Minecraft may be the greatest game of all time. At $10 for what’s basically an imagination-powered life-stealing engine, it’s either the best or worst value software in history, but its true strength is the developer’s sheer love of gaming. While EA make you spend $60 for slightly updated stats and animated hand towels, and act like you’re the one who should be excited they’re getting away with it, Notch upgrades thousands of worlds for free with less ceremony than most people tweeting what they had for lunch.

The ten commandments didn't promise as much in the first line

Any new item revolutionizes Minecraft servers, and with pistons that’s a twofer: the Inustrial and Digital revolutions simultaneously. It took the rest of humanity centuries to manage that, and Minecraft servers pulled it off in one update. Every addition is invention combined with chaos theory and more skilled players than the Philharmonic Orchestra. In the weeks since they’ve arrived, pistons have powered everything from transforming castles to the invention of the transistor.

A single schematic hasn't changed a world this much since the wheel, and that wasn't so much a "schematic" as "a single curve"

Powered pistons have shaken up the entire ecosystem, which is good because shaking things is exactly what pistons are for. They’ve built infinite data loops, ridiculous Rube Goldberg machines, and of course they’ve been used to kill Creepers because everything in Minecraft should be used to kill Creepers at least once and preferably forever WE HATE YOU CREEPERS. (Creepers have the bad luck to kill someone who can come back and bend an entire world to their murder.)

Unfortunately you can’t crush things directly, though that’s probably good because you’ll be working on your huge piston-powered contraptions from the inside and don’t want to be smeared into paste by them (another way Minecraft servers are far superior to the real Industrial Revolution). But if there’s one thing Minecraft players are good at its invention: pushing Creepers into lava, suffocating them with sand, opening trapdoors, closing trapdoors, and every single one is stupidly fun.

But that’s nothing compared to the computer revolution.

The transistor! The invention so powerful a league of lawyers were formed just to prevent anyone getting a patent because that would make them the most powerful person in the world, and we’re now building them for fun. So what do the developers do as well as giving you a brilliant new component to invent things with?

Invent something with it. This is Minecraft. The Sticky Piston alchemized Slimes from ridiculous resource and pseudo-currency to the core of master machinery. Sticky pistons can pull as well as push, and the real Minecraft players aren’t even reading this part of the sentence as they drift into a mental world of conveyors and simulated factory lines.

Minecraft servers are well on the way to everything we asked for, a real world of invention and electronics. We’re just waiting for uranium blocks and aerodynamic interactions and we’ll move there permanently.

Open worlds have become compulsory, which is a contradiction and also a worse travesty than beginner cooking classes using recovered Dodo eggs. An open world demands awesomely talented developers who can create a living, breathing world. Not cut-rate 3D artists whose manager decided their copy of Shootin’ Stuff XV would work better without pacing, level design, or progression. Most open worlds are like microwave dinners – they achieve the first word at the expense of the second.

For example: scattering the same locations over a map like sprinkles, but less enjoyable, does not replace design. Which may be why there has only been one: Minecraft.

Wow, a revolutionary building physics engine! And they’re, they’re using it for yet another basic shooter. Great.

Every other open world is about as free as smoking on an oil rig. You can go any direction you like, but not very far, and it always looks the same and ends in the same explosions. Which are incredible fun (don’t ever think we’re complaining about that part) but shouldn’t be confused for incredible freedom. When your only decision is whether to blow things up now or later, you’re about as free as a smart bomb (though at least you get to respawn.)

Just Cause 2 was a literally giant example of this. The largest virtual world in console gaming to date, an entire fictional country with exactly three things you to do: shoot someone, hook them, or blow them up. While we contend that setting an action game on an island composed entirely of military installations and petrol tanks was an act of entertainment genius, the fortieth time you run in, blow things up, and run away until you regenerate things start to feel a little samey. It’s less a virtual world than a vast Easter Egg hunt as you locate every explosive barrel in the world, and if we wanted to run around hunting objects hidden by the developer we’d be playing Crackdown again.

Which isn’t a bad idea.

