Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (6 page)

After Markus became familiar with
Infiniminer
, he immediately sat down and began recoding his own game. He changed the third-person perspective to a first-person point of view and redid the graphics to make them even more blockish. It was a step away from the traditional strategy game he’d picked from his models and toward a more adventure-oriented setup. After a couple of days of frantic coding, Markus leaned back in his chair, satisfied as he saw the puzzle pieces beginning to fall into place. Building, digging, and exploring took on a totally new dimension when players saw the world through the eyes of their avatars.

In early May 2009, Markus uploaded a video recording of a very early version of
Minecraft
on YouTube. It didn’t look like much more than a half-finished system for generating worlds and Markus gleefully jumping around inside it, but still, the essence of it hinted at how the game might look when it was done.

“This is a very early test of an
Infiniminer
clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it,” is Markus’s description of the clip.

Someone on the fringes might regard what Markus did as intellectual-property theft. Without beating around the bush, he revealed where he found his inspiration and even went as far as to call
Minecraft
a clone of an existing game. But game developers, more than other kinds of artists, often find their starting point in an existing idea that they then work on, change, and polish. All studios, large and small, keep tabs on what their competitors are doing and frequently borrow from their games. Still, game developers seldom accuse others of plagiarizing. Almost all platform games originate from the mechanics that Nintendo put in place in the first
Super Mario Bros.
, released in 1985. And more or less all role-playing games build on the structure that was developed in games such as
The Bard’s Tale
. That’s why Zachary Barth refuses to single out Markus as a thief. He even speaks about how he himself used
Team Fortress 2
and the indie game
Motherload
as inspiration for
Infiniminer
. Actually, he’s tired of the constant questions about if he feels ripped off considering the millions of players and dollars that
Minecraft
has pulled in.

“The act of borrowing ideas is integral to the creative process. There are games that came before
Infiniminer
and there are games that will come after
Minecraft
. That’s how it works,” says Barth.

About this time Markus, after discussing the matter with some friends at the TIGSource forum, decided to call his game
Minecraft
. The name was a combination of the words
mine
, for mining ore in shafts, and
craft
, as in building or creating something. The name is also a wink at Blizzard’s strategy games
Warcraft
and
StarCraft
, and the enormously successful online role-playing game
World of Warcraft
. Initially, the game had the subtitle
Order of the Stone
, a reference to the online series
Order of the Stick
, of which Markus was a fan, but that idea was scrapped before the game was released to the public.

Markus was convinced that he was onto something big, but convincing the world around him of the excellence of his game was not so easy. A bunch of different ideas merged into
Minecraft
, and explaining them without any kind of demonstration was complicated. Over coffee with his mom, Markus attempted to describe in sweeping gestures the new project he was working on. He told her about the building, the exploration, and the atmosphere, and then explained how the game would be both easily accessible and complicated at the same time. Maybe it could develop into something great, he thought aloud. Maybe he should give notice at work and focus entirely on
Minecraft
. Ritva smiled slightly. It sounded like a really good idea, she’d said to her son. But maybe he should start by working only part-time? It wasn’t entirely easy to support oneself on game development alone. He’d said that himself before.

In truth, Markus’s idea was all Greek to her. Plus she remembered the year after high school, when he didn’t look for work, didn’t study, and barely went outdoors for days at a time. What would happen if he became just as obsessed with another project, something that could be just as important to him as building with LEGO pieces had been when he was in elementary school but that earned him next to nothing? She was worried, and yet, she saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about the game. He became confident, self-assured.

Elin better understood what Markus was thinking. She was among the first in the world to try out a working version of
Minecraft
. As soon as it was ready, Markus sent it to Elin and asked her to play. When she logged in and started up the world, what she got was basically a tech demo—a world of blocks beneath a blue sky. But Markus’s intentions were immediately evident to her. A couple of minutes of digging and building and she was entrenched in the game.

“This is SO much fun!” she said to her boyfriend.

From that moment on, Elin was Markus’s game tester. Every time he added a new feature to
Minecraft
, he sent her the latest version. Markus often stood watching over Elin’s shoulder while she played, listening intently to her comments. If Elin liked something he’d done, he seemed to reason, the rest of the world would probably like it, too.

