Source (intention) — original note, preserved verbatim. Synthesis in Why games.
Minecraft Is Not A Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjxH0IuyCpg
- Minecraft is not a game, it’s a thing you play games with.
- Minecraft is a timeless game - video
- I think the magic of Minecraft is in enabling whatever play style you want
- The meaning of any word depends on the context it is placed in.
- This matches Yuri’s explanation of why he doesn’t like Duolingo (it teaches isolated words, with no context application)
- Plato’s metaphysics: everything already exists in the intelligible world, we just haven’t discovered it yet in the sensible world
- All change in a language comes bottom-up (from the population to the grammar dictionaries)
- My method of analysis/research is strongly prescriptivist → I take each word of a question, break it down, research the meaning/concept of each one, and only then start to infer.
- A well-designed video game will bring a game and encourage you to use all the mechanics built into its simulation.
- Players tend to use the simplest solution to a challenge and stick with it > a hard rule or hard objective to break that strategy
- The meta: a base game that is easy/manageable, but uses its story or the depth of its mechanics to encourage players to take on challenges that seem almost impossible, requiring a creative solution from them. (example: pacifist-style runs or limited-engineering challenges)
Minecraft Is A Timeless Game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yidkhy7NbmI
- What makes Minecraft so big: love for the game and freedom to create
- You can create anything and play however you want
- The most important block in Minecraft: redstone
- It adds a layer of complexity that can be used by newer players and infinitely expands the creation possibilities for more engaged players
- This, for a product/software, is essential: being simple and efficient for the standard user and having tools to expand usage for the engaged user.
- Mods play, in my opinion, the most important role in the fact that the game is still alive today.
- There are mods for everything and, if there isn’t one, you can create it
- This reminds me of the open source software philosophy I discussed with Yuri