If only they’d made a sequel (because they really didn’t)

Grand Theft Auto does a better job of it, but “it” is always the same thing: Drive there and kill people. There are Army Humvee drivers with more varied jobs because sometimes their vehicle breaks down. At the other extreme freedom has slowly evaporated from first person shooters because it’s simply not wanted. In the olden days we’d run around Doom maps searching for an exit (and more importantly, ammunition), but nowadays repeating a section because you were shot in the face is about as enjoyable as actually being shot. Call of Duty saves slightly more often than an investment bank and makes a hell of a lot more money.

So what makes Minecraft different? Why isn’t it the same thing over and over? Why doesn’t it suffer from a lack of design, which should be kind of a problem when the entire world is randomly generated? Because it’s not finished. The same reason Minecraft is so successful is also the reason it can’t become more successful, because it has no victory condition.

And if there was this sure as hell wouldn’t be it

The result is a masterpiece of multiplayer, not just despite but because the players have nothing to work for. Even Fallout eventually drags people back to their primary quest, but Minecraft servers are less linear gaming and more LEGO. The lack of a goal is more than compensated for by the multitude of methods to get there, once you decide where “there” is. If there was any objective – get somewhere, dig deep, build big – there would suddenly be a best way to do it and everything else would be wasting time. And while gamers do deeply love wasting time, we’re still aware of the difference. With nothing to do, suddenly everything is worth doing. And in a game where everything can range from “farming” to “constructing a vast glass skull overlooking the night lit from within with the fires of a burning forest”, that’s more doing than any other game has even dreamed of.

It might be impossible to give a goal that doesn’t waste half of what the community has built. It might be that Notch spends forever adding items, planes, and new monsters to run like hell from. And we don’t think we’d want it any other way.

Minecraft creator Notch recently generated more hatred than the Alderaanian-emigrants “What we think of the Death Star.” club by daring to care about money and quality control. Which is a bit of a problem, as indie developers need to make money and quality products. His release of paid mod development tools was met with more concentrated screeching and whining than fifteen dentists drills in one mouth, and was even more painful – forcing him to scrap the small fee within 30 minutes of the announcement.

Such supremely fast response is a benefit of small, smart and involved independent developers, so it’s a pity he has to waste caring about customers on such stupid complaints. Complaints stupider and more overprivileged than Donald Trump complaining he can’t find a helicopter to match his hair (though since all helicopters are artificial, it should be easy.) There’s a real danger that this problem could drive Notch to hate the gaming public, and when a company hates their public they start doing things like banning private servers and selling alternate costumes for real money.

Minecraft mod tools could be the most powerful addition to any game since the Doom marine was first issued with ammunition – it could make it awesomely fun or destroy things. We’ve discussed before how adding new items to Minecraft could create the first multiplayer game to directly rival civilization itself – not the game Civilization, but the actual human society – but that depends on them not sucking.

It needs to not suck. And with random internet strangers making the mods, you’d have a better chance of finding things that don’t suck in a Dyson showroom. Notch’s idea was that maybe restricting the ability to corrupt his masterwork to people prepared to make the smallest, tiniest bit of effort might be a good idea. He was wrong – it was definitely a good idea, which is why thousands of people with nothing better to do than sit at their computers and hate their favorite developer the second he showed his face.

The majority of the haters disqualified themselves by swearing, cursing, or writing on the official Minecraft forums with their official Minecraft account about how much they hate the guy behind Minecraft (while their signature begs you to visit their Minecraft server.) It’s the same thing you see everywhere online, but to read it in action feels like some kind of species-wide intelligence test. One we’re failing. Badly.

Checking through the most vocal complainer’s post history reveals their number one hobby to be complaining about how lazy Notch is. Which is exactly the sort of support you should show when the developer already has your money but continues to update the game for free anyway.

The also interpreted the statement that any submitted mods could be included in future updates to mean that the evil Notch was going to steal everyone’s ideas instead of doing any work (because, you know, the guy who wrote a multimillion-selling game, where you can construct an entire world, in his own time isn’t a big one for effort). As opposed to absolutely basic legal protection so that the company wouldn’t end up utterly unable to program whole classes of objects like gems or electricity just because some idiot twelve year old started a mod with that subject six months earlier and couldn’t be bothered to finish it.