Even before
Minecraft
was shown to the public, Markus had made a couple of important decisions that would have a huge influence on the game’s continued development. First, he wanted to document the development openly and in continuous dialogue with players, both his semiprofessional colleagues at TIGSource and any others who might be interested. Markus updated his blog often with information about changes in
Minecraft
and his thoughts about the game’s future. He invited everyone who played the game to give him comments and suggestions for improvements. In addition to that, he released updates, in accordance with the Swedish saying “often rather than good” (meaning someone who prefers spontaneity over perfection). As soon as a new function or bug-fix was in place, he made it available via his site, asking players for help in testing and improving it.

Second, Markus knew from the beginning that he eventually wanted people to pay for
Minecraft
. In the back of his mind were his talks with Jakob at Midasplayer and their dream of starting their own game studio, so it seemed only natural to put a price on his game. And it was better to do it as soon as possible.

It doesn’t sound very controversial, but the fact is that Markus’s decision went against most of the current trends in the gaming and Internet world. Many technology prophets talk about the road to riches on the web being through charging as little as possible for your products, preferably nothing at all. At most of the well-known Internet companies, for example Google and Facebook, the cash comes mainly from ads. In the gaming industry, the trend points to “micropayments.” Rovio-developed
Angry Birds
, which costs one dollar from the App Store, is maybe the best-known example. Another is the Swedish-developed online game
Battlefield
Heroes
. It’s a variation on the popular game that’s free to play, but players can buy new equipment and better weapons for a few dollars each.

Markus disregarded all such things.
Minecraft
was to cost around thirteen dollars during the alpha phase, the first period of development, mainly because it was a sum that he felt comfortable with. When the game was completed, the price would double.

“The reason that I released the game so early was that I would never have been able to finish it otherwise. Charging money was the same thing. I knew that I would never feel that it was good enough to put a price tag on. So I charged from the start,” says Markus today.

Anyone looking for more refined business logic behind what would become the most profitable gaming phenomenon of the last decade is on a fool’s errand. Markus is notoriously disinterested in business and economics. When someone asks him to reveal the secret behind
Minecraft
’s unbelievable financial success, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He just followed his gut, he says, did what felt right and what worked for him. To the question of what was the most important thing he learned from
Minecraft
’s early sales, Markus answers:

“I understood that an orange splash where it says ‘half price’ works really well. That’s what I had on the site during the alpha phase.”

On May 17, 2009, Markus uploaded the first playable version of
Minecraft
onto the indie forum TIGSource. “It’s an alpha version, so it might crash sometimes,” he warned. Other forum writers immediately began exploring the blocky world that Markus presented to them. There was a lot of digging, building, and discussing. The game crashed at times, but even at that early stage, it’s clear that
Minecraft
was exerting an unusual magnetism on players.

It took just a couple of minutes for the first reactions to come. “Oh hell, that’s pretty cool,” someone wrote. “I hope you make something really good out of this, dude, I think it has a lot of potential,” another encouraged. Barely an hour after Markus uploaded the game, the first image of a
Minecraft
construction was posted in the forum thread. “This is way too much fun. I built a bridge,” wrote the person who uploaded the image. Others filled in, adding their own constructions. A castle, a fortress, a secret treasure chest. Someone wrote that he’d tried to make a boat, but the result was too ugly to make public. Someone else built a giant phallus, but never uploaded an image, just relied on a vivid description of the work: “It was such a thing of awe that Firefox decided to pack it in before I could snap a shot of that mofo.”

Markus followed the postings with great interest, listening to bug reports and discussing
Minecraft
’s future with others on the forum. Friends and family remember how he told them enthusiastically about the warm welcome
Minecraft
had received. Many games are uploaded on TIGSource every day, but few struck a chord with the audience the way Markus’s game had. In his head, a ray of hope began to shine. Maybe he was on the right track this time.

In early June, Markus described his intended pricing model on his blog. Those who paid for the game were promised access to all future updates at no extra cost. A free edition of
Minecraft
would still be available, but only the current half-finished version of the game. For those who bought a copy of
Minecraft
immediately, there was a discount. When the game entered beta-development, the price would be raised to $20, and the finished version would cost $26. On June 12, Markus opened for orders. Twenty-four hours later, he clicked on the sales statistics and could hardly believe his eyes. Fifteen people had paid for the game. In just twenty-four hours, more than $150 had landed in his PayPal account.

