The Opposite Of FarmVille

Minecraft, the indie game making all the news right now, exists as a kind of incantation repeated by game designers and developers. As a backlash against the kind of emasculated experiences that purport to be playful by nature, Minecraft is a powerful weapon.

Over the last couple of years, social games like FarmVille have grown into the kind of  mainstream news-generating machines that players happily claim an addiction to, for better of worse. There are stories of their success on a regular basis, or at least, there were.

At Playful 2010 this year, many of the @thisisplayful speakers talked about the awkwardly named gameification of everything. The torches were out, virtually, to burn the idea that games without  meaningful choices, where the player cannot impact the world or the story, can be called games. Games where decisions have consequences, if I may.

But these are the kind of social games that I jokingly told Made By Many were partly my fault. "Social games, their part in my downfall," I said.

And then there's Minecraft.

It's the opposite of FarmVille. One developer from Europe versus legion developers from America.

Where Zynga boasts that "roughly 10 percent of the world’s Internet population¹" has played one of their games,  (really?) Minecraft has "surpassed 1,000,000 registered users and 300,000 purchases²". 

Whilst Zynga "can add up to 1,000 new servers each week" to cope with demand, (note, the obvious disclaimer), Minecraft generates $250,000-$350,000 per day. Is that net profit? Gross profit? Or does nobody care, because it's a good story?

It's as if all that game designer frustration has created a golem out of Minecraft. I hope it doesn't go on to exist solely to prove that proper games can be as successful as the cold, calculated social gaming alternatives. Although I don't mind if Minecraft pushes any further mention of FarmVille out of the public eye.

At least Minecraft isn't Limbo, another indie success, albeit on a dedicated console with a game mechanic that involves repeatedly and morbidly killing a young boy with trial-and-error puzzles, whilst making great play of the young adult lost in the woods theme. Minecraft is fun, addictive, simple and bewildering. Limbo and FarmVille, simply, are not.