The result? Free mod development for all, which means we can look forward to a set of mods as small and high quality as the internet’s collection of Harry Potter fan fiction. It also puts paid to Notch’s vision of a future TF2-type store, full of quality items, replacing it with an infinite sea of “CHECK OUT MY COOL RETRO NO-TEXTURE BLOCKS!” where finding a quality mod takes longer than programming it yourself. After learning to program.

But don’t worry. We’ll find them for you!

Minecraft is the ultimate triumph of gameplay over graphics (despite having 3D the the Doom crowd would have killed real people for fifteen years ago). Its success is not despite but because it’s got more in common with Lego than modern games: great big clunky squares but you can build whatever you like with them. When you’re able to construct a vast skull fortress, then set it on fire, you don’t really need a narrative beyond “The Story Of Because I Wanted To.”

The first First Person Builder

But because developer ‘Notch’ is a real gamer despite having a made-up name and earning millions of dollars, which should technically make him a corporation who treats all open-sourcers as evil communist pirates. The latest version of Minecraft allows you to easily install your own graphics packs, and if you’re going to spend approximately far, far longer than you meant to in that pixelated world of addiction we thought we’d find the prettiest packs for you. Because time saved searching the internet is more time to find some bloody obsidian.

The packs instantly update the menu graphics, which is brilliant.

The Painterly Pack

The most popular yet basic, customizable yet true to the original material. That’s a double-contradiction and the result of unimaginable hours of sheer love: there are diamond wedding anniversaries resulting from less care and effort than the Painterly Pack. It’s an all-round upgrade to the basic graphics without any point of its own to make, other than “Notch is really busy building upgrades to our favorite game so we thought we’d improve the graphics for him.”

The second option: You’ve got to love people who understand their players

Quandary

Quandary keeps faith with the original even more than Painterly, gorgeously – and considerately – adding a seasonal progression to the virtual world. Because if you’re going to spend such a stupidly long time in this embodiment of addiction you might as well see the seasons passing. Or if you can view this as a true labor of love, because the real proof that you care is when you do things the other person will never know or appreciate. Like coding a complete seasons for the trees in a game where people spend all their time underground!

Retribution Games also provide the excellent Texture Rotator, a must-have for anyone upgrading their MineGraphics. Instead of picking a pack, the script automatically cycles you through all the seasons and any other addons you have installed every time you play.

Cel pack

I’m feeling Viewtiful, or is that Okami just me

The ultimate mockery of the “simplistic graphics” detractors, the Cel-Pack makes things more beautiful by showing less detail. Instead reality is rendered in a gorgeous cross between cartoon graphics and Mario-grade blockiness. The only thing blockier than that is Tetris.

TRON!

The remake even agrees that liquid can exist here!

If you’re going to simplify the style, you might as well take it to the raddest extreme of the 80s (and a recent remake.) The TRON pack takes cel-shading to its minimalist maximum, by removing the shading. And the content of the cells. The result is astoundingly like what we thought the Matrix would be back when that was a term in sci-fi books, and if they’d had it before 1995 would probably have had an entire movie to itself.

It’s the glory of style over substance, with the numbers to prove it. The entire TRON pack is less than a megabyte – many modern games spend more than that on blood-spatter dynamics without achieving one ounce of this mod’s tons of soul. And yes, we know souls are insubstantial. That’s how much soul these graphics have!

Mixcraft HD

For those who think 16×16 graphics blocks are an insult to modern gamers, behold: HIGH DEFINITION32 x 32!

Behold, the future of retro!

Mixcraft doubles the resolution of everything in your world. And if you want more than that, ask yourself: in those modern games with realistic lighting and detailed textures, have you ever created something instead of destroying for no other reward than the fact you could?

Minecraft is the most creative thing you can do with computer games short of stopping playing and starting to build things – and it lets you do that without the “stopping playing” part. The one-man wonder was programmed by Markus “Notch” Persson over the course of a year and is so spectacular it got a shout-out from Valve.  When the people behind Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead start saying your game is great, that’s past “compliment” and into “apotheosis.” It’s so successful it’s already got idiotic whiners complaining that he doesn’t update enough.

So what can big developers learn from the little guy?

