Whether or not this was meant to be a humorous video or a serious look into the Minecraft paradigm I find this video very manipulative. In the same way that talking about your views on Politics or Atheism vs Religion would be manipulative, it’s bound to gain controversy and bound to gain attention. I can’t be sure why the video was made, I can’t reach into Leon’s head and pull out his reasoning, all I can do is draw my own conclusions. So using words while I use words like ‘think’ and ‘feel’ know that I’m only making stipulations into the authors mind, that I’m only studying it from my own perception.

When I first watched the video I was reminded of a couple of years ago when Spoony started his series on Final Fantasy 8. During that time Spoony had garnered the attention of the fan base of the game and came under attack and sparked his own controversy. I only watched these videos in hindsight and learned of the reactions in hindsight as well. However to me it seems like Spoony didn’t actually intend for any of this to happen, the controversy he sparked was because he had some real meaningful grievances with the game. While it might be the same with the author of this video I also feel that the way it was made was more aware that it was going to spark this controversy, that in a way he knew he was opening up this door to bring a community down on him. And if I’m totally wrong and this was some dark joke on game communities or fan bases I feel that it was completely lost in the creation process making it entirely unfunny.

Feeling that I was manipulated I was simply going to ignore this video as Baseless bait for controversy, not necessarily ‘trolling,’ but something more sinister. But as I’ve watched the video three times now I feel that I’ve already been manipulated into whatever the intentions of the video were. I’m contributing to the hype by adding my view to it, so I might as well make my viewpoint on it known.

That said the video did make some very fair points:
-Minecraft was in fact inspired by InfiniMiner.
-The graphics are not very good and don’t pay homage to what they say they do.
-The initial learning curve is very high.
-The combat is very linear and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

I would like to offer up my own opinions however on some of the points that were made, they are good points but they’re not exactly irrefutable. The fact of the matter is that many of the points made are very much based on personal experience, and that the overarching tone of the video is that somehow a game that is purely based around the way the community has embraced it is somehow ‘bad.’ With that in mind I’m going to go down the list of the points made and bring up my own points, unfortunately I don’t have the magic of film on my side so I have to condense it to a list structure.

1) This game is user friendly. You have to read walkthroughs to learn the basics of the game, and that the game’s only challenge is based around learning to play the game.

This point sort of hits on the whole idea of: ‘What makes a game fun?’ This has been debated rather heatedly for a long time, and the answer to the question is not as easy as one might think. In fact it often breaks down into a lot other questions. Are easy games fun, are artsy games fun, are games that are perpetually growing and changing fun? Games by and large are based on the players experience, and what has been found is that gamers are in fact people and there’s no one overarching way to have fun with a game. Some gamers like action games that challenge them with complex mechanics but initially easy basics.

Where this point breaks down is in the assumption that there’s not in fact a set of gamers out there who enjoy actually researching their game, that they don’t enjoy having a very acute learning curve to even get into the game. There are games out there that are built around the idea of actually going out and having to research the game in order to play it, this harkens back to tabletop games that are usually so steeped in rules that they have multiple books on the subject. Now you might say that this only proves your point that most games do have instruction manuals but I would point out that while you might have the instruction manuals on hand that these table top games with multiple books are very much about researching how to do things in the books mid game.

Games like Dwarf Fortress, Eve Online, and Heaven and Hearth are all games that are perpetuated by their community posting instructions for people to gain basic understanding of the game. Are these games failures in the basics of game design? Are they bad just because not everyone can get into the game easily? These questions might sound dismissive to some people, but there is clearly a fan base for these games, if they were really so bad then why do people still dedicate so much time to these games?

As well saying that once the basics are understood that there’s no challenge to the game is also not entirely true. Knowing how to make tools and survive your first day is just the beginning of the game, in order to play “well” you have to not only survive, but thrive in the world that you build around you. There are a lot of things that you can’t just teach people, things like learning how to safely mine, learning the ins and outs of Redstone programming, and navigating the world around you. Those are all things that can be explained yes, but you actually have to experience them to get good at it.

Now that said I put playing the game well into quotes because the game is in fact built around the users own experiences. It’s the ultimate sandbox and players don’t have to go out and master anything in order to survive the game, all they really have to do is survive. And that’s pretty much as easy as building a dirt house with a door and killing pigs and cows for their meat every so often. And that might be fun for some people but it certainly isn’t where the heart of the game lies.

I could go on and on about this and I already have, you say that the fact that you have to research this games mechanics makes it somehow worthless. I say that is untrue, that games of any nature are found to be fun by different strokes of people and saying one type of game is worthless just because it doesn’t speak to your own tastes is stilted and a little bit offensive.

2) Graphics, the game looks like crap. And the justification for the games graphics is equally bad, the game is meant to look like a retro game but it doesn’t actually strike a similarity to any retro games.

