** This is a cross-post from my tumblr account.

I am a busy person. I have a lot of stuff to do, on many projects. I don’t have the luxury to spend massive time, outside of hacking through my todo lists. Then why do I continue to find myself burning hour after hour hacking through pixelated blocks, toward a seemingly unknown goal, in the dark, dodging nightmarish creatures?

This is a serious problem for me. I now consider Minecraft a level 1 threat to my schedule (Level 1 is the worse! Tread carefully). How can a game thrown together in less time it takes most people to do their Christmas shopping, in alpha phase, with little to no content & zero plot or story, cause over eight-hundred thousand people to fork over a chunk of their entertainment budget? *breathe* Okay, sure; it was only $10, but these days that can buy you some pretty epic experiences (see: Steam vs. GFWL pricing wars).

The truth is that Minecraft fills a hole within us which very few games even approach, let alone succeed in doing well.

A long time ago, in a little game named Star Wars Galaxies, you could buy a house. And this was no ordinary house, where you click an arbitrary button while talking to an arbitrary NPC and suddenly are transported to an arbitrary house “instance”. No, this house was different. This house was real. You had to find an empty place in the world, and put your house there. And your house was there. There in the physical sense, not the ‘Hey look at that creeper there’ way. Anyone in the game who came within visual distance could see your house. Why was this special?

Because it turns out that we want to change things. Passing through the world without leaving an expression of our person, is foreign to us. We need to touch the environment, and we need others to see that touch. The reason we don’t have this in games is simple. By nature, allowing you to change the game world, in a way that everyone else can see, is difficult. It is easier to create a static world with “dynamic” top soil (can we say ‘destructible environments’?). And of course, easier translates to cheaper; therefore very few forays into this landscape exist.

Sure, you may be thinking; ‘What about Simcity?’. Admittedly, games do exist which try hard to let you make your mark. However, it is usually only within a set of limitations imposed by the designers, with few exceptions. Very rarely have we been given a game which allows us to build anything that we desire. And when one does come along; it’s overcomplicated and frustrating; causing little to no market traction.

Minecraft is different. It puts us in a world where we can tear down and build up anything we can think of. You want a big floating stronghold; sure. Maybe a to-scale reproduction of the Millennium Falcon; no problem. Perhaps you just hit puberty and want to flex muscles constructing a massive penis and vagina set; as you wish. Minecraft does not impose restrictions.

So, Minecraft is addictive and fundamental to our needs to imprint ourselves on the world. And it doesn’t try to guide us with nanny mechanics, because the game is so simply designed that very few directions are needed. Much of the enjoyment with mastering the game is through the process of figuring it out.

The explosion of attention for Minecraft is good for several reasons. It has made very clear that gamers will respond to (and pay for) projects which give them more control of their environments. I predict we will see large publishers rushing to include such player-generating mechanics in future titles. This is not to say that every game needs these elements. Although, a fortification building misison in Modern Warfare 3’s single-player campaign might be fun.

Unfortunately, Minecraft is so simple, that it lacks needed market stability. Nothing in Minecraft is difficult to reproduce, and it does not bring anything “new” to the table. Put simply; there is no IP in it. I suspect (and hope) that Minecraft’s developer Mojang has plans for imminent augmentations; beyond polish and new content. The community which has built up around the game has little to ensure it’s solidity as big publishers start landing their own offerings. I have some viable options (and opinions) to fix this, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

In the end, Minecraft is an evil killer of my time, but I can’t help but love it. It has revealed the goldmine that modifiable game worlds are. And I look forward to seeing more emergance in this space, and to what Mojang shows us next.

Good work guys, and thanks for a riot of fun!