The Minecraft Generation: A distinct demographic cohort

Roughly every other year I travel a few states over to visit my sister's family. I enjoy visiting with her and my brother-in-law and seeing my two nephews. I usually bring something for the kids, often in the form of a computer game. I recall in late 2011 thinking that on the next visit I'd introduce my nephews to Minecraft.

I never got the chance—early in 2012 my sister emailed me saying essentially, "What is this Minecraft game and where do I get it? The kids want it because their friends are playing."

The story in a nutshell: Minecraft has gone viral among children of all ages, but particularly middle schoolers.

Minecraft has sold 26 million on all platforms, but as far as I know Mojang has no data on the age of the players. While many adult gamers have bought Minecraft, kids make up a large percentage of players. Apparently the autograph lines at Minecon have consisted mainly of children and their parents.

As with any activity that becomes massively popular with children, parents become concerned. Below are some examples of this concern:

• "Even my daughters are obsessed," in My kids are obsessed with Minecraft
• "Both my son and daughter have been addicted to Minecraft for some time now," in Minecraft Activities for Younger Kids
• "…my children cannot stop playing Minecraft," in Minecraft Obsession: Is it Time for a Break?
• "He was playing Minecraft endlessly..." in Breaking Up With Minecraft Is Hard To Do
• "They were asking for it all the time," in Minecraft – why I stopped playing it with my kids
• "…families with Minecraft-obsessed children have to come up with new ways to accommodate it in their daily lives," in An “Educational” Video Game Has Taken Over My House
• "When my kids are at home, they are clamouring to be on the computer playing Minecraft," in Ending the Minecraft Addiction

The Children Online newsletter devoted its October, 2012 issue to Minecraft: Is Minecraft the Next Parental Concern?
 
In the section Concerns for Parents the Internet Safety Project's wiki entry for Minecraft says:

Due to the immense popularity of Minecraft, pirated copies of the game are easy to find online. Besides being illegal, pirated software can often be a disguise for malware.

I've included the above links as anecdotal evidence about how pervasive Minecraft is among children. I'm certainly not alarmed at how much kids are playing it, but I do support parents who make sure that their kids get outside to run around. (As far as computer games go, I can't think of a more appropriate game than Minecraft, since it gives kids both a creative outlet and practical experience in planning and carrying out projects.)

The Minecraft phenomenon is now a couple of years old and shows no sign of waning. Mojang keeps adding features to the game which keeps it fresh, and there is innovation both in server game styles and Minecraft's lively mod scene. I think this means that the game will remain popular with children for the foreseeable future.

Thus in the next several years there will be a large number of people entering adulthood who grew up playing Minecraft. It may prove to be a defining experience for this group of people as a result of their pervasive and intense play of the game. Skills that they learn while playing Minecraft will be applied throughout their lives, and their outlook on life may reflect their experiences in the game.

Demographers look for shared experiences such as this when defining demographic cohorts (e.g. Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Generation Y). One name assigned to the cohort of kids currently of middle-school age is Generation Z. It may not be long before there will be a solid case to be made for calling it the Minecraft Generation.

I think the Minecraft Generation will have a profound impact on the real world since its members will have cut their teeth modifying their virtual ones.

The game industry will definitely feel the impact.

Minecraft is the third largest city in the world

Sales of Minecraft continue and the number of players keeps climbing. Here's the latest tally:

Minecraft — Pocket Edition: 10 million
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition: 6 million
Minecraft PC: 10.3 million

Total: 26.3 million

Let's remember that these figures are paid sales. We're not talking registered accounts on some free-to-play title here.

We can put these numbers in perspective by comparing Minecraft sales to the largest cities in the world.

It turns out that ranking cities is a bit confusing because there are many criteria that can be used to order them. Wikipedia's entry for world's largest cities describes a number of ways of ranking, so we'll pick a couple which seem to be applicable in this case.

One method is city proper, which is defined as "an urban locality without its suburbs" with the result that this method results in the smallest populations for each city.

Since the PC version is canonical in terms of features, we can consider that to be Minecraft's city proper.

Where does Minecraft PC place in the List of cities proper by population? With 10,368,365 sold it just squeaks into twelfth place ahead of Shenzhen, China:

11.  Seoul, South Korea (10,575,447)
12.  Minecraft PC (10,368,365)
13.  Shenzhen, China (10,357,938)

Minecraft PC sales are larger than every city proper in North America. In the Americas only Sao Paulo, Brazil is larger. In Europe, only Moscow and Istanbul are larger.

Another way to rank Minecraft is to use the total sales of all versions, the 26.3 million figure calculated at the beginning of this article. The total of all versions is perhaps analogous to the concept of a city's urban area.

Where does Minecraft place in the List of urban areas by population?

