Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything (9 page)

Chapter 11

A Dilemma Concerning
House Cats

“I’m going to
demonstrate to you how I really don’t play
Minecraft
like other people,” says the voice on the YouTube film.

The viewer peers into what looks like a deep shaft. The walls are gray and are built out of bedrock. The gamer, Halkun, calls it a well.

“I’m sure you’re probably thinking, ‘Why, Halkun, that is a very, very deep well!’ And I’m going to show you the reason why. It is currently holding. . . ”

The camera turns 180 degrees.

“. . . this!”

A structure looms up, so large it seems to disappear into the distance. The Starship
Enterprise
. In full scale. It’ll boggle the mind of anyone who has painstakingly put block to block to build something in
Minecraft
. Creating the whole spaceship from the TV show
Star Trek
must have taken weeks, maybe months.

The clip continues and Halkun gives a guided tour, talking about the model. The film has been viewed over 10 million times and is a typical example of many people’s first
Minecraft
encounter.

“I haven’t slept yet, so I’m gonna be a little loopy!” says Halkun triumphantly.

Minecraft
’s breakthrough coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the YouTube phenomenon
Let’s Play
. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a person recording himself or herself playing a popular computer game. The video clip often has a voice track of the player describing what’s happening on the screen and talking about his or her impressions of the game.
Let’s Play
is closely related to an older but similar phenomenon called
Machinima
(a combination of the words
machine
and
cinema
), a kind of film genre that uses the game world as the stage and its characters as actors. It may sound incredibly specialized, but
Machinima
has long been an established form of expression in the gaming world.

Minecraft
and
Let’s Play
turned out to be a good match. Since
Minecraft
encourages its players to create their own goals and challenges, each gamer’s experience is unique. In the gaming world, concepts such as emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling are used to describe these phenomena. For many players, the main objective in
Minecraft
is not the game itself, but rather the documentation and public viewing of their creations.

One might assume it’s a hobby for a nerdy and obsessive group of people, except that the number of people drawn to the
Minecraft
videos is staggering. In the spring of 1966, John Lennon said in an interview that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Markus has never expressed himself in the same terms, but might have significantly more reason to do so. Calculated in number of Google searches,
Minecraft
briefly surpassed Jesus in popularity in early 2011. During the summer of 2010, YouTube’s in-house analysts named
Minecraft
the year’s fastest-growing trend. There are several million video clips about the game. During the month of May 2011 alone, more than 35,000
Minecraft
films were uploaded—that’s more than a thousand a day—and while most of them are only viewed a few times, truly popular clips can attract a huge audience. The most widely viewed
Minecraft
clip ever is “Revenge,” a cover of Usher’s hit song, “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” complete with a music video in which a
Minecraft
character sings about his hardships with thieving Creepers. Nineteen-year-old Californian Jordan Maron, more well known as “Captain Sparklez,” created it. At the time of writing, “Revenge” had been viewed over 92 million times.

Two more
Minecraft
filmmakers who have attained similar levels of stardom are Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley, two young Englishmen who are collectively the heart of the
Let’s Play
phenomenon The Yogscast. In about four years their YouTube channel has racked up nearly 1.8 billion views. It’s not easy to describe a Yogscast clip to an outsider. Like popular TV shows, Yogscast is divided into seasons. Each episode is around twenty minutes long, and new ones are uploaded to YouTube every week or so. The setup resembles a kind of improvisational theater, with the
Minecraft
world as the stage, props, and cohesive frame of reference. Most often, Simon and Lewis follow a loosely written script with a fantasy theme, but improvise wildly and supply the characters with their own voices.

The third season of Yogscast is based on Simon and Lewis’s avatars Honeydew and Xephos (one is a Tolkien-inspired dwarf warrior with a red beard, the other, a
Minecraft
version of Commander William Riker, from the TV show
Star Trek: The Next Generation
). They save the world from the evil wizard Israphel. The two men are funny, quick-witted, and likable. They often lose their train of thought, start to laugh, or get distracted from the story by something irrelevant that catches their interest. For the viewer, the experience is reminiscent of listening to two guys playing a computer game together, which is, more or less, exactly what it is.

Successful
Let’s Play
filmmakers earn big money from their works. For a few years, YouTube has been sharing a slice of its massive advertising revenue with those who provide content for the site, but it’s hard to find out exactly how much. Google, YouTube’s owner, is very tight-lipped about what the agreements look like. Also, the revenue varies depending on the season, choice of subject, and how much ad room Google’s sales department succeeds in booking at a given time. But the consensus among filmmakers is that the video ads shown before a film clip generate between one and two dollars per thousand views for the creator of the clip. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but with the enormous numbers of viewers that YouTube videos attract, the dollars quickly add up. Jordan Maron is supporting himself completely on the revenue from “Revenge” and other video clips. In a good month, Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley can make tens of thousands of dollars from their Yogscast episodes.

Not everyone is lucky enough to live off of YouTube fame, but many video makers can supplement their normal income with a few hundred dollars extra a month by playing
Minecraft
for an audience. SethBling (known to the public only by his handle) is one of them. His day job is at Microsoft’s Xbox division in Seattle, a job that would make many a programmer envious. On his free evenings and weekends, he invests almost all his time in playing
Minecraft
.

