What makes Minecraft so popular ?

[Sarevok]

Other than building stuff with virtual lego blocks what does the game have to offer ? I get that the game world is huge. But quantity != quality. Because otherwise one could release the players in a procedurally generated infinite maze and call it a masterpiece.

[bobalot]

I bought the game (beta version) because of the sheer hype, played it for a 1/2 an hour and left disappointed.

Perhaps I didn't play it for long enough, but it seems like an oversized version of Lego. Fun, but I fail to see what the hype was all about.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I enjoy the sense of exploration and survival in a dynamic world.

Waaay back in the day, I would frequently find myself playing games like Diablo II, killing all the bad guys in a defensible area, and effectively carving out my own little corner of the world. Problem was, even though the Diablo 2 areas were somewhat random, the bad guys would just respawn if I came back later. I wanted to be able to build my own little base of operations, carve a path through the monsters until I got too far to use the base, and then carve out a new one and repeat. The thought process was, "Hey, I'm having an actual effect on the world! I'm fighting back the monsters here, here, and here, and replacing those areas with bastions of civilization I created with my own blood, sweat and tears."

Minecraft lets me do some of that. I can build a little bastion of civilization somewhere, keep the monsters at bay, and slowly build up more and more power and extend my base further and further, by directly altering the world through measured efforts.

[Zixinus]

The game is fun and offers a bit more than just lego: it offers you to walk WITHIN your LEGO world.

The monsters are a side-effort really, just there to make things a bit more interesting: the real thing is experimenting and building things. It's fun meddling about and carving out the world around you.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I enjoy the sense of exploration and survival in a dynamic world.

Waaay back in the day, I would frequently find myself playing games like Diablo II, killing all the bad guys in a defensible area, and effectively carving out my own little corner of the world. Problem was, even though the Diablo 2 areas were somewhat random, the bad guys would just respawn if I came back later. I wanted to be able to build my own little base of operations, carve a path through the monsters until I got too far to use the base, and then carve out a new one and repeat. The thought process was, "Hey, I'm having an actual effect on the world! I'm fighting back the monsters here, here, and here, and replacing those areas with bastions of civilization I created with my own blood, sweat and tears."

Minecraft lets me do some of that. I can build a little bastion of civilization somewhere, keep the monsters at bay, and slowly build up more and more power and extend my base further and further, by directly altering the world through measured efforts.

If you want that, just go play DWarf Fortress. It is much more "Fun", in that regard.

[Darmalus]

If you want that, just go play DWarf Fortress. It is much more "Fun", in that regard.

While I know that DF likes to brag about how "FUN" their barrier to entry of an interface is, I'll just wait until they have a lower case "fun" and intuitive interface (somewhere around 2030, I'm guessing) and in the mean time play stuff like Minecraft, which are fun right off the bat (if you like that style of game, some don't).

As for why Minecraft is popular, I would say that it filled a niche that had been empty for a long time: a large dynamic world where you can manipulate everything. Needs an objective other than survive, but an Adventure Mode is planned for the future, so I'm looking forward to that.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Interface aside, I'm also not sure exactly how Dwarf Fortress is supposed to fill BCG's niche, anyway, since the primary game mode is based in a single location. Even Adventure Mode isn't like that, since you can't do much leaving your mark upon the world aside from murdering things.

As for why it got as big as it is, I'm guessing some part of that has to do with this being the Internet, where popularity has a way of breeding itself. It was interesting and (more importantly) lucky enough to get a following and that just snowballed.

[open_sketchbook]

I feel the best part of minecraft is the very tangible sense of persistant progress. As the whole world is dynamic, the modifications you do to it in the course of gameplay feel very real; more so than in Dwarf Fortress, because you are right there in it instead of hovering about above it.

[Mr Bean]

Let me tell you a little story

I play Minecraft, it's my definition of a downtime game as I have four projects in process in three different worlds at any one time.

Take my current project, found a seed I liked by scanning the forums for a big mountain ish world

See that? That was my original house, built out of 100% Wood and Glass which I got via the simple method of clear cutting the nearby forest then replanting it, some wood I burned into charcol for the coal to smelt the glass and I built it in about an hour of real time. I saved and left it for a three days.

