintage Story if you want the refined Minecraft survival experience. Just finished playing it with my wife a few weeks ago — great fun.
> 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.
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!
Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.
You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can.
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.
A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft.
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.
If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc.
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.
Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic
Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game.
I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.
I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011.
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've played a lot of Minecraft and I still remember beta 1.7.3 very fondly -- albeit for different reasons -- but I want to offer a differing perspective.
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.
I don't remember the specific version (s) I played. I remember being kinda depressed and burned out.
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.
> 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.
For people that would prefer the vanilla experience, I recommend the Betacraft client. I have been using for some time since I had some issues with sound being missing when playing older versions on the official client.
Thank you for sharing, all this talk of beta 1.7.3 (which is over 10 years old, my goodness how time flies) has made me nostalgic to try it, and this might be what convinces me to, since without anything new I probably would set up in a cave and then quickly quit.
The thing is, you don't have to play the rpg aspect of it at all. You can still play the same game you played in beta 1.7.3 and get benefits like more variety of blocks for building and better automated farm setups leveraging the newer items like unmeltable ice. No one is forcing you to slay the end dragon.
For real, I play this game for hundreds of hours and not even bother to beat end dragon in vanilla survival even once. I mostly play around redstones/command blocks/mods. The game don't really force you to play survival mode at all. No "unlock creative mode after beat this game" sh*t exists in this game. If you really don't like it, just ignore this part as a whole.
See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
I liked the simplicity of 1.7.3 beta, but the addition of hunger made pvp more interesting. Enchantments also made XP farming a thing, which brought in creativity. Mobs got needed buffs so caving was actually a challenge. Overall I liked most of the changes until MSFT bought it and did the bad combat update, which online arcade modes rejected. They just could've done without The End.
> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.
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.
> 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?
It has a lot of parallels with Lego and not just the fact that they're both a bunch of boxes that you can attach together. I think the fundamental mechanics of Minecraft lends itself to a type of creativity that other games find it hard to recreate. By being so little, it manages to be so much more than the sum of its parts. Minecraft didn't have a proper ending for the first few years of its life.
One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.
I don't know that it's an "innovation" as much as a lucky break.
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.
Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him.
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.
Maybe they would have been better off by simply trying to make it run on mobiles as is? It’s java, there is no reason why it couldn’t just work - some people do play the java version on ipads even.
For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time.
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.
Not to ick anyone's yum, but when games begin to approach the same parts of my brain that I use for work, I question why I'm not just using them to make more money instead.
But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.
I've heard it said that there are two kinds of Software Engineers when it comes to Factorio.
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.
I cannot think of any game that could approximate a full-time job as much as EVE (I am currently obsessed with factorio, which I play after working for 8 hours on production line automation systems)
Taken to an extreme, this would exclude any game with any element of problem solving, leaving just... cookie-clicker- and twitch-reflex-FPS-style games.
Since we are onto game recommendations I recommend Pokemon without any irony. The wiki is vast. Honestly I don't know how people are supposed to learn about all the deeper game mechanics without a wiki, and RNG manipulation can be quite fun.
I almost added on Pokemon to my comment! Agreed. Though I will say it's depressing to see the party you spent the whole game with is genetically inferior (low IVs) and you have to breed a whole new set to play competitively (or cheat, or use Pokemon Showdown instead of a real game), and that the breeding process has a lot of luck involved and takes ages. I think they improved this in more recent games with ways to raise your IVs, but it made me burn out on the series and stop playing at least once. I haven't played the Switch ones yet. When I was last playing through a Pokemon game, I think it was Sun, I planned out my final party and movesets for them in advance so I knew what TMs I had to find and which 'mons to catch on which routes.
I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment.
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.
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.
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
It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.
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.
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.
And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server
https://hub.docker.com/search?q=minecraft
https://old.reddit.com/r/admincraft/
> 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...
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.
https://www.curseforge.com/
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
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.
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.
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.
Avoid mods at first.
Family friendly streamers are:
- [Jax and Wild](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw)
- [Grian](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu6...)
- [Mumbo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U)
-[Stinarose](https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose)
Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game.
https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays
HermitCraft and Vault Hunters are some SMPs to check out
https://hermitcraft.com | https://vaulthunters.gg
The Dream Manhunt series is pretty epic too
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.
> 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.
[0] https://www.betterthanadventure.net/
[0] https://betacraft.uk/
How do you feel about modern Minecraft?
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?
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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.
(I only play Java)
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.