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

by Daniel Goldberg

  Chapter 11

  A Dilemma Concerning House Cats

  “I’m going to demonstrate to you how I really don’t play Minecraft like other people,” says the voice on the YouTube film.

  The viewer peers into what looks like a deep shaft. The walls are gray and are built out of bedrock. The gamer, Halkun, calls it a well.

  “I’m sure you’re probably thinking, ‘Why, Halkun, that is a very, very deep well!’ And I’m going to show you the reason why. It is currently holding. . . ”

  The camera turns 180 degrees.

  “. . . this!”

  A structure looms up, so large it seems to disappear into the distance. The Starship Enterprise. In full scale. It’ll boggle the mind of anyone who has painstakingly put block to block to build something in Minecraft. Creating the whole spaceship from the TV show Star Trek must have taken weeks, maybe months.

  The clip continues and Halkun gives a guided tour, talking about the model. The film has been viewed over 10 million times and is a typical example of many people’s first Minecraft encounter.

  “I haven’t slept yet, so I’m gonna be a little loopy!” says Halkun triumphantly.

  Minecraft’s breakthrough coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the YouTube phenomenon Let’s Play. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a person recording himself or herself playing a popular computer game. The video clip often has a voice track of the player describing what’s happening on the screen and talking about his or her impressions of the game. Let’s Play is closely related to an older but similar phenomenon called Machinima (a combination of the words machine and cinema), a kind of film genre that uses the game world as the stage and its characters as actors. It may sound incredibly specialized, but Machinima has long been an established form of expression in the gaming world.

  Minecraft and Let’s Play turned out to be a good match. Since Minecraft encourages its players to create their own goals and challenges, each gamer’s experience is unique. In the gaming world, concepts such as emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling are used to describe these phenomena. For many players, the main objective in Minecraft is not the game itself, but rather the documentation and public viewing of their creations.

  One might assume it’s a hobby for a nerdy and obsessive group of people, except that the number of people drawn to the Minecraft videos is staggering. In the spring of 1966, John Lennon said in an interview that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Markus has never expressed himself in the same terms, but might have significantly more reason to do so. Calculated in number of Google searches, Minecraft briefly surpassed Jesus in popularity in early 2011. During the summer of 2010, YouTube’s in-house analysts named Minecraft the year’s fastest-growing trend. There are several million video clips about the game. During the month of May 2011 alone, more than 35,000 Minecraft films were uploaded—that’s more than a thousand a day—and while most of them are only viewed a few times, truly popular clips can attract a huge audience. The most widely viewed Minecraft clip ever is “Revenge,” a cover of Usher’s hit song, “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” complete with a music video in which a Minecraft character sings about his hardships with thieving Creepers. Nineteen-year-old Californian Jordan Maron, more well known as “Captain Sparklez,” created it. At the time of writing, “Revenge” had been viewed over 92 million times.

  Two more Minecraft filmmakers who have attained similar levels of stardom are Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley, two young Englishmen who are collectively the heart of the Let’s Play phenomenon The Yogscast. In about four years their YouTube channel has racked up nearly 1.8 billion views. It’s not easy to describe a Yogscast clip to an outsider. Like popular TV shows, Yogscast is divided into seasons. Each episode is around twenty minutes long, and new ones are uploaded to YouTube every week or so. The setup resembles a kind of improvisational theater, with the Minecraft world as the stage, props, and cohesive frame of reference. Most often, Simon and Lewis follow a loosely written script with a fantasy theme, but improvise wildly and supply the characters with their own voices.

  The third season of Yogscast is based on Simon and Lewis’s avatars Honeydew and Xephos (one is a Tolkien-inspired dwarf warrior with a red beard, the other, a Minecraft version of Commander William Riker, from the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation). They save the world from the evil wizard Israphel. The two men are funny, quick-witted, and likable. They often lose their train of thought, start to laugh, or get distracted from the story by something irrelevant that catches their interest. For the viewer, the experience is reminiscent of listening to two guys playing a computer game together, which is, more or less, exactly what it is.

  Successful Let’s Play filmmakers earn big money from their works. For a few years, YouTube has been sharing a slice of its massive advertising revenue with those who provide content for the site, but it’s hard to find out exactly how much. Google, YouTube’s owner, is very tight-lipped about what the agreements look like. Also, the revenue varies depending on the season, choice of subject, and how much ad room Google’s sales department succeeds in booking at a given time. But the consensus among filmmakers is that the video ads shown before a film clip generate between one and two dollars per thousand views for the creator of the clip. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but with the enormous numbers of viewers that YouTube videos attract, the dollars quickly add up. Jordan Maron is supporting himself completely on the revenue from “Revenge” and other video clips. In a good month, Simon Lane and Lewis Brindley can make tens of thousands of dollars from their Yogscast episodes.

  Not everyone is lucky enough to live off of YouTube fame, but many video makers can supplement their normal income with a few hundred dollars extra a month by playing Minecraft for an audience. SethBling (known to the public only by his handle) is one of them. His day job is at Microsoft’s Xbox division in Seattle, a job that would make many a programmer envious. On his free evenings and weekends, he invests almost all his time in playing Minecraft.

