Matthias Newcomer

If you’re a gamer and you haven’t read Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal (you might have seen her on The Colbert Report ), head on over to Amazon and check it out. It’s a fascinating look into how video games are making the world a better place, but also how we look at games overall. In the first chapter, she illustrates four main components of any game, one of which being the "goal", that important drive that gives gamers incentive to continue. It’s essential to any kind of game because without it, the game doesn’t have a meaning. It’s generally pointless to play, and therefore, a gamer won’t play.

You may notice, at least as my personal preferences go, that many of the games which don't encourage you to gun your friends down, instead emphasize actually working with them. Nowhere is this more obvious than the multiplayer in Minecraft.

What do I mean by that? In game development terms, a "vertical slice," is a gameplay segment of finished or near-finished quality that showcases all the planned features of a game to potential investors. At the start of a project, these are a massive sink for time and effort, since they essentially involve doing all the hard parts of finishing a game to complete one 10-minute section. Generally, they’re seen as a bad practice. However, toward the end of development, it’s a lot easier to pull assets together for a vertical slice. Of course, if you’re shopping your game around to publishers at that stage, you’re probably in a lot of trouble, but a standalone "vertical slice" can also serve as a strong alternative to a traditional demo.

Certainly, this lends itself to some games better than others. It won't work with any sort of scripted, linear action game, but it's not much trouble to take a chunk of an RPG or Sandbox world, string together a bare-bones quest line, and set players loose. This allows for demos of the caliber you see with emergent games, where it's much easier to take a chunk of gameplay and give it away - Civ V's Demo let you play with a few civilizations on small maps, for instance, while Killer Instinct gives players one free character as a taste. I'm all for anything that allows single-player, structured games to be more competitive, especially when it provides a workable alternative to awful early-access crap.

The trend of building homes that don't look like homes is one of the best ones in Minecraft . It lets players innovate and think outside of the box. A home is wherever the Minecraft bed is, and that could even be a massive battleship docked in the middle of an ocean bi

Now Minecraft has no overarching objective, so it instantly challenges McGonigal’s claim that a goal is required in a game. But actually, Minecraft ’s main goal is composed of multiple smaller goals. It doesn’t have a "grand" objective, but it has smaller objectives, little bite-size incentives that replace each other over time and take the role of a larger objective. First you collect resources, then you build a house, then you survive the night, then you wake up and continue, but each with steadier and steadier increases in scope and scale. Even better, there’s no one direction to go. Being able to explore in multiple regions and build whatever you feel is satisfactory is open-ended. You are given tools and no direction, yet you are still creating. You’re making the direction. This is a massive undertaking, one that changes everything that anyone knew about videogames before, and it’s a bigger embodiment of the "sandbox" mentality than Grand Theft Auto has even been.

The Classic Control is what you'd normally put up with in a standard FPS, where head movement moves the view and body orientation is controlled smoothly by the right stick or mouse. This is the heart of the VR FPS problem, because while moving forward, back, and strafing isn't much of an issue, turning the view without moving your body is when bad things start to happen at the base of your lizard brain. Even in a blocky Minecraft world the sense of Real is too strong, and while you know you're playing a game the part that keeps things like your heart pumping and lungs breathing without conscious thought hasn't the slightest idea what's wrong. The trick is to break the idea of Real, and this is where the special VR Control mode comes into play.

I’m not going to argue that every game should sell itself vertical slice demos. There’s obviously a lot of cost involved in giving away a standalone product, and not every game lends itself to this sort of distillation. However, both Dead Rising and The Stanley Parable went the extra mile with their demos and garnered excellent sales. The same seems to be holding true of Bravely Default. Developers capable of building a short standalone scenario should definitely consider it when it comes time to market their games.

Minecraft is the brainchild of Markus "Notch" Persson, an independent game developer from Sweden. Persson’s interest in the building elements of games like Infiniminer led him to expand upon the construction pitch of the game and add in expansive exploratory and dungeon-crawling features as well. In 2009, Persson released an alpha version of Minecraft Strategy , with an overwhelmingly avid public flocking to see the game. Persson continued to develop the game into beta, with users being frequently updated with new modes, mods and abilities as it developed. Before the game even went gold in March 2012, Minecraft earned over 4 million purchases. It is currently the sixth bets selling PC game of all time with over 33 million copies sold across all platforms (over 12 million of those being on PC alone).