Now I already said that you made a good point on the graphics, yes the uses graphics that are meant to evoke an 8bit sort of feel but doesn’t actually strike a chord with any 8bit games of the past. This is definitely a failing on the part of Notch who could have used the engine to make something a lot more aesthetically pleasing. And yes there are people who have gone out and made texture packs to make the game more pleasing to the eye, and yes that doesn’t make the game graphically worthwhile by its own standing.

However to say that the game is ugly is harsh, now I realize that this is part of your character. And that you might think this, and I’m not going to set out to change your mind on the subject. Therefore this is going to be a short field of rebuttal.

I’m going to say that subjectively I like the way the game looks by default, I’ve been playing since alpha and the first time I got into the game I was blown away by the way it looked. There’s a sort of charm to the way that the whole world is made by 8 bit blocks. I remember very vividly when I first made my world and I turned around and looked to see a large hill side with an arching cavern in front of me, waterfalls pouring down either side of the hill, trees interspersed around. It was a scene that made me gaze in awe not because of the blocks themselves but because I could internally imagine a similar scene in real life, and that’s where the game is truly beautiful in my opinion, in the fact that it can capture the players imagination and make beautiful scenes in the mind’s eye. Since then the game has added a lot of different types of enviroments, from swamps, to oceans, and deserts, ambient lighting, and other visual effects that have made the game prettier and prettier as the time passes all without the inclusion of mods or texture packs.

Now I can’t speak to everyone’s experience and I don’t aim to change your mind on the way the game looks, but that’s because I realize that not everyone is going to enjoy the graphics. I’m not going to defend them further than to say that I like them, and yes the art direction could have been much better.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

3) The Combat is linear, thoughtless even. Everything is on a very basic level, neither monsters or players gain advantage.

Here’s another part where I say that you make a good point but I have my own view points on the subject as well. Yes combat is very linear, swinging a sword around can be done by just holding down the mouse button, the bow is easy to use because creatures just walk toward you in order to attack, with the exclusion of skeletons that shoot at you or Ghasts who fly and shoot at you. In that respect yes the game is very simple, however it is not a game that was meant to be focused around combat. As I have stated before Minecraft is a game that is focused around the ideas of surviving and thriving in your environment given nothing but your own two hands to do so.

That said the enemies add a whole new dynamic to the game when you’re focused around surviving, the fact that neither enemy nor player has the advantage mitigates your survivability down to numbers. And since there’s only one of you and countless monsters on any given night you’re ultimately going to die if you don’t build a shelter or defenses against the monsters out there. Also saying that the enemies are all the same is not exactly true, even in alpha enemies had different skills and specialties that could mess with your character. Zombies did just walk toward you but they could also fit into the same places that you could, they make sounds so that you know they’re coming and they’re slow but if you don’t have a sealed off are they can get in through any opening that you could get in. Skeletons as well had the same dynamic of making a sound and being slow walking but otherwise able to get into the same places that you could, but they also had the added bonus of shooting arrows at you meaning that even as you were running you had a chance of being damaged. Spiders were larger than the skeletons and zombies and therefore couldn’t fit through a doorway but they were faster and could climb up sheer surfaces meaning that standing inside a walled off area wasn’t going to save you unless you had a roof over your head. Finally Creepers were fast and most importantly of all quiet, the fact that creepers did not make a sound until they were ready to explode was mind blowing in how difficult to deal with, other than sealing yourself up in your house there was no way to deal with them other than looking over your shoulder every couple of seconds.

So yes if you’re just looking at straight combat all the enemies are easy to deal with with the proper tools, but when you consider them in the light that they weren’t meant for straight out combat but rather survival their genius starts to shine through, they all had subtle variations that made you have to think about how to deal with your surroundings. And that is just the default creatures from the initial release of the game, they’ve since added other creatures to make things even more difficult, Silverfish that have eggs that look just like stone, Endermen that teleport, and cave spiders that are small, fast and do poison damage.

I’m afraid you’re just misrepresenting the core dynamic of the game when you say that combat and ai are very linear.

4) The game is boring.

I’m not even going to honor this point, there’s no argument that you have that is not based on your own experience. Conversely there is no argument that I could make that isn’t based on my own experience. This is not something that can be defined objectively, no one can outright be the final judge of whether or not a game is fun or not. There are countless people out there that find all kinds of First Person Shooters fun and rewarding as gamers but I don’t particularly care for them, I don’t have fun shooting other people not because I dislike violence in games or some reason like that but just because I’ve never been interested in playing Army Men in the back yard, I was always the one digging tunnels and little sand cities in the sand box which is probably the reason I like minecraft, it speaks to my creativity. If you find the game boring that’s all well and good but stating it in your video like its spoken gospel is again a bit offensive and stilted.

That said there are things that you can stage and make art out of in minecraft, it’s not relegated to just placing down blocks for sculptures. The inclusion of red stone and pistons and levers, switches, buttons, pressure plates, dispensers, mine carts, and boats can make for very fluid and dynamic pieces of art if you’re creative enough to do so. You made a point statement earlier that you didn’t want to hear about someone making the U.S.S. Enterprise because it was made by a player and not the development team. But then put a point in about other games that are similar to minecraft with trampolines and other staging devices where you can make art, inevitably those are going to be made by the players too. Minecraft supplies its own set of tools for players to make art just like these other games do, it’s not just ‘Lego Blocks’ as you seemed to point out, and not everything is sculptures.