SethBling came into contact with
Minecraft
through a roommate. He approached the game with a programmer’s eye and quickly discovered redstone. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, he decided to begin uploading videos of his creations to YouTube. On his channel, there are demonstrations of how redstone can be used to build elevators and train stations, automatic doors and a machine to teleport wolves. He has also re-created classic computer games such as
Minesweeper
and
Donkey Kong
, fully playable within the
Minecraft
world. His work consists of complex, detailed constructions that spin
Minecraft
in completely new directions, and actually have more in common with exercises in programming or engineering than with gameplay.

“I like
Minecraft
for precisely the same reason that I like programming. I have full control of the world and can shape it exactly as I choose. I can test different constructions and mechanical systems in order to see what the results are,” he says.

Re-creating classic games in
Minecraft
has become something of a distinguishing mark for SethBling. His breakthrough came when Markus began taking notice of his creations, thanks to a video that was popular on the discussion forum Reddit. In it, the video maker showed how he had re-created the classic Nintendo game
Duck Hunt
in
Minecraft
. Markus found the link, had a good laugh at the clip, and tweeted it to his followers on Twitter.

In the world of
Minecraft
, being mentioned by Markus on Twitter is called being “Notched.” A quick look at the
Minecraft
inventor’s account gives us a clue as to why such a seemingly unpretentious action has a name of its own. At the time of writing, over 700,000 people follow Markus on Twitter. The short message, with a link to SethBling’s ingenious creation, was the digital equivalent of sending a letter to almost all of central Stockholm with a promise of free entertainment in exchange for a mouse click. Within forty-eight hours, 300,000 people had seen the film. In a flash, SethBling had 4,500 new subscribers to his YouTube channel.

“Notch doesn’t tweet about YouTube clips very often, but he seems to be nerdy in exactly the same way I am. That’s lucky for me,” says SethBling.

In a good month, he makes a couple thousand dollars from YouTube.

Markus’s status as the creator of
Minecraft
gives him considerable sway in the world of the game. A single link from his Twitter account puts a spotlight on whoever has his attention, a kind of fame that can also be turned into revenue through YouTube ads. It’s probably one reason that the image of Markus, in a pixely and stylized shape, recurs in many of the most impressive
Minecraft
projects you can see in films.

While Markus’s status is self-evident, he is far from the only one with great influence in the world of
Minecraft
. After all, he’s not the one uploading the vast number of films online—millions of players are doing that. Which means that neither Markus nor anyone else at Mojang has much control over how the image of
Minecraft
is shaped on the Internet.

Mojang has never paid a dime for ads or PR for
Minecraft
. Instead, the players themselves have generated the enormous hype surrounding the game. It’s a perfect example of “viral marketing,” the art of utilizing people’s social networks to spread awareness about something new. The extensive YouTube community that has grown around
Minecraft
isn’t just the result of the game’s popularity; it’s also the main cause of it being a hit from the start. Every time a
Minecraft
player uploads a video to YouTube, the chance increases that someone, somewhere will notice the game and decide to try it out. And the more people who play
Minecraft
, the more video clips are uploaded. If it hadn’t been for Yogscast, Captain Sparklez, SethBling, and all the other YouTube celebrities,
Minecraft
would never have reached such a large audience as it has today.

That would be a nightmare scenario for a company with an obsessive need for control. Big companies hire hordes of PR consultants, marketers, and crisis managers to chisel out communication strategies, advertising campaigns, and rules for what information the company will divulge. All of this is thrown overboard when unbridled YouTube filmmakers are allowed to take over.

Alex Leavitt is someone who closely examines that phenomenon. He’s a researcher at the University of Southern California, focused on culture, media, and digital communication, and he is interested in how the Internet affects the production of creative works and changes the way we relate to and consume popular culture.
Minecraft
is one of his primary objects of study.

“
Minecraft
is this obscure little game that became a worldwide phenomenon in more or less a couple of weeks. It just exploded. I want to understand how all these millions of people playing it have affected its development,” says Leavitt.

Alex Leavitt regards
Minecraft
as an example of what he calls “open-source culture.” By that he means popular culture that is created symbiotically by its originators and its users. American academic Lawrence Lessig has coined the concept “read/write culture” for more or less the same thing. Both point to a form of cultural production that preempts the traditional concepts of producer and consumer.

What makes
Minecraft
such a wonderful object of study, says Leavitt, is that the game became popular long before it was finished. As the finished version wasn’t released until MineCon 2011, players, at an early stage, had the opportunity to influence how the game would look and play. For years Markus has been engaged in constant dialogue with his players about the future of
Minecraft
. On his blog he has comprehensive documentation of successes as well as mistakes and thoughts about the game’s development. On Twitter and in discussion forums, he has consistently encouraged players to give him feedback for future versions. Responding to the hundreds of suggestions and opinions that pour in daily would be impossible, but Markus can often be seen on discussion threads about
Minecraft
, and he talks daily with his players on Twitter. If nothing else, he’s created a feeling of accessibility; anyone can offer a suggestion and maybe have it taken into account in the next version of
Minecraft
.

Markus’s constant presence also creates a strong emotional bond between the game and its players. When Carl wants to impress other CEOs and company bigwigs, he doesn’t mention the millions of people worldwide who play
Minecraft
, or the five thousand people in Las Vegas who stood up and applauded when Markus got up onstage. Instead, he mentions what in marketing lingo is called “user engagement.” Mojang’s figures show that 75 percent of those who paid for
Minecraft
in the last two years are still active players. They are what Carl would call “monthly active users.” According to him, this many of them may well be a world record. Or, as one player says, “It doesn’t feel like you’ve bought a game. It feels like you own a part of it.”