Gameplay over Graphics

Back in the mists of 16-bit time, there was a huge debate over “Graphics versus Gameplay.” Graphics-fans thought impressive games were much more fun, gameplay-proponents thought they were superior to those shallow fools, but both fell for the company line that developers could only afford one or the other – as if games were an RPG and the developer only had a certain number of skill points to spend. The truth was that small developers couldn’t afford more development time, and big ones didn’t want to.

Behold the visual splendor! Which caused some people to think this was better than Street Fighter 2!

What’s worse is that the graphics won. Absolutely and utterly. Most major series now crow over their incredible visuals, whether it’s the latest Call of Duty or an iteration of the Unreal Engine. That’s no problem – especially when the games are as good as Modern Warfare and Unreal Tournament – but the problem is where they’ve invested millions of dollars in an entire game world, it’s all too easy to add another level and call that a sequel. The first Halo revolutionized the world of first person shooters. Reach just added five powerups, and cost $10 more.

Enjoy it, you got that instead of a better game by your favorite developers

The graphics on a Minecraft server are almost confrontationally ancient. Many cosplayers insult their inspiration by painting cardboard boxes in incredibly inaccurate costumes, but in Minecraft they’re wrong because they have too much detail.

And the shading is far too realistic

And it doesn’t matter. The graphics couldn’t be more pixelated if they were porn on the Disney channel, but after a few minutes you don’t see blocks the size of your face – you see your house you built with your shiny metal pickaxe. And you’re more impressed with that iron tool than you were with Doom’s BFG9000.

This doesn’t meant that modern games should revert to blocks and pixels (besides, we’re already full up on deliberately retro games). The mega-market scale of “being the latest shooter” means they can’t risk looking less than the best. But they’ve got the awesome texture-mapping down to an art, and they’ve shown they can port it from game to game without even pretending to make an effort (we’re looking at you, Madden series). Minecraft servers prove that just one guy can create unbelievably immersive worlds in a year. So why not hire a few more creative types to give those great big graphics teams something worth animating?

Keep Improving Because You Want The Game To Be Good

This is vital, and that’s literally vital as in “to do with life.” The constant improvements have grown Minecraft from a simple sandbox to an ever-expanding world with a real sense of wonder and exploration, of growth and evolution.  Life.  Of course every company makes an effort to improve their games, but that’s “Keep Improving Because You Want More Money.” Which is a very, very different attitude and can lead to the exact opposite effect.

For example EA “improved” the incredible Modern Warfare series by removing private servers and firing everyone involved in actually making the game. Eidos improved Kane & Lynch for a sequel because they wanted to make at least a bit of money out of the dog’s breakfast of a game, when anyone who wanted to make a good game would have started by building a time machine to erase K & L from history.

Give Players The Game They Bought

This is the big one, and more difficult for large developers to swallow than a sentry gun.

Not to be taken internally

Notch has made over half a million dollars from Minecraft with less electronic security than a stone age village: he has no DRM, no paid updates, no online validation, just this crazy idea that once you buy the game you own the game. Every owner gets all improvements for free, and as far as he’s concerned that’s the end of the story.

Which raises the question: why isn’t it? If you can come up with a good answer please let us know.

Trust The Players

This trust is understanding that gamers are quite capable of doing things – that’s why they’re playing a game instead of watching a movie. Minecraft doesn’t even have a narrative yet, just a world where you can walk around digging dirt and building buckets, and because you can do exactly that it’s more fun than you’d believe. In most modern games opening doors is a delay, a press of the “use” key, and often a poorly disguised loading delay. On a Minecraft server it’s an incredible sense of pride: because you built the door, and the house it’s at the front of, and you’re now in that house instead of being murdered by terrifying green screaming creepers roaming the landscape.

Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Black Ops doesn’t even trust you to shoot the bad guys.

The CoD series has had some awesome sequences, but when it’s possible to complete an entire level without firing your gun – because the writers didn’t want the pesky player to screw up their awesome pacing – you have to ask exactly what a game really is. Is it an electronic wonderland where imagination is the only limit? Or is it a massive graphical update to Simon Says?

Call of Duty: Rainbow Ops