Went exploring later on and it's a pain to climb up and down the mountains that are all over that place so I built walkway's between the mountains (That thing of wood and class coming out of the side of the building.) That took me about two weeks of on again off again building until I'd linked the nearest four mountains via elevated walkways.
Then I carved a water side out of the side of the mountain(That thing in the right going down)

Why? Because I wanted a goddamn water slide.

That is Minecraft. Why do people like the Sims? It lets you play god, why do people play Minecraft? Because it lets you change a world in a persistent way, you can come back to it, trim that tree, raise or lower that mountain. Because it's all in first person it's a more visceral than normal map making in a game like Sim City where you can't get the same kind of fine control that Minecraft allows.

[Stark]

Its totally unstructured, so anyone who wants something more goal-oriented than 'made a giant wang statue' will probably always be disappointed. BCG outlines the sort of thinking involved. I'd say the appeal is much more Second Life Construction Kit, and as Bean says the Sims has been one of the most popular games since the 90s.

The idea that DF is more ANYTHING than Minecraft (other than more 'pain in the ass broken') is absurd. There's a reason the Minecraft guy is a multimillionaire and the DF guy is nothing.

[Starglider]

The idea that DF is more ANYTHING than Minecraft (other than more 'pain in the ass broken') is absurd.

DF has interesting emergent dynamics, but a horrible interface (abysmal without the 3D visualisation) and very steep learning curve. Minecraft has decent graphics (not realistic, but charming to a lot of people), a fairly good interface and is actually appealing to casual players.

The game Crossroads should be criticising is FortressCraft on the Xbox 360, which has a partial recreation of Minecraft's sandbox mode and that's it. No creatures, no crafting, no physics, no items, no vegitation and since the programmers couldn't be bothered to do voxel characters it uses Xbox avatars that clash horribly with the rest of the graphics. Yet it is still the fastest selling Xbox Live Indie Game ever, because apparently a lot of people like to play with virtual Lego on their TV.

[Stark]

Are you one of those people who are outraged that a very successful idea has spawned successful imitations? It's not like on the XNA scene it has much competition, after all. I'd expect many more Minecraft-esque games in future, and eventually one might actually have a game in the construction set.

And DF can be as emergent as it wants; with near-zero accessibility it could model the entire universe stochastically and nobody would give a fuck because such arcane concepts as 'menus' are beyond the cretinous moron who perpetrates the disaster.

[Starglider]

Are you one of those people who are outraged that a very successful idea has spawned successful imitations?

It would be pretty ridiculous to be outraged by a video game, unless it was something utterly offensive. Imitation isn't a problem either; originality is nice when it works but most progress in gaming, like everything else, comes through progressive iteration and refinement.

I am mildly disappointed that such an inferior knock off got all the attention. I am sure there are better clones on the way, just like Angry Birds has 100s of clones many of which are significantly better than the original. Personally I like the look of this Neverwinter Nights clone, but so far no one has come up with a real 3D editor interface that is as intuitive as virtual lego.

And DF can be as emergent as it wants; with near-zero accessibility it could model the entire universe stochastically and nobody would give a fuck because such arcane concepts as 'menus' are beyond the cretinous moron who perpetrates the disaster.

DF has a fair sized fan base for an indie game, and a disproportionate number of those are completely obssessed with it. It doesn't and never will have mass appeal - neither will say Hearts of Iron - but it's delivered a lot more hours of enjoyment than most indie titles.

[The_Saint]

It's popular for the same reason the Lego company has managed to sell bajillions of small oblong bits of plastic for over 60 years: because humans (well some of them) have imagination and imagination likes to have an outlet.

On a server a couple of friends and I run I started on a small spit of sand about 20m across... a bit of work and then I had a 9 storey fortress with undersea tree farm, roman baths, automatic mob killer/item collector, TNT cannons, 8+ kilometres of underground metro connecting said fortress to several outposts, a full-scale cathedral (think Notre Dame), Egyptian pyramids, Eiffel Tower, skull fortress, roller coaster....

The benefit of the "infinite" map size is that unlike Lego or any other modelling gear is that you don't have to tear down a structure to build the next... you just go find somewhere else to start.