  SethBling came into contact with Minecraft through a roommate. He approached the game with a programmer’s eye and quickly discovered redstone. After experimenting with it for a few weeks, he decided to begin uploading videos of his creations to YouTube. On his channel, there are demonstrations of how redstone can be used to build elevators and train stations, automatic doors and a machine to teleport wolves. He has also re-created classic computer games such as Minesweeper and Donkey Kong, fully playable within the Minecraft world. His work consists of complex, detailed constructions that spin Minecraft in completely new directions, and actually have more in common with exercises in programming or engineering than with gameplay.

  “I like Minecraft for precisely the same reason that I like programming. I have full control of the world and can shape it exactly as I choose. I can test different constructions and mechanical systems in order to see what the results are,” he says.

  Re-creating classic games in Minecraft has become something of a distinguishing mark for SethBling. His breakthrough came when Markus began taking notice of his creations, thanks to a video that was popular on the discussion forum Reddit. In it, the video maker showed how he had re-created the classic Nintendo game Duck Hunt in Minecraft. Markus found the link, had a good laugh at the clip, and tweeted it to his followers on Twitter.

  In the world of Minecraft, being mentioned by Markus on Twitter is called being “Notched.” A quick look at the Minecraft inventor’s account gives us a clue as to why such a seemingly unpretentious action has a name of its own. At the time of writing, over 700,000 people follow Markus on Twitter. The short message, with a link to SethBling’s ingenious creation, was the digital equivalent of sending a letter to almost all of central Stockholm with a promise of free entertainment in exchange for a mouse click. Within forty-eight hours, 300,000 people had seen the film. In a flash, SethBling had 4,500 new subscribers to his YouTube channel.

  “Notch doesn’t tweet about YouTube clips very often, but
he seems to be nerdy in exactly the same way I am. That’s lucky for me,” says SethBling.

  In a good month, he makes a couple thousand dollars from YouTube.

  Markus’s status as the creator of Minecraft gives him considerable sway in the world of the game. A single link from his Twitter account puts a spotlight on whoever has his attention, a kind of fame that can also be turned into revenue through YouTube ads. It’s probably one reason that the image of Markus, in a pixely and stylized shape, recurs in many of the most impressive Minecraft projects you can see in films.

  While Markus’s status is self-evident, he is far from the only one with great influence in the world of Minecraft. After all, he’s not the one uploading the vast number of films online—millions of players are doing that. Which means that neither Markus nor anyone else at Mojang has much control over how the image of Minecraft is shaped on the Internet.

  Mojang has never paid a dime for ads or PR for Minecraft. Instead, the players themselves have generated the enormous hype surrounding the game. It’s a perfect example of “viral marketing,” the art of utilizing people’s social networks to spread awareness about something new. The extensive YouTube community that has grown around Minecraft isn’t just the result of the game’s popularity; it’s also the main cause of it being a hit from the start. Every time a Minecraft player uploads a video to YouTube, the chance increases that someone, somewhere will notice the game and decide to try it out. And the more people who play Minecraft, the more video clips are uploaded. If it hadn’t been for Yogscast, Captain Sparklez, SethBling, and all the other YouTube celebrities, Minecraft would never have reached such a large audience as it has today.

  That would be a nightmare scenario for a company with an obsessive need for control. Big companies hire hordes of PR consultants, marketers, and crisis managers to chisel out communication strategies, advertising campaigns, and rules for what information the company will divulge. All of this is thrown overboard when unbridled YouTube filmmakers are allowed to take over.

  Alex Leavitt is someone who closely examines that phenomenon. He’s a researcher at the University of Southern California, focused on culture, media, and digital communication, and he is interested in how the Internet affects the production of creative works and changes the way we relate to and consume popular culture. Minecraft is one of his primary objects of study.

  “Minecraft is this obscure little game that became a worldwide phenomenon in more or less a couple of weeks. It just exploded. I want to understand how all these millions of people playing it have affected its development,” says Leavitt.

  Alex Leavitt regards Minecraft as an example of what he calls “open-source culture.” By that he means popular culture that is created symbiotically by its originators and its users. American academic Lawrence Lessig has coined the concept “read/write culture” for more or less the same thing. Both point to a form of cultural production that preempts the traditional concepts of producer and consumer.

  What makes Minecraft such a wonderful object of study, says Leavitt, is that the game became popular long before it was finished. As the finished version wasn’t released until MineCon 2011, players, at an early stage, had the opportunity to influence how the game would look and play. For years Markus has been engaged in constant dialogue with his players about the future of Minecraft. On his blog he has comprehensive documentation of successes as well as mistakes and thoughts about the game’s development. On Twitter and in discussion forums, he has consistently encouraged players to give him feedback for future versions. Responding to the hundreds of suggestions and opinions that pour in daily would be impossible, but Markus can often be seen on discussion threads about Minecraft, and he talks daily with his players on Twitter. If nothing else, he’s created a feeling of accessibility; anyone can offer a suggestion and maybe have it taken into account in the next version of Minecraft.

