What Makes Minecraft So Addictive?

It is a strange coincidence that during a summer when the world was riveted by 33 Chilean miners trapped in unimaginable conditions, hundreds of thousands of internet gamers were crafting pickaxes, lighting torches, and venturing into pixelated caves of their own. Much like those brave Chileans, the Minecraft players found themselves cut off from their family and friends, not trapped but hopelessly addicted. The game recently sold its 500,000^th copy, and another 1.1 million people use the free version. Not bad for a game that was mostly developed by one guy, and is still in Alpha Testing.

So here’s the gist. When you start playing Minecraft, you’re placed in a randomly-generated world of lush green fields, majestic waterfalls, and gaping caverns.

Everything is made up of textured blocks, which can actually be quite beautiful. There are even blocky little pigs and sheep. (POSSIBLE TOPIC FOR FUTURE OVERTHINKING: The rise of 8 bit chic. Think of Chiptune music. Think of the Scott Pilgrim movie. As video games start looking and sounding more and more like movies, our generation feels a certain nostalgia for the old school videogame aesthetic.)

Unfortunately, when the sun sets, you’re going to be attacked by zombies. So you better start punching trees. No, it’s not just a way to relieve stress. Punching a tree creates a log block. Then you can break the log block up to make four wood blocks. Then you can take two of the wood blocks and make four stick blocks. Are you having fun yet?

Okay, now take four more wood blocks, and use those to make a workbench. On the workbench, you can combine 2 stick blocks and 3 wood blocks to make a wooden pickaxe. Who cares? YOU care, buddy, because now you can look around for some stone to mine. After that, combine 3 cobblestone blocks and 2 sticks to make… a stone pickaxe!

Anyway, skip about an hour of chopping down trees and turning those trees into wood blocks, and you’ll finally have enough wood to build your first house. And by house I mean a wooden box with a door, where you can huddle in fear as the zombies roam the countryside. When the sun comes up, you can venture into a cave in search of the raw materials to build a nicer crib. Just remember to bring a torch (combine a stick and coal) because monsters spawn in the darkness. Life may have been tough for those Chilean miners, but at least there weren’t any giant spiders down there.

This is not a game that is determined to shower you with pure fun the moment you start playing. This is a game where you have to do a lot of repetitive things to survive, and a LOT of repetitive things if you want to create anything interesting. (It’s also a game without an instruction manual, so if you’ve not willing to watch a lot of YouTube videos to figure out what the hell you’re doing, you won’t get far. The first time I played, I immediately dug a massive hole straight down, until I fell into lava and died.)

All this begs the question: why is Minecraft so popular?

The Minecraft neophyte might assume the game is all about action. After all, the game’s main mode is called “Survival,” and the goal is to defend yourself from hordes of monsters every night. But if you start watching Minecraft videos on YouTube, it’ll be a long time until you find one that shows a battle. What you’ll find are lots of people showing off the amazing things they built.

Here’s a nice little home. Make sure you watch until 1:15:

Still not sold? How about this massive replica of the Reichstag:

Ironically, it does NOT burn down.

But it’s not just structures. Here’s a guy who built a sheep-shooting cannon:

I urge you all to go to Google, search for “Minecraft,” and click on Images. Some of the things you see will make you simultaneously proud and ashamed to be a part of the human race.

So here’s the underthought explanation for Minecraft’s success: “Clearly, people really like building things and showing them off, and Minecraft gives people the freedom to do that. Case closed.”

But then here’s my thought experiment: why would anyone choose Minecraft over Second Life?

(I must pause here to urge you all not to flame me immediately. I am not suggesting that Second Life is superior to Minecraft, or vice versa. I’m suggesting that they are different, and I want to consider how.)

Second Life, for those of you who do not have a Tardis on your mantlepiece, is a virtual world you can join for free. You create an “Avatar,” which does not necessarily have to be blue and furry and catlike, although many of them are (dating from long before the movie). Then you can explore and create exotic places, participate in live events with thousands of other real people, and most importantly, have lots of the cybersex with Sailor Moon lookalikes. (Okay, NOW you can flame me.)

