Comment by mambodog
16 years ago
I've given it a lot of thought, and I don't think Minecraft would be so easy to pick up and play if in weren't so 'blocky'. At least not without some really good design. The size of the blocks in Minecraft really lend themselves to being able to put together things that approximate real life structures, while maintaining a sufficient level of simplicity.
This simplicity makes reasoning and manipulating the game world less challenging, resulting in the game being more accessible to a wide variety of players.
Similarly we don't give children atoms to play with, we give atoms constrained into lego blocks.
Constraints give rise to creativity. Just compare that to the "1K" or "7 day" competitions.
Or even compared to, for example, the constraints on plays in the Elizabethan era when Shakespeare wrote, or the syllabic constraints on haiku. One would think that there would be a bigger "dancing bear" (it's amazing that the bear dances at all, not that the bear dances well) factor, but not many playwrights match Shakespeare, given fewer (or no) constraints.
I've had to switch languages a lot when coding, but even in a constrained or flawed language, you see code that is beautiful and amazing. Constraints free up thought, as when you stop rebelling against a framework, you can excel in it. It's hard to push your brain into what feels like a hole; I can't get anything done in Perl because I spend too much time being repulsed, but some people embrace the language and produce great software.
Having just praised restrictions like that, though, I still have to mention that this game looks really cool.
This is probably why the old 8- and 16-bit games seem to have so much more compelling gameplay than ultra-realistic modern games. Well, that or we are just cranky oldtimers.