Minecraft – The Lego Game

Dear Minecraft

You’re the wet dream of an indie developer come true.

You’re the mocking laugh in the face of the game industry whose biggest deity is better graphics.

You’re both the saviour and the nemesis of the ultimate explorer. Your game frame is the size of a postcard, but your world is infinite. Your borders are only vertical, but you would generate horizontally forever given anyone had the space and time for it.

You’re the kind of game that turns the player into a creator, a constructor or perhaps just a stranded loner in a world gone Lego, Lego on acid as someone coined it.

Speaking of Lego

One of my course mates wrote a very poignant post about you called That Lego Game pt. 1, but instead of summarizing it, I have chosen to repost here, he said it so well himself:

While talking to one of my close friends on Skype, who happens to work in the digital design apartment of LEGO, about my blogging exercises for the digital game theory course, he jokingly referred to Minecraft as “the great LEGO-game that LEGO never made”. In recent years the LEGO-corporation has, in collaboration with the British game studio Traveller’s Tales, published a number of successful video game licenses such as Lego Star Wars, Lego Batman, Lego Indiana Jones as well as Lego Harry Potter.

While these video game titles have received both critical acclaim from the reviewers as well as a general popularity with the LEGO-fans, they have nevertheless removed the focus farther and farther away from the original appeal behind the little LEGO-block that Ole Kirk Christiansen invented back in 1949. Using the French Sociologist Roger Caillois’ terminology one could argue that the strength of the original LEGO-block was its paidiac-nature (unstructured and spontaneous playfulness red.), since it could be used to construct an almost infinite number of different objects and scenarios. Compared to the paidiac-nature of the original LEGO-block the puzzle-platform games from Traveller’s Tales revolves around a much more rule-bound or ludic structure, in which the player is supposed to traverse different environments, while defeating a number of enemies as well as earning bonus points for new equipment.

(By Extazify on Deviant Art)

During our conversation on Skype my friend additionally told me that the digital design department in LEGO for many years had been trying to recreate the paidiac-nature of the original LEGO-block in a digital form within their video games as well as software programs, since this after all had been the reason why this specific toy had remained widely popular throughout several generations of children.

Therefore, the LEGO-corporation decided to team up with the American developer NetDevil back in 1995 in order to create the ambitious massive multiplayer online game that by its release in 2010 would be named Lego Universe. In Lego Universe the player is able to collect different LEGO-bricks throughout his many travels and adventures, which he subsequently can use to build different objects as well as buildings in a number of special areas in the game. Despite of this obvious attempt to recreate the paidiac-nature of the original LEGO-brick in a digital form, Lego Universe has so far failed commercially, and many players have rightly referred to it as “just another World of Warcraft clone”.

(The World as someone built it in Minecraft)

While I was visiting LEGO’s yearly convention called Lego World at “Bella Centret” this weekend, I noticed that Lego Universe solely was occupying one small stand, which furthermore would be completely deserted most of the time. Instead, the most popular part of the convention was the section with the elaborate fan-build landscapes as well as scenarios, which some of these fans had spent more than two years creating. This observation further underlined the fact that the major appeal behind LEGO is the paidiac-manner, in which it allows you to build an almost unlimited number of different scenarios solely by means of your own fantasy and a few simple plastic blocks.

While the LEGO-corporation so far has been largely unsuccessful in replicating the paidiac-nature of the original LEGO-block in a digital form, another video game was suddenly released back in 2009, which to a much greater extend mimicked the free-form play afforded by the original LEGO-brick. This small indie game was of course called Minecraft, and it was programmed, designed as well as released by the Swedish bedroom programmer Markus “Notch” Persson.

Mmmm, I love Lego… I’ll see you soon Minecraft.

- Ironyca Lee

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