Minecraft: Institutions and Audiences

How is Minecraft different from other video games:

 Minecraft has obtained a Bafta and consists of multiple boxes containing merchandise ready to be distributed to their fans. The game has been downloaded more than 100 million times on the PC, consoles and smartphones since it’s launching in 2009. 

A games editor for The Guardian suggests that the games ‘blocky landscape’ with ‘the soothing piano soundtrack’, meant that he believed it would be perfect for his elder son, Zac, who had been diagnosed with autism. Zac apparently ‘responded to Minecraft immediately’ and this is why Minecraft has been deemed to be very effective with autistic children aiding their learning and ability to focus. The game allows children to experiment, discover and construct a variety of things ranging from ‘making houses…mansions, then giant, sprawling castles’. Minecraft even allowed Zac to communicate to his family, which he had never properly done before. Even though the conversation was constructed purely on Minecraft, the game gave Zac an opportunity to reduce the ‘grunted responses’ and to communication effectively to his family.

The writer of the article, Keith Stuart, expresses that through writing about his personal experiences of Minecraft helping his eldest child Zac with his autism, he had a numerous amount of ‘tweets, emails and comments from other parents’. The game was a tool for basic learning to be attained. For instance, in the game the gamer has to collect raw materials and create a piece of every day furniture. The sense of ownership that every Minecraft player has- ‘it’s the heart of the game’. For autistic children it is ‘an escape, a safe place, and he was able to model it in his way’.

The article even illustrates that the game is a device in which family members who are separated from each other can be in communication and be active with each other not just verbally active. For example, a father had stated that ‘he’d been based in Afghanistan’ and was unable to retain the attention of his child, before he would run off and play Minecraft. In saying that, the game gave him and his child a chance to spend hours of time together, and it would work as a platform in bringing them together.  Minecraft is now being used in schools across the world. The company have also released an education version, which enables teachers to set up classroom servers where students can build models of their towns. Through this system students gain a deeper understanding of geography, agriculture, architecture and physics. The communication is straightforward and simple, which acts as part of the appeal.

Minecraft has become a success through the ‘naïve qualities of the visuals’. Markus Toivonen oversees the games merchandise. He perceives that these simple and straightforward communication is what makes the appeal of the game. The benefit of Minecraft is that it is ‘kind of cartoony because of the low resolution….But a benefit of that is it allows you to fill the world in with your own imagination’. The writer of the article believes this aspect is what works for his son Zac. The game having an ‘awkward’ and ‘blocky aesthetic’ which means that Zac feels less self-conscious about what he makes. Anecdote: “Her son was autistic, and he was having to switch schools-he was really anxious about it. But they knew he was a fan of Minecraft, so what they was, they gave him a plan of the school. It showed where his classroom was, and where he entered the building and everything. And he built the school in Minecraft. Later, when he actually started at school, he knew exactly where he was going, and he felt comfortable’. 

A programmer of the game Maria Lemoἠ says that she prefers the high customised versions that were created by the modding community that designs and shares its own texture maps, items, creatures, as well as stories making them available online. These files players can immediately download into Minecraft and then subsequently have a version of the game that looks like it is set in space. Since the game has become a globalised phenomenon, many have tried to emulate the game. Mojang embraced hobbyist and hackers as a part of the experience. Apparently ‘he didn’t care if people copied it’. In fact ‘if anything it was beneficial- it spread the game more’.

How might the Microsoft takeover be received by audiences?

The $2.5 billion worth game, has said to have stunned the millions of fans that it has attracted with the Microsoft takeover of the game. From the book by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson called ‘The Definitive History of The Game’, they have updated the book by including the final days of the Mojang’s independence. A conversation was held between Jens Bergensten and Markus Persson about if it was true that Mojang was going to be sold to Microsoft. They apparently talked about how the Minecraft community would react once the sale went public. Some would be angry, and others may feel abandoned. Markus believed he would be labelled a sellout, a person who abandoned his ideas for a sum of money. Markus even thought about taking a break from the internet to avoid the amount of abuse that would come when it went public.