1. Tokyo-Yokohama (Keihin), Japan (37,239,000)
2. Jakarta (Jabodetabek), Indonesia (26,746,000)
3. Minecraft (26,300,000)
4. Seoul-Incheon (Sudogwon), South Korea (22,868,000)
5. Delhi, India (22,826,000)

So when ranked by urban area, Minecraft zooms past many of the other Asian giants and even moves past Seoul into a solid third place.

A couple of other rankings:

List of U.S. states and territories by population:

1. California (38,041,430)
2. Minecraft (26,300,000)
3. Texas (26,059,203)

Minecraft would be the second most populous state in the U.S.

List of countries by population:

45. Nepal (26,494,504)
46. Minecraft (26,300,000)
47. Afghanistan (25,500,100)
48. ...
88. Sweden (9,566,945)

Minecraft is the 46th most populous country in the world. Now 46 may not seem like a very impressive rank until you peruse the list and see how many familiar countries rank lower than Minecraft.

The most notable country is Sweden, Minecraft's country of origin. Minecraft easily outranks it by more than a factor of two. Eventually there may be three copies of a version of Minecraft sold for every person in Sweden!

Any way you look at it, there are a lot of people buying and playing Minecraft.

Minecraft is going mainstream (vote for Notch in the TIME 100!)

Signs are everywhere that Minecraft is going mainstream. I'm not talking about mainstream among gamers—most gamers are aware of Minecraft, whether or not they play it.

I mean that Minecraft is going mainstream in the sense that non-gamers are becoming aware of it. Just in the last few days two major old media outlets have recognized Notch (Markus Persson) for Minecraft—both TIME and the New Yorker magazines.

The TIME recognition is currently only a nomination, but it's for the TIME 100 list of the most influential people in the world! The final list is selected by editors; it appears that they're guided by online voting for the 151 nominees. Thus it seems safe to say that Notch will make the cut from 151 to 100, since what other nominees will have so many middle schoolers and teens around the world voting for them? Or gamers of any age, for that matter?

I looked quickly through the list of nominees and it appears that Notch has the youth vote sewn up. Plus, voting is yea/nay for each candidate, so it appears you can support multiple people. Not the most rigorous poll.

You can vote here to approve Notch's appearance on the list. As I write this he holds seventh place(!) with 16K votes. There are four more days of voting. Given the millions sold it will be interesting to see how many votes he gets when the polling closes on Friday. Whatever the total, it's possible that the Minecraft and gamer communities will mobilize to the point that people will be a bit sick of hearing about it by the time Friday rolls around. [Update 4/11: A huge surge of votes has lifted Notch into second place, passing Kim Dotcom. Mohamed Morsi, the President of Egypt, who still holds first place by a large margin has more negative than positive votes, so Notch now holds the top spot for positive votes after deducting votes against.]

It's even more of a sign of becoming mainstream when you make the New Yorker magazine due to its exclusive readership. This is particularly true for games since they're not often covered. Will Wright was profiled in the New Yorker prior to Spore's release in what now seems like a masterful bit of PR and marketing work by Electronic Arts considering how the game turned out.

Unlike the profile of Will Wright, the New Yorker piece about Notch doesn't appear in the print issue. It's a blog entry on the web site, which greatly diminishes its impact. Titled The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame, it's a well-written profile of Notch and how he's coped with the fame and fortune brought on by Minecraft's unexpected success. While not long, it does touch on some fairly personal things such as Notch's relationship with his father, and his divorce. It made the front page of Hacker News where it triggered a lively discussion.

This sudden spate of coverage is coincident with Minecraft sales on PC hitting 10 million copies, which ties it for seventh place on Wikipedia's List of best-selling PC games. My post that Minecraft is still selling like hotcakes holds—in the run up to the 10 million milestone, @jeb_ (Jens Bergensten) tweeted "Not slowing down...":

@jeb_ tweeted: "In January I estimated Minecraft (PC) would hit 10,000,000 on April 8, but now it looks more likely to be on April 5. Not slowing down... :o" 2 Apr

It's also in the wake of Minecraft's sales on all platforms hitting 20 million back in January, which was noted in The New Yorker piece which linked to an earlier tweet by Jeb:

@jeb_ tweeted: "About 10 hours ago, Minecraft (PC) hit 9,000,000 sold copies! Which should bring the total for all platforms to... 20 million?" 22 Jan

If it were any other company I'd assume that PR work was involved in getting this old media coverage, but since it's Mojang I'd be surprised if it was the case. But one never knows.

Twitter is broken—tweets are missing

Currently the following is displayed prominently at the top of Twitter's I'm Missing Tweets or DMs page:

Bug Alert:

• Some users are not currently able to see all Tweets posted within the past week from accounts they follow. These Tweets might still show up in third-party applications or in your Mentions tab.
• Some users are currently experiencing an issue with direct messages disappearing, without the sender or receiver deleting them from their inbox.
• Some users may experience a delay in DM delivery. A notification may arrive to your email inbox, but the DM won't appear for some time after the email delivery.