Elin and Jakob were two people who really noticed the effect the early sales successes had on Markus. Elin remembers how he obsessively followed the growing numbers of games sold. She hesitates to describe him as nervous, but clearly Markus was very focused on the early reactions to the game. Seven games purchased per day felt unbelievable.

Initially, Markus dismissed these sales as a passing fad. But every day the number of discussion threads about
Minecraft
on the game developer forum grew larger, and increasing numbers of people visited them. All the while, the sales counter continued ticking upward, slowly at first, then faster. At home in Sollentuna, Markus did a quick calculation:
If I can sell more than twenty games a day, that’s enough for something approaching a decent salary
, he thought, and made up his mind.
Then I’ll quit my day job. Then I’m really doing this.

Chapter 8

The Hedonic Hot Spot
of the Brain

Early comments on
the first version of
Minecraft
didn’t seem particularly noteworthy at the time. Reading them now, they seem rather prophetic.
Minecraft
was then a very simple game, with only a fraction of the features that it has today. You could only dig up blocks and put them where you chose; that was it. Markus hadn’t had time to put in the animals, monsters, or anything else he had planned for the game. Still, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Players built things, took immediate screenshots of their creations, and uploaded them online. Within a few years, millions of others would be doing exactly the same thing. The question is why? What made
Minecraft
so easy to like right from the start?

Understanding why certain games are fun and others are not spans disciplines such as psychology, art history, and neurology. Game publishers invest enormous sums to determine what it is that will get players to spend an extra hour in front of the screen.

Minecraft
completely disregards the fact that other game developers go to great lengths to create worlds in which every detail is shaped with millimeter precision. In the racing game
Gran Turismo 5
, players can whiz around the Nürburgring in an almost photo-realistically re-created Lamborghini or Ferrari racecar. The action-adventure game
Assassin’s Creed II
lets the player climb tall buildings with soft, lithe movements, perfectly adapted to the jutting edges and window ledges that are there to grab hold of. Once on top of a church bell tower in fifteenth-century Florence, he or she can gaze out over an exquisitely rendered version of the city.

Does all this mean that these games are approaching reality? Not at all. A resemblance to reality in games is not only difficult to achieve, it often ruins the experience. For most players, driving a sports car along Germany’s most famous racetrack needs to be much simpler than in reality. In the same manner, Ezio, the main character in
Assassin’s Creed II
, must have superhuman climbing skills if the game is to be any fun. However, it’s not enough that games make reality easier; in some cases they have to make it
un
real in order to retain players’ interest.

In the first-person shooter game
Halo
, there are two ways you can injure enemies with a handgun: you can either shoot your opponent or, if you get close enough, you can club him with the butt of your gun. If Bungie, the company that develops
Halo
, had attempted to emulate reality, a smack of the butt would hardly cause injury at all, while a couple of gunshots would kill. In fact, the opposite is true. In
Halo
, a melee attack is often much more damaging than a gunshot. Making the game “realistic” would have made it feel one-dimensional. The design would have felt, strangely enough, illogical, since it’s more difficult to get close to an enemy than to shoot one from a distance.

This is where the strange logic of games becomes evident. The point is not to emulate reality but to adapt reality to clear, functioning rules. This phenomenon is a great deal older than computer games. Take chess, where the rook is more agile than the king, and pawns can only attack diagonally. Rock-Paper-Scissors is another example—a rock bashing scissors may be plausible; the scissors cutting paper also. But paper covering the rock would probably not be regarded as a victory if it weren’t necessary for the game to function.