To what extent do you think that the Microsoft takeover inhibits the “brand”?

In order to assess the extent to which Microsoft taking over Mojang has inhibited the brand, it is vital to understand the manner in which it was done in and the contributory resultant factors after Microsoft bought the company. The article demonstrates that Jens should not inform anybody about the Microsoft deal. Jens is the person who is the creative director and the article implies that Jens would probably not have been told, if it weren’t for the fact that he needed to get started on the code review. This amount of secrecy, underpins Mojang to not particularly respect their workers, and by identifying further about the co-founders they present that they are just only considerate of themselves. Furthermore, within the article it conveys that by keeping silent on the deal it would mean that there would not be a vast quantity of people handing in their notices to leave when the deal had gone through. It suggests that in order to assure their staff would stay, people at Mojang were made an offer. The offer entailed that those who stayed on for six months after the sale would be rewarded with two million Swedish crowns, this accumulates to after tax $300,000. This creates the debate about companies believing that money will create a happy and enjoyable work environment for those who stay. Although, the article does address that through Minecraft’s success, the employees did go on trips which would make people envious, though in saying that many of the employees held the perception ‘that their hard work mainly benefited Markus, Jakob, and Carl’. Looking at the article closely, it captures the concept of their being a barrier between the employees and those who were the management. It states that Markus would throw in bonuses and perks ‘when he felt generous’. This phrase evokes how Markus would treat the employees nicely, but only treat occasionally. These people are the ones who are making sure the game continues to be a global success, and they should be paid far more than ‘a normal salary’, which is evidently far less than what the three co-founders receive, even though Markus has not worked ‘on Minecraft for over two years now’. Just by reading these facts it instantly highlights that the brands reputation for me is significantly decreasing. In the companies defence this behaviour would be normal at another institution, it is just for the fact that ‘Mojang was different’. The company gave the impression of a close-knit group who were friends, but when the company started to grow, there became a distance between the management and the employees. During the summer of 2014, one Mojang employee said that “Management have been really good at keeping wages down. Instead we have been told that Mojang is a nice place to work, that we get free trips to the Game Developers Conference and that we all receive a Christmas bonus”. This hostility between the employees and the management does not enforce a brilliant workforce and so the game and its advancements may be affected.

A significant piece of information to draw closely to is that all of the three co-founders would ‘leave Mojang as soon as the sale was done’. It was hinted that maybe they would be ‘given seats on the board of the acquiring company’, to be the advisers or ‘to remain in charge during the transition into the new ownership’. This would be to ensure that there are still people there from the previous company and it reduces the chance of the business collapsing. This makes sense to why, the article states that they do not believe ‘that Microsoft would have accepted Markus’s immediate departure’ so lightly, there must have been talks about it. The only reason for this is that Markus presumably wanted to draw away from the company as soon as Microsoft bought it. By not having essentially the components to where the game started from, Microsoft has immediately inhibited the brand. The brand has lost all sense of who it is and its origins, it will now be created by other people who will not be as emotionally invested into the game as when it was first launched. This was shown to a higher extent from Daniel Rosenfield who was the composer of the Minecraft soundtrack, he felt on the day of the sale ‘betrayed by Markus’. This just alludes to the aspect that emotionally people were invested and when you receive this contribution a game has a much higher chance to be a success and from a person’s account of the general manger at Microsoft Games Studios he is far from being the person to take Minecraft into the next level for its fans. He spoke on a number of occasions about Mojang’s future, although instead of mentioning Mojang, he called it Minecraft. This illustrates that Microsoft confusing the company name with the game, highlights that maybe Microsoft are not really that interested in Minecraft as a game after all, and if this was true then evidently the game will not be a true representation of what it once was and therefore Microsoft owning Minecraft will indeed inhibit the brand to a high extent, as it shows their incompetence and embarks on the reality that the game and its features may not have the potential to exceed than if it had the original team.