Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything

by Daniel Goldberg

  Markus disregarded all such things. Minecraft was to cost around thirteen dollars during the alpha phase, the first period of development, mainly because it was a sum that he felt comfortable with. When the game was completed, the price would double.

  “The reason that I released the game so early was that I would never have been able to finish it otherwise. Charging money was the same thing. I knew that I would never feel that it was good enough to put a price tag on. So I charged from the start,” says Markus today.

  Anyone looking for more refined business logic behind what would become the most profitable gaming phenomenon of the last decade is on a fool’s errand. Markus is notoriously disinterested in business and economics. When someone asks him to reveal the secret behind Minecraft’s unbelievable financial success, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He just followed his gut, he says, did what felt right and what worked for him. To the question of what was the most important thing he learned from Minecraft’s early sales, Markus answers:

  “I understood that an orange splash where it says ‘half price’ works really well. That’s what I had on the site during the alpha phase.”

  On May 17, 2009, Markus uploaded the first playable version of Minecraft onto the indie forum TIGSource. “It’s an alpha version, so it might crash sometimes,” he warned. Other forum writers immediately began exploring the blocky world that Markus presented to them. There was a lot of digging, building, and discussing. The game crashed at times, but even at that early stage, it’s clear that Minecraft was exerting an unusual magnetism on players.

  It took just a couple of minutes for the first reactions to come. “Oh hell, that’s pretty cool,” someone wrote. “I hope you make something really good out of this, dude, I think it has a lot of potential,” another encouraged. Barely an hour after Markus uploaded the game, the first image of a Minecraft construction was posted in the forum thread. “This is way too much fun. I built a bridge,” wrote the person who uploaded the image. Others filled in, adding their own constructions. A castle, a fortress, a secret treasure chest. Someone wrote that he’d tried to make a boat, but the result was too ugly to make public. Someone else built a giant phallus, but never uploaded an image, just relied on a vivid description of the work: “It was such a thing of awe that Firefox decided to pack it in before I could snap a shot of that mofo.”

  Markus followed the postings with great interest, listening to bug reports and discussing Minecraft’s future with others on the forum. Friends and family remember how he told them enthusiastically about the warm welcome Minecraft had received. Many games are uploaded on TIGSource every day, but few struck a chord with the audience the way Markus’s game had. In his head, a ray of hope began to shine. Maybe he was on the right track this time.

  In early June, Markus described his intended pricing model on his blog. Those who paid for the game were promised access to all future updates at no extra cost. A free edition of Minecraft would still be available, but only the current half-finished version of the game. For those who bought a copy of Minecraft immediately, there was a discount. When the game entered beta-development, the price would be raised to $20, and the finished version would cost $26. On June 12, Markus opened for orders. Twenty-four hours later, he clicked on the sales statistics and could hardly believe his eyes. Fifteen people had paid for the game. In just twenty-four hours, more than $150 had landed in his PayPal account.

  Elin and Jakob were two people who really noticed the effect the early sales successes had on Markus. Elin remembers how he obsessively followed the growing numbers of games sold. She hesitates to describe him as nervous, but clearly Markus was very focused on the early reactions to the game. Seven games purchased per day felt unbelievable.

  Initially, Markus dismissed these sales as a passing fad. But every day the number of discussion threads about Minecraft on the game developer forum grew larger, and increasing numbers of people visited them. All the while, the sales counter continued ticking upward, slowly at first, then faster. At home in Sollentuna, Markus did a quick calculation: If I can sell more than twenty games a day, that’s enough for something approaching a decent salary, he thought, and made up his mind. Then I’ll quit my day job. Then I’m really doing this.

  Chapter 8

  The Hedonic Hot Spot of the Brain

  Early comments on the first version of Minecraft didn’t seem particularly noteworthy at the time. Reading them now, they seem rather prophetic. Minecraft was then a very simple game, with only a fraction of the features that it has today. You could only dig up blocks and put them where you chose; that was it. Markus hadn’t had time to put in the animals, monsters, or anything else he had planned for the game. Still, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Players built things, took immediate screenshots of their creations, and uploaded them online. Within a few years, millions of others would be doing exactly the same thing. The question is why? What made Minecraft so easy to like right from the start?

  Understanding why certain games are fun and others are not spans disciplines such as psychology, art history, and neurology. Game publishers invest enormous sums to determine what it is that will get players to spend an extra hour in front of the screen.

  Minecraft completely disregards the fact that other game developers go to great lengths to create worlds in which every detail is shaped with millimeter precision. In the racing game Gran Turismo 5, players can whiz around the Nürburgring in an almost photo-realistically re-created Lamborghini or Ferrari racecar. The action-adventure game Assassin’s Creed II lets the player climb tall buildings with soft, lithe movements, perfectly adapted to the jutting edges and window ledges that are there to grab hold of. Once on top of a church bell tower in fifteenth-century Florence, he or she can gaze out over an exquisitely rendered version of the city.

