Does Minecraft need to Modernise?

 Nothing will come of nothing.

We have a tendency to be resistant towards wanting things to change or evolve in any fashion for fear of losing that which made it special to begin with, for how can something new come along if the original doesn't die first? Our very beings shouts out against the concept of death, struggling for the impossibility of eternity amidst a reality absolutely conceived to feed decay and destruction. It's a futile struggle, but one which informs and drives a lot of human determination. And yet a knock on effect of that stubbornness means that it can often be hard to accept when a situation would be better off after change, though by that very same merit the opposite 'evolved' desire to be rid of the old in favour of the new can often, through similar obstinance, ignore when something still serves it's purpose just fine and would be ruined with change for the sake of uniformity or 'modernity'. Why do I introduce these concepts? Because recently I noticed an article directly targeted at the age old institution of Minecraft and it got me really thinking about what might be done for that game we all have some affinity for.

Perhaps the most key and important mode for Minecraft is it's Survival mode, because besides from it's creative heart, Minecraft is a game that tries to give value and life to the things that you create so that the act of creation has worth. Survival mode gives you enemies, forces you to seek sustainability, make you have to walk the ground, requires the manual gathering of materials, all to ground the player in that way which creates a hurdle worth crossing. Sure, if you look at the raw thesis of what Minecraft proposes: a engine for unlimited creativity, then Creative mode would be the purest completion of vision. But those that understand how important the struggle and work behind the art is, in relation to the overall completion, knows that there is no doubt Survival mode is the backbone of the game. And yet-

"Minecraft's Survival mode is boring, and it needs to evolve" says Brendan Lowry for Windowscentral. A bold proposition to the say the least, let's explore. In Lowry's world, survival is too simple for the player to master, noting that Minecraft doesn't push it's players to "meaningfully interact with any of its building or crafting systems". Getting food to survive is simple, building a bulwark against the spawn of the night is childsplay, and nothing overwhelmingly threatens the player once they've gotten a footing in this world. Lowry sees this as a gamemode stuck in the past, lacking the purpose that a player like him searches for in his games. He "likes to have reasons beyond (his) own boredom to build advanced structures, explore, and hunt." And of course Lowry has some ideas for what would make Minecraft closer to a survival experience better than what it currently is. 'Roaming hoards, block breaking mobs, more enemies in general, new ores (is that really related to survival?), and more dungeons.'

 

So I'm going to honest with you right now, whilst I respect Brendan Lowry's opinion and the way he's even gone to the trouble to outline a road to 'success' under the mantra that 'limitation breeds creativity'; (that is the purpose behind survival mode to begin with; good on him for picking up on that) I fear he's a little bit backwards on pinpointing exactly what Minecraft is and what purpose it serves. Ironically, Mr Lowry seems to be a little stuck in his ways for what a survival game actually is, which is what he excuses Minecraft itself of being. You see, what he envisions is Minecraft as a survival game similar to the others out there in Rust, Valheim or No Man's Sky. He wants a game that offers challenges that need to be overcome by tackling the endless list of upgrades and improvements that usually end up dragging players all over the place in search of the next higher tier of anything, leading to a point where all the gear gathered thus far is abandoned and depreciated. Obvious once you take a step a back and really look, that's not the sort of game that Minecraft has ever been or wishes to be, let me explain.

Minecraft isn't about overcoming overwhelming odds of new enemy types with new gear that pushes some meaningless stat two points higher with each tier. Minecraft is a lot simpler than that, and in that simplicity, impossibly more evocative. You see, Minecraft yearns for creativity, plain and simple, and the ultimate challenge it offers the player is no more complicated than the challenge to be creative. Starting a world in Minecraft is similar, to put this in the terms of an author or artist, to being presented with a blank page and being required to fill it. The endless possibilities of what could be is overwhelming until you take that very first step, which is incidentally the impetus that Survival mode provides. Once you've gotten a foot hold, Minecraft doesn't need to limit itself to keep the player interested, that's the kin of other games. Limitation may breed creativity, but Freedom is creativity.

A key point that a lot of his arguments keep coming back to is the idea that Minecraft doesn't push it's players to new systems with challenges, and that is absolutely intentional in a manner so simple that it pains me one might not notice it. The toy box of blocks and mechanics laid out before the player are the same as the box of toys laid out before you back when you were a child. In such days you didn't need a noose swinging over you neck in order to interact and enjoy yourself, you just needed to have the courage to reach out and enjoy yourself. No one needed to stand over you and tell you how to enjoy your play time, why you should be playing, all that was up to you, and Minecraft taps into to the childhood freedom of an entire world at you fingertips. The very reason for your playtime is up to you, and I can fully understand how that is intimidating and not what everyone looks for in their games, such as I assume it is to Mr Lowry, but that doesn't mean every such game needs to hobble and neuter itself to fit inside a more comfortable box just for him.

Other survival games suffer from this paradox of progression over creativity, which quite counters the assertion that 'limitation breeds creativity' for this context. Once you've managed to build yourself a castle- too late it needs to be rebuilt with even better materials, that armour needs to be recrafted, those weapons too. Always you find yourself chasing these stat increases until you reach the ultimate top tier and then... you're done. There's no incentive to stick around, because until now you've played only to overcome the challenges the game has presented to you, thus when there's no more challenge there's no more reason to play. Half of the items in the game exist only to be slightly sturdier alternatives to what you're already using, and only the truly impeccably built survival games manage to stop entire inventories from depreciating with each jump onto the next tier. But even then the ultimate result is a driven journey to an inevitably shallow end. Minecraft, on the otherhand, is all about a journey with no end.

Now bear in mind as I state all of this, that I am a fan of both Survival games and Minecraft and I've experienced enough of both to be able to safety say that Minecraft is not a survival game, at least not in the traditional sense. Minecraft is a careful balancing act between bare bones simplicity and utterly optional indepth complexity, in order to remain endearing for children and engrossing for adults; every update needs to manage this flawlessly in order to prevent upsetting that which Minecraft is. Adding a mob, throwing in a new block, always has to have this purpose beyond 'higher stat value' else you ruin the concoction and make it feel as shallow as a lot of the lesser survival games out today. Even adding Netherite as a stronger item tier than Diamond was a big deal for what it meant to the game and required care and justification every step of the way. Mojang aren't quiet about any of this either, watch their dev blogs and they'll actively tell you how they don't want to bog down the timeless concept that Minecraft is. And so I ask, does Minecraft need to modernise itself to fit the tastes of a genre it grazes? Of course not, because what it is happens to be so much more unique all on it's own.