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?

Even Valve can act shamefully

Via Hacker News I recently ran across a piece on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site called First Sale Under Siege — If You Bought It, You Should Own It.

In the piece EFF explains the concept of "first sale":

…once you've acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. In simpler terms, "you bought it, you own it" (and because first sale also applies to gifts, "they gave it to you, you own it" is also true).

Publishers have always hated the first sale doctrine because it reduces their sales, but now with everything moving to digital formats they can act to prevent it. As EFF's piece explains, first sale is under siege because publishers are furiously working to abolish it.

Most gamers are aware of Valve's huge Steam Holiday Sale currently running through January 5th. Deep discounts are the major feature of this annual sale, commonly reaching 50% and often 75% or more.

In addition to buying a number of titles for myself, I also bought a number of gifts for my young relatives. I'd never used Steam for gifts before so I did some research on how it worked. In the process I came across this in the answer to What is a Steam Gift?

Also note that you may only gift new purchases—you may not transfer games you already own. That’d be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you’ve used every morning for the past year.

Here we have a clear example of first sale being under siege. But more disappointing than Valve being the perpetrator is that the used toaster analogy is wrong and Valve knows it.

Of course real world items such as toasters show signs of wear as the result of being used. Toasters, in particular, readily show wear and accumulate crumbs and other dirt. Obviously a used toaster is less valuable than a new one of the same make and model.

Not only do digitally-distributed games not wear out, an infinite number of copies can be made of the original download. So the sentence should read "That’d be like wrapping up and presenting a clone of the toaster you have, in its original brand new state." But an accurate analogy wouldn't support Valve's argument.

If Valve permitted the gifting of used games it would incur costs both in processing the gift transaction and the bandwidth consumed by the recipient downloading the gift. Valve isn't concerned with recouping those costs, which are but a tiny fraction of the revenue received from a new sale. It wants to avoid the loss of income from a reduction of new sales.

Valve has been called out on this before; one instance is this November, 2011, thread on the Steam Users' Forums called Used toaster analogy is no good in this economic climate. As user puffincat points out, Valve could simply be honest about not wanting to suffer the lost sales.

In using an analogy that it knows to be inaccurate, Valve seeks to mislead its customers. This example shows that even a beloved company such as Valve is not above occasional shameful behavior.

[Update 12/28 15:03] Valve's broken analogy is not a mistake; it's broken for the purpose of shaping consumer behavior. Consider the other two ways Valve could have treated the analogy:

1. It could have replaced the analogy with an honest admission that Valve and the other publishers think that their sales will be higher by prohibiting the gifting or resale of used games.
2. It could have omitted the analogy, and prohibited gifting used games without any explanation.

The first option would likely cause some consumers to think of Valve and the other publishers as being greedy, which is not an image companies find useful to project. The second option would have little effect on consumer behavior. Instead Valve chose an inaccurate analogy regarding gifting used games:

That’d be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you’ve used every morning for the past year.

Can you spot the subtle manipulation in this statement? It creates the idea of being someone so stingy that they'd give a used toaster as a gift. Most people will reject this idea since they don't wish to appear to be a cheapskate. This natural reaction to a concept most people find repellent serves to shape consumer behavior to Valve's benefit—gifting only new games.

There's a word that perfectly describes the inaccurate analogy:

propaganda, noun    Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

Thanks to the commenters on Reddit who caused me to think further about the analogy and the point I'm making with this piece.

Minecraft: The Lighter block from SDK's Mods

From the General Information spoiler in the topic for SDK's Mods on the Minecraft Forums:

The lighter block lights on fire when power is applied to it.

According to the Block and Item IDs spoiler, the Lighter currently has block ID 131, but it had block ID 112 when this Mod Compatibility List was published in January, 2011.

This video from March 12, 2011 shows Lighter blocks in use:

Minecraft- spider spawner trap with on/off switch

Mojang recently declared that plugins (mods) cannot have exclusive features, so it's no problem that other mods have blocks with similar functionality to the Lighter, such as the Hibachi in Better Than Wolves or RedPower 2's Igniter.

Mojang issued its statement so that it may freely implement functionality in Minecraft that is similar to that found in a mod. Indeed, Mojang has already done this with the Piston, Ender Chest, Anvil (Better Than Wolves has long had an anvil), and 3D Items.

[Updated Dec. 21, 2012 to add the Anvil and 3D items to the list of mod ideas that Mojang has incorporated into Minecraft.]