  Markus’s constant presence also creates a strong emotional bond between the game and its players. When Carl wants to impress other CEOs and company bigwigs, he doesn’t mention the millions of people worldwide who play Minecraft, or the five thousand people in Las Vegas who stood up and applauded when Markus got up onstage. Instead, he mentions what in marketing lingo is called “user engagement.” Mojang’s figures show that 75 percent of those who paid for Minecraft in the last two years are still active players. They are what Carl would call “monthly active users.” According to him, this many of them may well be a world record. Or, as one player says, “It doesn’t feel like you’ve bought a game. It feels like you own a part of it.”

  Alex Leavitt likes to talk about “narratives” in a more abstract way. In a piece of music, a book, or a more traditionally designed game, the narrative is built in. The composer has designated the melody, the game designer programs the challenges that lie on the way to the next level, the playwright has worked on the dramaturgy, and the actor interprets the role for the camera. In Minecraft, a meaningful narrative arises in the interplay between gamer and game.

  “When you talk about movies, music, or games, the creative process typically takes place far from the user. Minecraft doesn’t work that way. It is better seen as a platform, where the users provide the content,” Leavitt says.

  In Creative Mode, designed for players who just want to build without worrying about monsters, this can be taken to an extreme. For a long time, Markus was opposed to such a play mode in Minecraft. The whole challenge would vanish, was his reasoning. Where’s the fun in that? However, among players, Creative Mode turned out to be possibly the most popular style of play. Markus listened and, when the beta version of Minecraft was released, one of the big innovations was better support for the users who wanted to re-create things such as the Eiffel Tower in full size rather than worry about being attacked by zombies.

  That decision, which originated with the players and not with Markus, is perhaps the strongest contributing factor of why Minecraft grew into such a phenomenon. Without Creative Mode, few of the most impressive Minecraft constructions would have been built—the creations that have done the most to give the game attention and attract new players.

  Markus Persson, Carl Manneh, and Jens Bergensten preparing for MineCon 2011. Photo courtesy of Mojang.

  The strong sense of commitment that Minecraft instills in its players is also a reason that some of the Internet world’s most influential investors have taken an interest in the game. One of them, David B. Pakman, was quick to see the potential of Mojang’s creation. In the 1990s, he had worked for Apple and founded the division that would later create products such as iTunes and the iPod. He has been the CEO of eMusic.com, one of the world’s largest digital music stores, and for the past couple of years has been a partner in the venture capital firm Venrock Associates, which owns significant stakes in several leading Internet companies.

  David Pakman discovered Minecraft when his kids began playing it after school. He watched, captivated, as they sat for hours in front of the computer, longer than with any other game, and he realized that the odd little creation from Sweden was something extraordinary. Pakman contacted Carl to hear more about Minecraft and to ask if he could offer some advice to the newly started company. Since then, he’s been an informal adviser for Mojang on questions regarding business strategy and development. He has also become a devoted Minecraft player.

  David Pakman is polite in a typically American fashion. He is careful not to criticize anything about Markus’s creation or to describe Minecraft with anything but praise. However, on one point he is refreshingly clear: the true value in Minecraft is not in the game, its inventor, or anything that Markus or Mojang’s programmers have done. The real value lies in the enormous community of devoted players gathering around Minecraft and filling it daily with new content.

  Actually, David Pakman doesn’t think Minecraft should even be referred to as a game. Markus’s creation has more in common with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, he feels. Minecraft is inherently a
social experience. It’s an activity to gather around, and therefore also a reason to socialize. If Facebook can be likened to a kind of hangout spot on the Internet, maybe a bar or a restaurant, then Minecraft is the digital equivalent of people meeting to play soccer together.

  That point of view has serious implications for the future of Minecraft, and for what Markus, Jens, Jakob, and the others at Mojang spend their days working on. There are millions of enthusiastic players out there with ideas about new functions, new monsters, challenges, and experiences to add to Minecraft. The developers at Mojang can’t possibly compete with that. If Minecraft is to become as lucrative as possible, David Pakman says, it would perhaps be wise if Markus and Jens Bergensten stopped seeing themselves as game programmers and instead focused on developing the game as a social platform.

  That’s a job description few game programmers would sign up for, and perhaps Pakman senses that his reasoning is approaching a sensitive subject, because he apologizes:

  “It’s hard to say that anything about Minecraft should be different, because it hasn’t exactly hurt Mojang to do things as they have. For them, it’s a question of identity. Markus describes himself as a game maker, not as a creator of social and creative platforms, and of course, he should continue to do so,” he says.

  Alex Leavitt finds just these kinds of discussions fascinating. Musicians, filmmakers, sculptors, architects, and game designers are all driven by the will to create, he says. To give shape to an idea and put their own stamp on it. Traditionally, the emphasis is on the individual creator—the artistic genius, the gifted musician, the visionary film director, or the game designer—as an elevated and respected person. To Leavitt, Minecraft questions that very view of artistic creation.

  “How much of what Minecraft is today can be traced to Notch and how much is the result of the interplay with the community? There’s a tug-of-war there, between the creator’s vision and the users’ visions, which I think is very interesting.”