Parents like Minecraft because it can be a creative outlet for their children. Teachers like the game because it can bring lessons to life. And Microsoft likes the game so much that the tech giant wants to buy Minecraft’s parent company for more than US$2 billion.
It is not flashy graphics or an intricate story line luring these groups to the game, however. Minecraft has become a global phenomenon by breaking with those conventions.
The point of the game is building things — and tens of millions of people spend hours constructing elaborate structures with digital pickaxes and other tools — and helping others make their own creations.
Photo: EPA
The game’s popularity has been clear for a couple of years. But the possible deal with Microsoft is the clearest sign yet how important tech giants view games like Minecraft and their growing fan bases. Already, Facebook bought a virtual reality headset maker for US$2 billion, and SoftBank of Japan spent US$1.5 billion for a stake in a mobile game developer. Last month, Amazon agreed to buy Twitch, a streaming video site, for more than US$1 billion.
More than any of those other deals, though, buying Minecraft for billions would be an acknowledgment that gaming is central to many people’s lives. The rise of mobile devices has put games at the fingertips of practically everyone, an engaging mode of entertainment or merely a time killer.
“It’s as if all these old people who don’t play games woke up and suddenly said, ‘Oh my god, gaming is the thing,’” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Changing Industry
Microsoft, of course, recognized the significance of games more than a decade ago, when it released the original Xbox gaming console. Since then, though, tectonic shifts in the industry, brought about by the rise of mobile devices and the Internet, have turned consoles into just one of many outlets for playing games.
Minecraft, created in Sweden, stands out because it has been a hit on nearly every digital device. It ranks as the top paid app for the iPhone and second for the iPad. Mojang, Minecraft’s parent company, said in June that sales of the console version of Minecraft had collectively passed those for computers. In all, the company said then, a total of nearly 54 million copies had been sold.
Games have become the most lucrative category of content in the mobile world, and that growth has driven many of the investments in video games by giant tech companies.
In part, companies like Microsoft want to make sure that the top games are available on their devices. Minecraft is not available on Windows Phones, Microsoft’s struggling mobile device. In an e-mail to Microsoft employees this year, Satya Nadella, the company’s chief executive, said that games were “the single biggest digital life category, measured in both time and money spent.”
Minecraft soaks up lots of time, as players can spend months building estates and entire countries, working away with pixelated ladders and building blocks.
No Boundaries
The game has succeeded partly by demolishing generational and gender boundaries that usually carve the games business into separate categories. Girls are among the most avid players of Minecraft, and it is one of the few games that parents play with young children. While players can attack the avatars of others in the game, it is a decidedly ungory experience.
In addition, Mojang lets its users create their own game servers on their computers so they can meet up with friends in their own private online worlds. Mojang sells copies of the game, rather than giving Minecraft away and charging players for add-on purchases, as many publishers do.
“It’s a complete outlier,” said Tero Kuittinen, a managing director at Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm. “Whatever the industry does, there’s always room for one or two who do the complete opposite.”
In the summer of 2010, Joel Levin was a teacher at the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York when he began playing Minecraft with his daughter, who was then 5. Although his family had no backyard of its own in the city, she constructed a tree house in Minecraft.
His daughter even learned to spell her first word in the game when she pecked out the command “HOME” so that her avatar could teleport back to her treehouse. Levin was so excited about the educational potential for Minecraft that he began using it as a teaching tool in his second-grade technology class.
He eventually quit to co-found a startup, TeacherGaming, that sells custom-made versions of Minecraft to classrooms for educational purposes. About 2,700 schools in the US, Europe, Australia and other countries are using the product, MinecraftEdu, to teach science lessons in which students test theories about gravity and history lessons in which they explore models of ancient Babylon.
Minecraft was created in 2009 by Markus Persson, a Swedish game programmer who goes by the gamer name Notch and remains Mojang’s largest shareholder. In a blog post last year, Persson said he wanted to make a game where players could do almost anything they wanted to.
“No fake doors that don’t lead anywhere, no trees you can’t cut down, and no made-up story being told to the player to motivate them,” he wrote. “Instead, the player would make their own story and interact with the game world, decide for themselves what they want to do.”
The rising popularity of Minecraft brought great wealth for Persson but unwanted pressures too. In June, Mojang faced an outcry from members of the Minecraft community after it changed its policies related to people who run Minecraft servers for profit. Persson said on Twitter that he was fed up with the criticism.
“Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life?” he wrote. “Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig.”
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
RSS