Over www.makeuseof.com Craig Snyder recently wrote a controversial, and highly opinionated article, regarding the "broken promises" of Mojang, Notch in particular, of their release of Minecraft 1.0. The article entitled "Is Minecraft Really That Great?" mostly focuses on the negative aspects of what the release team over at Mojang has failed to do with Minecraft. While the piece is labeled as an opinion piece, I think a few of his points are rather harsh, attack annimations, and sponge harvesting still missing, really?! A few others are spot on, e.g., Capture The Flag (CTF) and mod support (but those are coming still according to Mojang), but in general the piece is overall negative.
Craig says he's a Minecraft "fan" and will likely continue to play, with that said I think in general he's forgotten the reason why we play games, entertainment. The fact that both Minecraft is fairly cheap, especially for those of us with lifetime free updates, when compared to other games, and is extremely easy to go into, it also allows you to express yourself creatively. Not to mention all of the kick ass 3rd party content, like mods, youtube movies and webisodes, not to mention the parody skits, that entertain us all.
I'm not sure how old Craig is but he mentions "atari" at one point, but I think a lot of people these days forget, or never experienced, the "golden days" of computer gaming where a pixel was your entire character and it was all about the game play and story. Which is why minecraft is as popular as it is because YOU create the story and it doesn't matter how hi-rez your character is or if there are attack animations or not. Its about that first time you encountered a zombie and defeated him, or the first night you were running back to your base and took an arrow in the back from an unseen skeleton off to the right, or that nasty spider camped on top of your door. It's a story you'll relate to other minecraft fans/friends and they know exactly the terror you felt or euphoria of finding that vien of diamonds. Another of the key successes is the ability to mod minecraft to suit your gaming needs, so if you do want to have a minecraft MMO you can! Like Lego's minecraft is ever expanding!
Head over to makeuseof and check out Craigs Article and see what you think. If you think i'm "out of my head", and Craig is "spot on", feel free to shoot me an email.
Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!