Our engineers are hard at work to solve these issues. Follow @Support for updates!

There has been no mention of missing tweets recently on the @Support account, unless those tweets have themselves gone missing *wink*.

Unmentioned in the bug alert are lists.

For the last several hours my Twitter list for Minecraft hasn't been showing all the tweets:

Missing tweets in list @Stratagerm/minecraft (Click to enlarge).

Note the gap between tweets from 2 hours ago and February 16. This list should show dozens or even hundreds of tweets during that time. Notably missing is the tweet made by list member Jens Bergensten 12 hours ago announcing the Minecraft 1.5 pre-release.

I'm not the only user to see this issue with lists but it hasn't been widely reported. I suspect that it is happening more but that people aren't noticing.

Minecraft is still selling like hotcakes

Both the Xbox and the Pocket Edition recently hit sales milestones recently, which allow us to easily calculate total sales across all platforms:

PC/Mac: 8.7 million
Xbox: 5 million
Pocket: 5 million
Total: 18.7 million

In early December it was reported that the XBox version was selling 40-60K copies every week, and Notch himself tweeted that Minecraft sold 453k copies on all platforms on Christmas day.

In November, 2011 Minecraft had sold 4 million copies; in the fourteen months since then it has sold another 14.7 million across all platforms.

When Notch stepped aside, legions of young Minecraft fans missed daddy

[Another post exhumed from deep in the drafts folder.]

In December 2011, Notch announced that he was stepping aside from Minecraft development:

Notch tweeted "As of yesterday, @jeb_ is the lead developer on Minecraft! notch.tumblr.com" [Link no longer works due to Twitter's link rot.]

So although it had been telegraphed for weeks, when Notch himself finally announced it on Twitter and his blog, these young fans were left in a state of shock. Many were caught blindsided; the news item on the Minecraft Forum received over 500 comments, many to the effect that they "didn't see it coming."

Note the first four choices in this poll on the forum:

• I MISS NOTCH SO BAD!!
• I miss him. D:
• I kinda miss him
• I think it'll be okay without him

The abandonment issues raised by Notch's move were so strong that many young fans were in denial. This was perfectly illustrated by a comment to an item in Blue's News:

Hes not abandoning it ether, hes still going to do work on it in addition to his new project, its just he wont be the lead man anymore.

The meme that Notch would "still do some work on Minecraft" appeared many times in posts on Minecraft Forum.

Apparently one characteristic when a game's community has a large percentage of younger players is that they will reject news from credible sources. This not only includes gaming news sites such as gamespy and IGN, but even Notch himself.

Autograph lines at Minecon, is this a kid thing?

[This is one of several posts that's been sitting in draft form for way too long.]

One thing that struck me when watching videos of November 2011's Minecon was the large number of young attendees at the conference. Minecon 2011 was crawling with kids!

I'm not sure how Minecon 2012 compared to 2011 regarding the age of attendees. I only watched a single video from Minecon 2012 covering the API session, and during the Q&A there were a number of questions from kids. Being children they had a bit of trouble staying on topic, often asking questions about future developments in Minecraft itself rather than about the forthcoming API.

One blogger noted that the Q&As:

…meant sitting through a variety of children asking redundant things that have been answered a hundred times over, but you have to bite the biscuit on that sort of thing. The convention certainly opened my eyes to the volume and variety of people playing this game. Many of them are children, which just highlights the need for mindfulness, particularly when playing on servers. You’re probably surrounded by at least ten or so minors under the age of 12.

Here's a report from an attendee mentioning both autographs and kids at Minecon 2012:

Most of the panels were not informative at all, for example the Editing Panel were just them saying; “We use this software, and this” and answering questions from 10 year olds, asking why their video had black bars…Minecon is pretty expensive, but there were still a lot of kids around, but that is just a part of the Minecraft community. We spent a lot of time with Martyn (InTheLittleWood). And we could not walk for 10 min without 7 people wanting his autograph.

A year ago in Las Vegas the young fans at Minecon 2011 worshiped Notch like a god and stood in line for hours to get his autograph. Notch and other members of the Mojang staff spent considerable time signing autographs. (Minecon 2011 sold out with an attendance of 5000, and at the time I recall hearing reports of some disappointed fans who left Minecon without an autograph, but I can't find sources for that now.)

Apparently this year's Minecon 2012 had autograph lines too:

Oh man why did I stay in a line for an autograph while I could've attended Sethbling's panel

I've never attended any gamer-oriented gatherings. Do people wait for hours in autograph lines at QuakeCon, BlizzCon, or PAX, or is this only a feature of gatherings with large numbers of young attendees such as Minecon?