  Does all this mean that these games are approaching reality? Not at all. A resemblance to reality in games is not only difficult to achieve, it often ruins the experience. For most players, driving a sports car along Germany’s most famous racetrack needs to be much simpler than in reality. In the same manner, Ezio, the main character in Assassin’s Creed II, must have superhuman climbing skills if the game is to be any fun. However, it’s not enough that games make reality easier; in some cases they have to make it unreal in order to retain players’ interest.

  In the first-person shooter game Halo, there are two ways you can injure enemies with a handgun: you can either shoot your opponent or, if you get close enough, you can club him with the butt of your gun. If Bungie, the company that develops Halo, had attempted to emulate reality, a smack of the butt would hardly cause injury at all, while a couple of gunshots would kill. In fact, the opposite is true. In Halo, a melee attack is often much more damaging than a gunshot. Making the game “realistic” would have made it feel one-dimensional. The design would have felt, strangely enough, illogical, since it’s more difficult to get close to an enemy than to shoot one from a distance.

  This is where the strange logic of games becomes evident. The point is not to emulate reality but to adapt reality to clear, functioning rules. This phenomenon is a great deal older than computer games. Take chess, where the rook is more agile than the king, and pawns can only attack diagonally. Rock-Paper-Scissors is another example—a rock bashing scissors may be plausible; the scissors cutting paper also. But paper covering the rock would probably not be regarded as a victory if it weren’t necessary for the game to function.

  So it’s not a problem that the world that greets Minecraft players doesn’t resemble reality. Instead, the blocky graphics activate an important mental ability. The human brain is skilled at reading patterns and is especially good at finding familiar shapes like faces and human figures. That’s the reason why we can see shapes in clouds and the face of Jesus on a slice of toast. When the image of a face consists of only a few lines, we fill in the missing pieces. Something similar happens in Minecraft. The pigs in the game resemble pink shoeboxes with heads and legs
more than anything else, but there is no doubt to the player that they are pigs. Perhaps we should call the graphics “abstract” rather than simple. It’s an odd fact that game graphics risk seeming more unreal the closer they approach reality. Low-resolution game characters, such as Pac-Man, the pill-eating sphere from 1980, cannot be misinterpreted. It is often easier to identify with abstract, hand-drawn figures than it is with those that almost perfectly resemble humans but don’t quite hit the mark. Both robots and animated game characters often fall into that trap.

  In 1970, the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori coined the expression “uncanny valley.” The phenomenon can be observed when you draw a diagram of how attractive or pleasing a robot or animated figure is perceived to be by a viewer. Masahiro Mori succeeded in showing that we find such figures more pleasing to look at the more they resemble humans, but only to a certain limit. Virtual human faces that come close to the real thing but lack that little extra something—life in the eyes, perhaps, or natural muscle movements—become almost repulsive to look at. They feel dead, zombielike. The recognition curve drops into a deep chasm; that’s the uncanny valley. But then when the simulated face reaches an almost perfect level of detail, a level that few, if any, computer games attain today, the recognition curve turns upward again.

  The characters in Minecraft are a comfortable distance from the uncanny valley. Playing on a server with others, a player sees fellow players as blocky figures, leaving it to each player’s imagination to “animate” the characters with real personality traits. If you know your best friend is the one who is maneuvering the figure on the screen, that’s who you will see. There is no preprocessed face interfering.

  While Minecraft breaks with the gaming industry’s evolution toward photo-realism, the internal logic is infallible. This becomes most obvious when you build tools from minerals you’ve dug up. There are many recipes hidden inside the game; for example, two parts wood and three parts stone make a pickaxe if they are put in the correct places on a grid. Change the pattern and swords, furnaces, buckets, compasses, or pretty much anything appears. But the player never receives any help with the recipes—you have to figure out for yourself how to do it, or you have to go read about it on the web. There are so many recipes and they follow such a logic that the system almost feels organic. Minecraft exemplifies what is meant by a game having its own universe, with its own laws and logic. It has nothing to do with reality, but everything to do with a coherent, consistent set of rules.

  As with all effort in gaming, even creating a tool must lead to some reward. It’s usually that the tool makes it easier to do something else, like digging up even more blocks. And pickaxes crafted from rare materials are, naturally, more effective than common ones.

  Here’s where the question arises of what “reward” really means in a game context. Rewards can manifest themselves in many ways: getting to see the continuation of a story, one’s avatar receiving more power, getting to see a visually impressive film sequence, hearing a beautiful sound. The history of games is full of classic examples, like the ting you hear when Mario picks up a coin. But more than anything, the rewards are about that feeling of having solved a problem or puzzle. Why do we like that? There are theories that take us a good way down the road to an answer.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian-American psychology professor who is interested in what it means to “feel good.” So much that he has established a branch of psychology that studies happiness, contentment, and creativity. In the 1970s, he began working on a theory for a psychological state he thought he observed people sometimes attaining. He coined the concept of “flow” to describe the feeling of introverted ecstasy that successful musicians, artists, and athletes sometimes experience.