Second Life has been around since 2003, way way longer than Minecraft. Like Minecraft, it is free to get started. And as a tool for building complex 3-D designs, it blows Minecraft out of the virtual water.

For example, here’s a roller coaster somebody made in Minecraft:

That video has 2,939,000 views as I write this.

Here is a detailed replica of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island that somebody built in Second Life:

That video has 119 views. Not 119,000. Just plain old 119.

Here is a replica of the starship Enterprise somebody made in Minecraft:

Now with over 1,400,000 views.

In Second Life, you can put on a uniform and wander around the corriders of the Enterprise:

Total number of views for that one: 4,000.

Here’s a highway from Minecraft:

832,000 views.

Here’s a highway from Second Life:

8,000 views.

Now look, all I’m proving is that Minecraft videos are more popular than Second Life videos. I don’t want to give the impression that Second Life doesn’t have a huge fanbase. In fact, in March of this year alone, user-to-user transaction in the game exceeded $57 million. That’s a lot of virtual Lady Gaga costumes.

My point is that Minecraft’s success must be more complicated than “people like to build things,” since there are easier and more powerful ways to build things online. I think the genius of Minecraft is that it allows you to build things… but it makes it really really hard. By throwing up obstacles in the way of creativity, it makes you play longer and harder, and it makes the creativity more satisfying.

If you want to build something in Second Life, you just pull up your menus and start building. You don’t need to find raw materials. You don’t need to construct tools. You certainly don’t have to fight off enemies while you do it. Second Life isn’t a game; it’s a virtual world. If you want to create, you can go ahead and indulge your artistic muse without restriction. Here’s a cool video showing you how it’s done.

Naturally, this complete freedom makes Second Life completely pointless to a lot of people. What’s the point of building the Enterprise if the program is trying to help you do it? It’s not a game – it’s just a drafting tool with griefers. You might as well be using AutoCAD or Photoshop.

On the other hand, building stuff in Minecraft is very hard. Building even a simple wooden house requires you to chop the hell out of enough trees to give Al Gore a heart attack. If you want to build anything really impressive, you’re going to have to excavate tons of bedrock in search of iron, gold, and God willing and the crick don’t rise, diamonds. Of course, if you get attacked or burnt by lava, you’ll lose all your precious minerals and start again at the spawn point.

Every last brick you use, you must seek out, mine, and craft. And there are engineering challenges too. Want to build underwater? You’ll have to create glass tunnels filled with cloth, then burn the cloth to empty them out. Want to build a floating castle? You will have to hit to the forums to figure out how to make an elevator out of water and a boat (yes, you can craft boats). Dream of making a home entirely out of wool? You can make a creepy structure that automatically kills every sheep in the area, leaving you with the fluffy spoils. And the truly hardcore players take the phrase “lava lamp” to the whole new level.

It will take you days to make anything halfway cool. But when you put that last block on your replica of the Deathstar, you will feel like a golden god.

Now, this kind of game doesn’t appeal to everybody. It takes a certain kind of gamer to get sucked into Minecraft. You have to have at least a little grinder in you. The grinder doesn’t want lightning fast pulse-pounding action. What the grinder wants is a difficult goal that requires a ton of repetitive gameplay to reach. Grinding is usually associated with RPGs. Want to get your Elf to level 50? You’re going to have to kill a lot of orcs, my friend. Want to get your Charmander to evolve into Charizard? Prepare for several hundred battles against the same dumb trainers. For the real grinders, the harder the game, the more they like it. They are digital masochists. As Tom Hanks once said of our national pastime, “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

But here’s the thing about a Level 50 Elf or a Charizard–they don’t seem like impressive feats to the non-player. And even for other grinders, if you’ve seen one Charizard, you’ve seen them all. That’s why I think that a huge structure in Minecraft is a much more satisfying goal for the grinder to pursue. When you build a statue of Charizard a hundred feet tall, you are literally building a monument to your own grinding. Anyone, gamer or not, will be able to watch your YouTube video and understand how much you’ve been playing, and how clever at solving the technical challenges you were. I think that’s the core of the Minecraft formula: it provides people with the raw tools to build complex structures, but makes it very difficult to do so, thus driving anyone with a grinding bone in their bodies to quit their job and spend all day looking for more iron.