So it’s not a problem that the world that greets
Minecraft
players doesn’t resemble reality. Instead, the blocky graphics activate an important mental ability. The human brain is skilled at reading patterns and is especially good at finding familiar shapes like faces and human figures. That’s the reason why we can see shapes in clouds and the face of Jesus on a slice of toast. When the image of a face consists of only a few lines, we fill in the missing pieces. Something similar happens in
Minecraft
. The pigs in the game resemble pink shoeboxes with heads and legs more than anything else, but there is no doubt to the player that they are pigs. Perhaps we should call the graphics “abstract” rather than simple. It’s an odd fact that game graphics risk seeming more unreal the closer they approach reality. Low-resolution game characters, such as Pac-Man, the pill-eating sphere from 1980, cannot be misinterpreted. It is often easier to identify with abstract, hand-drawn figures than it is with those that almost perfectly resemble humans but don’t quite hit the mark. Both robots and animated game characters often fall into that trap.

In 1970, the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the expression “uncanny valley.” The phenomenon can be observed when you draw a diagram of how attractive or pleasing a robot or animated figure is perceived to be by a viewer. Masahiro Mori succeeded in showing that we find such figures more pleasing to look at the more they resemble humans, but only to a certain limit. Virtual human faces that come close to the real thing but lack that little extra something—life in the eyes, perhaps, or natural muscle movements—become almost repulsive to look at. They feel dead, zombielike. The recognition curve drops into a deep chasm; that’s the uncanny valley. But then when the simulated face reaches an almost perfect level of detail, a level that few, if any, computer games attain today, the recognition curve turns upward again.

The characters in
Minecraft
are a comfortable distance from the uncanny valley. Playing on a server with others, a player sees fellow players as blocky figures, leaving it to each player’s imagination to “animate” the characters with real personality traits. If you know your best friend is the one who is maneuvering the figure on the screen, that’s who you will see. There is no preprocessed face interfering.

While
Minecraft
breaks with the gaming industry’s evolution toward photo-realism, the internal logic is infallible. This becomes most obvious when you build tools from minerals you’ve dug up. There are many recipes hidden inside the game; for example, two parts wood and three parts stone make a pickaxe if they are put in the correct places on a grid. Change the pattern and swords, furnaces, buckets, compasses, or pretty much anything appears. But the player never receives any help with the recipes—you have to figure out for yourself how to do it, or you have to go read about it on the web. There are so many recipes and they follow such a logic that the system almost feels organic.
Minecraft
exemplifies what is meant by a game having its own universe, with its own laws and logic. It has nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with a coherent, consistent set of rules.

As with all effort in gaming, even creating a tool must lead to some reward. It’s usually that the tool makes it easier to do something else, like digging up even more blocks. And pickaxes crafted from rare materials are, naturally, more effective than common ones.

Here’s where the question arises of what “reward” really means in a game context. Rewards can manifest themselves in many ways: getting to see the continuation of a story, one’s avatar receiving more power, getting to see a visually impressive film sequence, hearing a beautiful sound. The history of games is full of classic examples, like the
ting
you hear when Mario picks up a coin. But more than anything, the rewards are about that feeling of having solved a problem or puzzle. Why do we like that? There are theories that take us a good way down the road to an answer.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian-American psychology professor who is interested in what it means to “feel good.” So much that he has established a branch of psychology that studies happiness, contentment, and creativity. In the 1970s, he began working on a theory for a psychological state he thought he observed people sometimes attaining. He coined the concept of “flow” to describe the feeling of introverted ecstasy that successful musicians, artists, and athletes sometimes experience.

“Flow” happens when you disappear into the task you have taken on and completing it becomes your sole purpose. The basis for Csikszentmihalyi’s hypothesis was laid down long before computers or video games hit the mainstream market, but in nearly every way, the condition is consistent with what players experience when they are deeply absorbed in a game. The world disappears and their hands seem to move independently as they steer their avatar toward new challenges. Good games give us challenges that are exactly the right degree of difficult. They give instant feedback and tell us if we have passed the test or not (for example, if an opponent died, or not). There are often hints to help the player along the way. Here is the essence of attaining flow; succeeding at task after task, with exactly as much resistance as we need to neither get bored because it’s too easy, nor so frustrated at its difficulty that we give up.

Also, playing games does not require us to get off the couch, carry anything heavy, or expose ourselves to unpleasant weather. Instead, we effortlessly steer an alter ego through a strange, exceptional world. Each separate action—digging up a block in
Minecraft
, climbing up a building in
Assassin’s Creed II
, or firing a shot in
Battlefield
3
—is accompanied by sounds and visuals that make the experience enjoyable, even when we fail. Playing the game is, in the words of the Hungarian-American psychologist, rewarding in its own right.

