Why Is Minecraft So Addicting?
“You can solve the Blind75, but you have to do each problem using mining turtles”
I share a common experience with a lot of people: When I first played Minecraft, it was the most boring game in the world. The rules took a long time to figure out. There was no clear objective, and there were monsters everywhere to punish me for failing to do things no one taught me to do. Starvation? Fall damage? Night mechanics? Everything was so unnecessarily complex, and to top it all off the video game looked like a cheap 1990s work that still somehow strained my graphics card.
Today, I think Minecraft is the single most addicting video game I have ever come across. It’s the perfect representation of object-oriented programming: As my high school teacher once explained, students would learn to interact with software objects that had attributes and clearly-defined methods for interacting with other software objects. What we got, in the end, was an entirely virtual world that we could virtually live in.
Why Are Video Games So Addicting?
I found a pretty good article online about video game empowerment, by GameInformer.
The tl;dr is something you have probably already heard. Video games appeal to three fundamental human needs:
- The need to feel competent (“master a situation”)
- The need to feel autonomous (“maintain control over our actions”)
- The need to relate to others (“feel like we contribute to society,” or to whatever world exists in the video game)
The article by GameInformer is on why we play video games. I will make the leap to why they can be addicting by simply stating the obvious:
- Most video games are designed to be as addicting and as engaging, for the sake of profits. The same can be said of social media sites like Medium and Facebook
- Video games often employ variable rewards. In Minecraft, for example, you can carry out actions like fishing, trading, and mining that force you to play probabilities. There is only a given probability, for example, that you will obtain a rare item when fishing or obtain a valuable resource when mining. Cal Newport calls this the slot machine effect, though to be clear Cal Newport himself is talking about social media
- Exploration. Curiosity itself has an addicting quality, and we find ourselves wanting to learn more about the world around us. In Minecraft, we can explore unknown places to obtain valuable resources like treasure, weapons, and portals
Natural Questions: How Can We Exploit This?
There is a really, really popular video on YouTube called How I Replaced Video Games With Coding, which I am linking but not embedding because I don’t personally agree. One comment calls it “toxic productivity,” which I reluctantly agree with. If anyone out there thinks coding is more fun than video games, more power to you. But if your average YouTube viewer walks into work with the expectation that their day-to-day life will feel as fun as playing a video game, then I think your average YouTube viewer is being set up for disappointment.
According to the aforementioned GameInformer article, “gamification” is already showing results (so perhaps I am wrong). Foursquare users (note to self: Look up what Foresquare is) receive new badges and awards. Websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Spotify employ progress bars. Puzzle games like Foldit and EteRNA invite players to fold macromolecules, for the purpose of furthering science and curing diseases.
As for coding, I don’t know. Most video games are specifically designed to be fun — your customer requirements assigned to you last Tuesday were not.
Into Minecraft
I have been playing a mod called FeedTheBeast. It has many features — some logical, some not — that make the player more powerful than one in vanilla Minecraft.
You can combine copper and tin to form bronze. You can enter a different world called the Twilight Forest. You can also make something called a Mining Turtle, then load it up with scripts you write in Lua.
A mining turtle comes preloaded with a somewhat lengthy script called Excavate (source code here). The program, like the unit, is so useful and overpowered that I doubt it would ever be greenlit in the real game. In addition to undermining the medieval vibe of the game, the mining turtle can also use its pickaxe infinitely, ignore timing mechanics, and occasionally ignore physics entirely to fly like superman. The mining turtle is essentially a superhero.
I recall having a lot of success with this person’s script in pastebin, which is about 250 lines long, but I wanted my own. What I got was six lines long and about a hundredth as impressive, but I stand by it.
Refuel, then indefinitely dig forward and form a 1-block hole above it. Forever. What could go wrong?
Well, I almost lost a turtle in the ocean. I think this game/mod would be pretty awesome as a coding tutorial, but on the other hand it takes a lot longer to find/obtain turtles than it does to code.
I also thought it would be really funny to have a turtle excavate under Smack’s house. He didn’t like it, but he did turn the hole into a bunny farm.
Closing Thoughts
Some people have had great success taking video game principles and turning them on their day-to-day lives.
Again, more power to them. But I think video games and productivity can be kept separate.