  “Flow” happens when you disappear into the task you have taken on and completing it becomes your sole purpose. The basis for Csikszentmihalyi’s hypothesis was laid down long before computers or video games hit the mainstream market, but in nearly every way, the condition is consistent with what players experience when they are deeply absorbed in a game. The world disappears and their hands seem to move independently as they steer their avatar toward new challenges. Good games give us challenges that are exactly the right degree of difficult. They give instant feedback and tell us if we have passed the test or not (for example, if an opponent died, or not). There are often hints to help the player along the way. Here is the essence of attaining flow; succeeding at task after task, with exactly as much resistance as we need to neither get bored because it’s too easy, nor so frustrated at its difficulty that we give up.

  Also, playing games does not require us to get off the couch, carry anything heavy, or expose ourselves to unpleasant weather. Instead, we effortlessly steer an alter ego through a strange, exceptional world. Each separate action—digging up a block in Minecraft, climbing up a building in Assassin’s Creed II, or firing a shot in Battlefield 3—is accompanied by sounds and visuals that make the experience enjoyable, even when we fail. Playing the game is, in the words of the Hungarian-American psychologist, rewarding in its own right.

  Perhaps this is how we must understand the balance between challenge and reward in computer games. Exactly what the reward consists of is not important, as long as the task of getting it challenges the player at exactly the right level. Perhaps our brains are simply made to enjoy succeeding at challenging things.

  So, how well does this model fit Minecraft? In one aspect, it seems to be way off target—Markus’s game doesn’t have what Csikszentmihalyi says is a condition for flow: clear direction. Instead, the player invents his or her own aim—for example, building a fortress or finding a rare mineral. From this perspective, it’s also obvious why some players stop playing Minecraft immediately; they are the ones who never get around to building anything, and therefore can’t create a meaningful goal for themselves. So Csikszentmihalyi’s model actually suits Minecraft like a glove, as long as the player makes a decision about what to aim for in the game.

  If games are so suitable for putting us into a state of flow, why isn’t everyone attracted to them? Are there differences in the brains of gamers? Simone Kühn believes so. She is a researcher in experimental psychology at the University in Ghent, Belgium, and is also interested in the brain’s capacity to experience pleasure. Deep inside our heads, at around eye level and halfway behind the neck, there is an area of the brain called the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum can be considered our center of hedonism, the part of the brain that is activated when we enjoy or anticipate enjoying something. Food, sex, and drugs get the striatum spinning, and it is often mentioned when discussing drug abuse or people who’ve developed a pathological dependency on gambling. However, the striatum doesn’t just turn us into slobbering hedonists; it is also connected to fast decision-making and the ability to take action. The same part of the brain that makes us attracted to fatty foods and drugs seems to help us get things done at work.

  “It has been termed the hedonic hot spot of the brain. It’s not often the case that a brain region is so clearly associated to one function, but with the ventral striatum it is clear that it is involved with reward processing,” says Kühn.

  To learn more about how playing computer games affects that place in the brain, Kühn went to Berlin. There, she found a group of test subjects and strapped helmets on them, looking into their heads with the help of an MRI device. The test subjects were asked to play an academically designed game. As expected, the striatum lit up when the subjects became involved in pushing buttons. But not everyone in equal measure. One group turned out to have larger ventral striata than others—they simply had more brain matter in this spot, especially on the left side. This group consisted of people who played computer games in their free time.

  The conclusion was obvious: game players have different brains than others. The question then becomes: What causes what? No one knows if gaming makes the striatum grow or if a congenitally larger striatum makes one more inclined
to play. It’s clear that certain personality traits seem to be more common among those who play a lot. They seek immediate rewards for their efforts and make decisions more quickly than others. If it could be proved that games make the brain’s enjoyment center grow, then it’s logical that these characteristics are strengthened by a lot of gaming. If that’s the case, then gaming may make us more active and give us quicker reactions, but it might also lead us to tend to choose short-term rewards rather than working long-term toward something greater.

  From Csikszentmihalyi’s flow perspective, the attraction of Minecraft is easy to understand. It gets a little trickier when we get into Simone Kühn’s research findings. Minecraft doesn’t give the same immediate gratification as do many other games. Minecraft is more difficult and it only becomes really fascinating once you’ve spent days building a cathedral out of one-meter blocks, or digging a winding system of tunnels and furnishing it with electric rails.

  Maybe that’s why Minecraft reaches outside the usual circles of devoted gamers. One way to explain it is to see Minecraft as something other than a game. Perhaps graffiti or dollhouses are better comparisons. Or why not adventure travel? Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto has described something similar. He has cited his childhood in the Kansai region of Japan as the inspiration behind his classics such as Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong. There, he would explore the countryside for hours and find his own caves and paths in the woodlands. He is also attracted to simulated danger, playing with the audience’s need to experience things that make them jump but that are impossible in reality—falling from great heights or fighting colorful monsters, for example. Minecraft reflects a similar ambition. Few of us will ever build a cathedral of real stone, but in Minecraft, we can get an idea of how it feels.