I always find articles about Minecraft interesting. I live off of Minecraft's success at the moment (I created the linked Minecraft wiki and also the Minecraft forum) and I often find myself disagreeing with articles about why the game is so successful.

I think the single biggest reason Minecraft has such success is completely accidental, something Notch never consciously caused: Minecraft is a creative game, a game that you need to be creative to enjoy properly, and what do creative people do? They share their creations.

Minecraft came at the perfect time, it came when indie games were becoming more popular, when Youtube video series about video games ("Let's Plays") were rising in popularity and at a time when the internet had become very social, it's so incredibly easy to share content now. If I want 100 people who don't play Minecraft to see a creation I've made in Minecraft it's very easy for me to do that, 5 years ago it would have been close to impossible to do this because the only real place to share content would be the forum for that game, and everyone on that forum would already know about it, so spread of the game would have been severely limited.

Minecraft is a fantastic game and of course if the game was bad it would never have been popular, but the success is in my opinion entirely an accident and a matter of being in the right place at the right time, nothing Notch could ever have expected or intended.

This isn't really about the post, but after the article about Dwarf Fortress a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it a try. I find the gameplay fun and there's definitely a lot to master, but the UI and the difficulty of visualizing what's going on are big obstacles. (There's a program called Stonesense that does isometric drawing of the world, but that seems to be it.) The Minecraft graphics are pretty basic, but even such a simple movable 3D view in DF would do wonders for situational awareness.

One of the best things about this type of games is the unexpected results you can get. And I am not talking about Easter eggs or different endgames some mainstream games boast themselves with. I am talking about really unexpected game situations (or even incidents).

As if you are building a giant simulation, where a very complex software system is interacting with unpredictable human players, and nobody, including the creators of the system, knows the limits of the simulation. This is the most interesting part of this type of games. This is why we get full working computers inside Minecraft, all sort of unpredictable scenarios in Dwarf Fortress, and also some really surprising glitches like the virtual epidemic that plagued the servers of WoW in 2005, almost like a real disease:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood

I've never played Minecraft before, but that video of fire spreading through that Minecraft structure & surrounding trees is frighteningly realistic.

I recently got training in a volunteer neighborhood emergency response organization (CERT, in case you're interested) and they showed a video of how quickly a fire can spread. It's truly frightening.

I found my heart racing when I watched that Minecraft fire just like when I watched a real fire on video.

When I was younger and played games I always thought that it'd be nice to make a game that isn't about killing, instead it should be about building stuff. I also thought that it'd be nice if it'd be as general as possible, so you can build anything you like. But also simple, because simple is beautiful.

Minecraft is all that.

I'm stuck on the randomized rewards right now, looking for enough iron to help my friend finish his ambitious minecart rail system, and simultaneously for 'enough' diamond.

This reads like NDF to me. Minecraft was not engineered to be all of these things; it just happened. Notch had a vision of what he wanted to do, tempered by time and skill constraints, and the resulting game is an accidental success, not a carefully constructed pillar of solid game design.

I think this so called game sucks. Its like Dwarf Fortress, or even Linux, there is a group, (small) that likes the challenge of making something poorly documented work. Compulsive puzzle solvers are attracted to it like flies to honey. I am not one of those, so this game does zip for me.

"Lightweight Java Game Library"

Really? Talk about a joke.