h. Play

You certainly have heard of Minecraft. The game is in alpha, it’s made by one main developer with the help of some people.

As a description, it’s a world-building game mixed with a rpg system through a first person view. The world is huge and randomized.

The world is mine

The website is telling us nothing special, the YouTube video just makes you think “what the hell is this shit”.

And yet after about a year of development Minecraft racks up 250 000$-a-day of sales via Paypal. Yeah. I can’t fucking imagine that either but I’m just so happy for him, Markus Persson.

Rock, Paper Shotgun has a Minecraft diary (1 2 3 4 5) and it’s just fascinating. You can see how much a deep gameplay combined with consistent mechanics and freedom to the player is more addictive than crack.

But what really cheers me up with Minecraft’s success is that it kicks off pre-conceived ideas with hard facts:

• The personal computer is awesome. Nothing like that would have been possible on a closed platform like consoles are. And there’s a ton of free PC games out there, there’s billions of free flash games. Minecraft just didn’t care and made it through nonetheless.
• There is no such thing as a target market in games (and overall in the entertainment business, it’s been made up). Build your game with a strong vision and the market will be here, whoever they are, little girls, gay nerds, Irak vets. It doesn’t matter.
• The best Technical mantra: Minecraft works on any PC of the last five years finger in the nose (WoW anyone?). It’s a Java game. Works anywhere and beyond.
• Visually interesting and quite original while being the most rudimentary ever (8bits 3D).
• Single player is important. 
• The only channel of marketing/PR has been word of mouth. Word of mouth made this man with his little team and his Java game millionaire. Read that twice and try to find any product in the world that makes people really wealthy without them spending an insane amount of money to make that happen. I don’t know one.

Lessons learned:

• Indie game developers are concerned about getting attention for their games. But it seems that if your game is original and deep (and really, this is the hardest part here) it will find its way. Remember, Minecraft is not even finished yet! The thing is we see the market the wrong way, we see it as traditional publishing sees it: you need to make a lot of noise so that a large part of people are hearing about your product and eventually a share of them are going to buy the game. With word of mouth over the internet, it doesn’t work this way: it ramps up with people aggregating and buying from anywhere in the world, silently. It’s a discrete process, totally the opposite of what marketing/PR are doing these days: being obnoxiously in your face all the time, screaming. Trying to sell an indie game this way is not going to work. Never.
• The insane amount of resources used in games for visuals and 3D is a waste. Focus on your gameplay, more and more and again. Open your game to people early and build what they want too. Nothing better than real world beta test. I mean, we can’t stress that enough.
• Minecraft’s business model is neat: play for free in your browser, pay for the premium version that makes you able to download a client. It’s kind of scary to go this way but it doesn’t stop people to buy a copy at 10euros. As of today, 27,27% of registered users have bought the game. That’s just insane. On XBLA if the rate of players buying a game goes over 10% developers jizz in their pants. Point is: in a direct relationship like that, trust and don’t screw your users. They will do the same to you. They will buy your game. They will talk about it. They will be more fan of your game than you ever will.
• The power of communities. Reddit, a news website funnier than Digg was in 2005 mixed with an extraordinary powerful community ala 4chan (without the nsfw tag) played a big role in Minecraft’s success. Don’t go to them to sell your stuff you moron! Just focus on your game and if it’s good enough, a community, somewhere, is going to take action and spread the word. It worked well for Minecraft, the one-man Java game from Sweden. And it’s the case with every success with digital distribution and indie games.

So while people are wondering about the 3DS CPU or how the Bioshock Infinite “gameplay-rollercoaster-without-AI-lol” video is amazing, while the mobile market looks like an awful clusterfuck as the Facebook game thing, a dude from Sweden shows us that you can make some “substantial” money today with a solid Java game for browsers and PCs.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now that’s something.

I read a lot of comments about Apple’s policies and how they don’t differ from consoles manufacturers policies and how we should be ok with them because we didn’t say anything since the NES.

Well, I believe that:

• Apple’s devices are not game focused devices. They’re now claiming that it always has been the case, you know, Apple’s classic rewriting of events. Their devices are mobile computers where any software can be made and sold, even stupid ones like fart apps. The software ecosystem is wild and large like the desktop computer market. Developers always have been free to do whatever they want in an environment like that (windows/linux/osx/symbian you name it). It generates innovation. So these policies are a big step back (same with Windows Phone 7).
• Consoles are more about 25 years old and they had two advantages over computers: the gamepad and the living room. For some reason gamepads only became common on computers around 2000 and they are still tied to consoles. Computers are more and more in the living room but it’s still early. So Nintendo Sega Sony Microsoft console dictatorship over developers has been ok since 85-86.