Perhaps this is how we must understand the balance between challenge and reward in computer games. Exactly what the reward consists of is not important, as long as the task of getting it challenges the player at exactly the right level. Perhaps our brains are simply made to enjoy succeeding at challenging things.

So, how well does this model fit
Minecraft
? In one aspect, it seems to be way off target—Markus’s game doesn’t have what Csikszentmihalyi says is a condition for flow: clear direction. Instead, the player invents his or her own aim—for example, building a fortress or finding a rare mineral. From this perspective, it’s also obvious why some players stop playing
Minecraft
immediately; they are the ones who never get around to building anything, and therefore can’t create a meaningful goal for themselves. So Csikszentmihalyi’s model actually suits
Minecraft
like a glove, as long as the player makes a decision about what to aim for in the game.

If games are so suitable for putting us into a state of flow, why isn’t everyone attracted to them? Are there differences in the brains of gamers? Simone Kühn believes so. She is a researcher in experimental psychology at the University in Ghent, Belgium, and is also interested in the brain’s capacity to experience pleasure. Deep inside our heads, at around eye level and halfway behind the neck, there is an area of the brain called the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum can be considered our center of hedonism, the part of the brain that is activated when we enjoy or anticipate enjoying something. Food, sex, and drugs get the striatum spinning, and it is often mentioned when discussing drug abuse or people who’ve developed a pathological dependency on gambling. However, the striatum doesn’t just turn us into slobbering hedonists; it is also connected to fast decision-making and the ability to take action. The same part of the brain that makes us attracted to fatty foods and drugs seems to help us get things done at work.

“It has been termed the hedonic hot spot of the brain. It’s not often the case that a brain region is so clearly associated to one function, but with the ventral striatum it is clear that it is involved with reward processing,” says Kühn.

To learn more about how playing computer games affects that place in the brain, Kühn went to Berlin. There, she found a group of test subjects and strapped helmets on them, looking into their heads with the help of an MRI device. The test subjects were asked to play an academically designed game. As expected, the striatum lit up when the subjects became involved in pushing buttons. But not everyone in equal measure. One group turned out to have larger ventral striata than others—they simply had more brain matter in this spot, especially on the left side. This group consisted of people who played computer games in their free time.

The conclusion was obvious: game players have different brains than others. The question then becomes: What causes what? No one knows if gaming makes the striatum grow or if a congenitally larger striatum makes one more inclined to play. It’s clear that certain personality traits seem to be more common among those who play a lot. They seek immediate rewards for their efforts and make decisions more quickly than others. If it could be proved that games make the brain’s enjoyment center grow, then it’s logical that these characteristics are strengthened by a lot of gaming. If that’s the case, then gaming may make us more active and give us quicker reactions, but it might also lead us to tend to choose short-term rewards rather than working long-term toward something greater.

From Csikszentmihalyi’s flow perspective, the attraction of
Minecraft
is easy to understand. It gets a little trickier when we get into Simone Kühn’s research findings.
Minecraft
doesn’t give the same immediate gratification as do many other games.
Minecraft
is more difficult and it only becomes really fascinating once you’ve spent days building a cathedral out of one-meter blocks, or digging a winding system of tunnels and furnishing it with electric rails.

Maybe that’s why
Minecraft
reaches outside the usual circles of devoted gamers. One way to explain it is to see
Minecraft
as something other than a game. Perhaps graffiti or dollhouses are better comparisons. Or why not adventure travel? Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has described something similar. He has cited his childhood in the Kansai region of Japan as the inspiration behind his classics such as
Mario Bros.
,
The Legend of Zelda
, and
Donkey Kong
. There, he would explore the countryside for hours and find his own caves and paths in the woodlands. He is also attracted to simulated danger, playing with the audience’s need to experience things that make them jump but that are impossible in reality—falling from great heights or fighting colorful monsters, for example.
Minecraft
reflects a similar ambition. Few of us will ever build a cathedral of real stone, but in
Minecraft
, we can get an idea of how it feels.