6) The source of the game is not very well designed.

Most of the tone of the fan rebuttals seemed to center around this idea, that the game programming was not very good at all. Now this argument is probably very tired by this point but it stands to be repeated because it’s basically centered around the soul of the game.

Minecraft worlds are made up into chunks of blocks randomly generated into different kind of biomes, it randomly generates not only what you see on the surface but what’s underground when you first enter the world. This includes cave systems, tree placement, hills, lakes, oceans, deserts, swamps, ravines, mountains, and other natural foundations all with thousands and thousands of blocks. And these do not change; they stay even when you go miles and miles away from where you started. As well as you move around new chunks of data are added in creating even more terrain which is not immediately visible to you.

Based on the fact that this game speaks to the creativity of the player using resources that they pick up from the world around them to create a world in an unlimited sand box environment how exactly would you have proceeded to make the game given the same programming language and the same development team? I’d really like to know because to be honest given that Notch made the initial game himself and only added in other people later that means he developed the base concept himself with java. Java is not that powerful of an engine to begin with and with only one developer I would venture to say that the game is very well conceived and programmed.

Now could it have been made with a better engine and a more rounded development team? Yes I sure think that with the current technology of the day it’s possible to make a sand box game like Minecraft with modern graphics and sensibilities, however I doubt that an indie developer could have made a game like that, it would likely take a lot more money and end up being an a list game. Now since Minecraft and Infiniminer there have been other indie games based around the idea of creativity and survival, Terraria is one example. But Minecraft does endure and is in fact being made better in its continued development.

Indie games do not always come out perfect, in fact most indie games are based around their community, they continue to get tweaked and worked on long after they’re released. Some of the more artsy ones might stay sedentary sure, but the ones like Minecraft or Terraria will most likely not be the same game a year from now as they were when they were first released. In that respect they end up a lot like MMOs in that they will have bugs and quirks and flaws that might never get worked out. But they’ll still be around because their community supports the game and the developer.

7) Finishing Up

I’ve read some of your comments on the matter of this video and you’ve said that just because the game is ‘not for everyone’ doesn’t mean that it’s above criticism. This is true, the game is not above criticism and I myself don’t believe that it’s the end all be all of indie games. But the light that you’re presenting this video in is very fatalistic and not fair to the intentions that the game was built around, it seems to be mostly built around your perception as a gamer which is fine. But you speak with the standpoint of some kind of herald of the gaming world, which is simply not the case.

I understand that this is part of a character that you’re portraying online but honestly like I said before the whole joke is lost on me. It’s unnecessarily cruel to the design of the game and the argument isn’t even that solid to begin with.

I think the major failing of this character that you’ve created at least in relation to this particular game is that you’ve completely lost the love of the subject. With characters like the Nostalgia Critic or the Cinema Snob who base themselves completely around despising whatever they’re watching you can at least get the idea that they love what they’re doing, that they actually care about these old movies. And if that reference isn’t close enough to home for a gamer the same goes for Spoony or Angry Joe, they love games and the reason that they make these rants is because they feel betrayed by them and want the gaming community which includes developers to get better as a whole. With you it just seems like you want to tear down the developer, there’s no love in coming through in this video, there’s no ultimate joke or overarching goal to save the game or the developer. It’s simply just a rant to the effect of “I don’t like this game or the developer and I wish other indie more deserving indie games were popular instead.”

I tend to think that a lot of Minecraft’s popularity is based around the hype that it was given to it by third parties. A lot of the fanbase for the game are not actually fans of the game itself but the the community behind it. Its become overinflated and frankly the people who do actually enjoy the game have been brushed by the wayside by modders, youtube videos, and an over excitable community of ‘players.’ Meanwhile there is an element of people, people who originally got into this game without the hype or the videos behind it who still quietly play the game on occasion and enjoy surviving their own little worlds with nothing but their two hands to start with.

In that I see Minecraft as a well made game, it has all the elements of a sand box game, it has a core dynamic that has frankly not been explored very well, and given the size of the initial development team it is a very nice technical achievement. It doesn’t need mods or texture packs to stand on its own, there is fun to be had by just creating your own little worlds and surviving them. There are a lot of flaws yes, but when did gamers become so obsessed with the quirks of a game, when did things like simplistic combat, or the user friendliness of the game become central points as to whether or not the game is good or fun?

Ninja Gaiden for the NES was not a user friendly game but it is touted as one of the best games in history. Mario world combatted enemies by jumping on their head and it has become a standard which all platformers are judged by.

None of this is going to change your mind of course, and I’m completely fine with that. But despite you saying that this was not an attack on minecraft fans I still feel that I was personally manipulated into watching this video simply because it would spark controversy among the minecraft fans. And in a way that is a completely separate kind of attack.