Why do we comply nowadays even with Apple who should not do that? Besides having a game specifically thought for an input you can’t find anywhere else (Wiimote, touchscreen), which is the case for a minority of games, it’s only for lousy reasons. Gamedev peeps grew up with dreams of making their own game on the obviously awesome next Nintendo console or next Sony station or because they started on their beloved old ass Apple II, they’re doing iPhone stuff. It’s a fanboy thing. It’s  mostly a non-business made decision, sadly.

Never have been a fan of them…Lefty thing?

But  with the explosion of budgets game developers increasingly didn’t really like to work with Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony. Dealing with expensive dev kits, verifications, approvals, delays and people having absolute power over the work of a team is unproductive. Who wants to spend thousands of dollars on hardware to develop a game for a console, with a smiling manufacturer pushing your game release for the last month of the quarter or not pushing it enough in the store because it would cannibalize their product? Months, years of hard work to witness that kind of shit? Thanks but no thanks.

Even worse, today if you are a third-party developer and want to make money –at least in the classic AAA business- you have to do it multi-platform which is basically, like making a game for computers, with different configurations… Add the dictatorship hassle. To be successful on a console today is an impossible task (look at how publishers just bleed money like crazy despite using huge marketing campaign for their games). It’s ridiculous.

Now in 2010, if you’re thinking without emotions from your childhood, the platform of choice is the classic Personal Computer, like it or not. Because you have 250 millions of these sold each year. Multi-core and hundreds of stream processors, gigs of RAM and more and more similar inter-connection and architecture (laptop to TV connection as easy as a console). Digital distribution. Link sharing and its virality via emails and boards. Because game developers can use whatever the fuck they want to build a game, can use any topic and let their minds explore ideas without fearing that it’s going to be rejected by some stupid and arbitrary organization or committee. Mind you, that’s critical to make a good game or at least, get a good start at it.

So there.

From Bartle’s blog

I added the game example column.

It started with this Gamasutra article about Limbo being a case of bad game design, article I totally agree with.

But Bart Stewart in the comments sums up something important: other than this gaming failing at being fair to the player, it’s really hard to make everybody happy in front of a game. There are types of temperament and unlike non-interactive forms of entertainment, we do play following them.

If you look at the Guardian type in games, it’s the most common –in both gamers and game developer’s heart- type. I hate that kind of game. I loved the Megaman concept but hated this stupid shit that is making it the hardest and the most unfair possible for the player. Like the article says, it feels for me that I’m losing my time and that developers are just crazy: it is not enjoyable (or if enjoying is just a matter of pure luck or pure madness, then I don’t like it because it’s a total rip-off of Life). There’s so many games I could have loved if they weren’t based on this arbitrary game design… That’s why the Mario series recently had strong changes regarding this issue (making it less and less arbitrary, helping the player etc).

Something I noticed with this chart: in problem-solving style, only Perception is not a Brute force technique. Actually, it seems that it’s the only smart problem-solving solution. Of course in games we have a mix of all of these, like in life we change our temperament too, but the main point is no, we don’t change not a lot, not that much…

The Perception problem solving style should be much more promoted in game design. For example FPS games are inherently made to be explorative but companies inject the Power problem-solving style and we end up with loads of killing simulator. Why?

In terms of responsibility for game designers, I’d rather push on the Rational temperament because if games are primary learning tools, well, the Rational temperament trains your perception and teaches you something that you can use in real life: getting better at recognizing patterns, at aggregating data and processing it. On the contrary, favoring the Achiever role, teaching the never ending greed for more, in a world where we’re running out of resources is not a good thing. That’s something we have to think about too. Not so much to show our support for a better world  and how concerned we are about the Earth, but because being synchronized with society problems is a good thing to sell stuff. BP knows it (“Look! We’re totally green!”) even if they lie. We need to use this power too (not the lying part, mind you).

Also Perception calls for subtlety. Perception is the fascinating angle that can speak differently to people, without compromising the core design. That’s how Mario/Portal/Braid/Deus Ex/Peggle do, pretty well: you can find it hard or easy, it’s all about your perception and you exploring the game mechanics. The game respects and lets you achieve what you want. I think successful physics-based puzzle games like Angry Birds show how people freaking LOVE that, being challenged, getting smarter, being in control. That’s a rush of good feelings for sure.

And you know, that’s how art touches people, with different angle from the same piece of work.

<insert obvious La Joconde smile picture>