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up until this point we've refrained from
talking about Minecraft because we felt
that we didn't have that much to add to
the conversation there is a lot to dig
into about Minecraft but so much has
been said about the game by so many
insightful people that said there is one
thing that hasn't been touched on much
what effect is this game going to have
10 years down the line once in a rare
while a single game comes along that
affects the entire game industry and
Minecraft is definitely one of those
phenomena it's such a behemoth in the
game space of course it's going to make
waves usually though when a game becomes
a mega hit like this its influence is
seen largely in the number of people
trying to clone the game to make a quick
buck in extreme cases these Mega hits
can lead the whole game industry to
focus their efforts around the genre
they popularize we saw it happen with
first-person shooters it happened with
MMOs it's currently happening with mobas
but I think Minecraft is a fundamentally
different situation and I think that
because Minecraft has gained massive
popularity with a particular group that
almost none of these other Mega hits do
and that group is young children that is
important because Minecraft is radically
different than the types of games most
of us grew up playing you see for most
of us we grew up with action games
reflex based games kids of the Nintendo
era grew up with Platformers and so when
they reached their teenage years and
became the principal target market for
the AAA industry many of them looked for
high action play later some of these
kids inevitably also joined the industry
and brought with them the experience and
the knowledge that all those years of
play had given them as well as the
biases and ingrained ways of thinking
this led to an industry increasingly
focused around action play about
adrenaline games and so we've moved from
Platformers to first-person shooters
generation to generation NES kids grew
up to give us things like Halo for the
Next Generation to grow up on and in
fact for almost the entire history of
the medium most of the games that are
hits with a younger audience that people
would start picking up by the time they
were seven or eight have had the same
core engagement reflex challenges
adrenaline and Mastery but now all of a
sudden that's changed all of a sudden we
have hundreds of thousands of young
people being introduced to gaming with a
low Fidelity game about building the
ripples from that are going to be
enormous think about the patience that
Minecraft takes to start you can't
really just Button Mash you can't just
slam on the controls and watch things
explode this is a wholly different
expectation than most of the games for
youth have had in the past in fact an
entire generation are for perhaps the
first time being trained not to expect
instant gratification from their games
imagine what that does to design
especially Mass Market design 10 years
down the road imagine if we could expect
a little more patience from the player
before they hop into the action imagine
if we could count on the player being
willing to do a little more work before
the game really opens up this creates an
incredible breadth of new play
opportunities it doesn't mean we'll have
to fundamentally change the genres of
games we produce but it lets us do more
with them games like the old thief or
Mech Warrior or games in the vein of
Rainbow 6 become much more viable for
the firstperson shooter designers
working at AAA companies if we can
expect players to come into games with a
willingness and maybe even an
expectation to have to put in a little
bit of work up front to really get the
most out of their games but it also
potentially changes what genres we build
look at the AAA space today it's filled
with games that are in evolution on what
that audience played when they were a
little bit younger games which can bring
the existing audience from one title to
the next because they're already
familiar with it already comfortable
with the genre and the mechanics now
look at the Indie space for every wildly
Innovative indie game we see a dozen
games playing to our Nostalgia our fond
Recollections of earlier days now
imagine what happens when that
audience's Nostalgia when the genre and
the mechanics they're comfortable with
centers around a building crafting game
it may well become a lot more viable for
genres that haven't seen triaa budgets
for 20 years to return to the AAA
Spotlight it may become reasonable for
companies to Branch into genres that we
haven't seen big teams work on since the
original Heyday of the PC and of course
this doesn't mean we'll lose our
first-person shooters or our racing
games but it does probably change the
percentage of the industry that's going
to be focused on Strictly
action-oriented play and in 15 years
when many of the people who are entering
the industry are the people who grew up
putting in their 10,000 hours on
Minecraft you better believe it's going
to change what they create will it
radically alter how we fundamentally
understand games no probably not but can
you perhaps expect to see more crafting
systems in your Shooters can you expect
to see more digging and Mining and
building in your RPGs almost certainly
we are an industry of human beings human
beings influenced by what we grew up
with and what we grew up loving and
today's generation has grown up with
Minecraft so can we expect this
Minecraft generation to change the
industry absolutely as the creators and
consumers of the future their voice will
weigh in on what games get made and how
they're crafted so when looking at the
Minecraft phenomena it pays to stop and
take a moment to look at the broad view
and think about how the games of
tomorrow might be influenced by the wild
success of one game with the children of
today see you next
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