Minecraft: the Best Videogame LEGO Never Made

Starting from early development stages the Swedish indie-hit Minecraft has been compared to the LEGO toys and franchise (Duncan, 2011). Although Minecraft doesn’t have direct visual connections to the popular Danish toy, like the two-by-four block or the mini-figure, many pointed to the similarity in the game’s mechanics and playing experience. The open possibilities of the LEGO bricks, their core content and development of original series have been driven to the background after the company's decision to focus more on licensed content, like Star Wars, Marvel and Harry Potter. This was reflected in the development of LEGO video games, which since 2006 were outsourced to Warner’s daughter company TT Games. In this blog we will focus on the development of Minecraft and how it filled in the gap after LEGO’s new market strategy up from the early 2000’s. On the basis of this analysis lies Aaron Smith’s article Beyond the Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age.

First, let's address the elephant in the room. Although Smith never explains the reasons behind LEGO’s financial decline, starting in the 1990’s, he reveals the fact that the arrival of electronic gadgets started to became a competitor, driving children’s attention. Until this point in time the sales of the LEGO brick were the company’s biggest source of income, as stated by Smith. Left out is the fact that, up from this point, LEGO lost its patents to their characteristic bricks, first in the U.S. and later in the E.U. as well. Losing their monopoly position on this niche in toys, LEGO started focusing on other’s licensed material, which were still protected under copyright laws. In the trend of horizontal integration, their internally produced video games soon followed. This strategy defines the way a whole cross-medial layer of the production chain is owned and deployed by a single company. Deviating from their multi-genre games, LEGO, in collaboration with TT Games, now focused on a single concept game model. This game model depicts the different franchises it licensed, which results in similar games with different characters and visuals over the years.  

Although LEGO tried (and failed) to incorporate the real life building experience into their games with the ‘Creators’ series, the newer installments don’t seem to have any of these mechanics. Then comes a small Swedish indie-developer called Mojang. Starting on the project on his own, founder Markus “Notch” Persson begun the development of a small side-project dubbed Minecraft. This RPG (role playing game) was met with overwhelming positive feedback and grew out to be one of the bestselling indie-games of all time. Praised for its open world and open ended gameplay, Minecraft soon build-up a large fan base. This group, like a modern online community befits, started to share, reinvent and remix the original content. Modding as one of those applications serves as ideal example for this cases for its ‘spreadability’.

As posed by Edmond (2014) ‘”spreadable” texts are defined by “good, compelling content” and a textual openness that encourages remixing’. The ability of users to become creators and share their newly made content contributes to the success on the initial product, according to her text. Smith also refers to this term to indicate the success of LEGO Star Wars (Smith, 2011: 6): a stage where the user can break character’s hierarchy and create his own stories. By adjusting the way Minecraft looks and works, the modding community had allot of freedom exploring the boundaries of what the game had to offer. Some mods made references to other cultural products, visually, but also mechanically. Modders would mimic other games, movies and even artworks and Minecraft gave them all the freedom to do so.

Smith juxtaposes spreadability with the idea of drillability, the way the audience is encouraged to immersive him/herself into the exploration of the core mythology (Smith, 2011:  2). Jason Mittell, who coined the term, saw this practise as so-called forensic fandom (Smith, 2011: 6). This is also recognizable in Minecraft. Apart from the modding community, Minecraft also had a large number of fans practicing the latter. Its community created a lot of narrative input, although the original game had no story-elements. A number of these even ended up in the game itself as an Easter egg, inside joke or final content, which brings us to the next point.

Minecraft was never a truly finished product. Running as a beta for almost two years, the game had enough time to try out different features and let the audience have a say in its development. This grassroot approach saw the audience, or users, as an important resource and adjusted the product according to their wishes. The game’s enormous success let to big attention on the global market, leading to Microsoft’s takeover of Mojang (and thereby Minecraft) for the record sum of $2,5 billion. This event is, in it’s own right, an example of corporate convergence in the case of Microsoft. By incorporating or merging with companies like Mojang it reaches bigger production capabilities, audiences and moreover the rights to their already successful products. LEGO, following their new business strategy, took a comparable route. By working with Time Warner they hoped to use flow of mass media content and float along with its current.

Do you think that the market gap LEGO left behind is perfectly sealed? Well, LEGO certainly didn’t let Minecraft get away with all the success. By releasing a new series based of Minecraft, LEGO tapped into their hype, now selling various licensed Minecraft-models in stores all over the world. The irony even goes a bit further now LEGO develops a new video game which shows allot of similarities to Minecraft according to numerous bloggers, who use the same arguments once used by other to compare to opposite (Etherington, 2015). Maybe Minecraft is the game LEGO should have made in the first place, but this only shows the influence of market trends, corporate strategies and great unpredictability of it all.

B.L., E.K., L.C., N.R., R.H.

Thesis proposal:

Who sells better, the tortoise or the hare?

Literature

Heidi A. Campball & Gregory P. Grieve (2014) ‘They Kill Mystery: THE MECHANISTIC BIAS OF VIDEO GAME REPRESENTATIONS OF RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY’, in: Playing with Religion in Digital Games, Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 255-275.

Sean C. Duncan (2011) ‘Minecraft, Beyond Construction and Survival’, in: Well Played: a journal on video games, value and meaning, Volume 1 Number 1: 1-22.

Maura Edmond (2012) ‘Here We Go Again: Music Videos after Youtube’, in: Television New Media 2014, 15: 305-320.

Henry Jenkins (2006), ‘Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence’, in: Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York & London: New York University Press.

Christopher Noyes & Crystal Roberts (2015) ‘Protecting the Brick: LEGO’s Global IP Enforcement Efforts’, in New York Law Journal: August 3, 2015.

Aaron Smith (2011) Beyond the Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Franc Trcek (2014) ‘The World of Minecraft is Cubic: LEGO Blocks for E-Kids?’, in: Teorija in Praksa; jan/feb 2014, Vol. 51 Issue 1.

Digital Material

Darrell Etherington (2015) Play Lego Worlds, a New Minecraft Competitor from Lego, Right Now, http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/01/play-lego-worlds-a-new-minecraft-competitor-from-lego-right-now/ (20 September 2015).

Merced, M. J. de la & Wingfield, N (15 September 2014) ‘Microsoft Says It Will Pay $2.5 Billion for Company That Created Minecraft’, New York Times: Dialbook. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/microsoft-to-buy-creator-of-minecraft-for-2-5-billion/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (12 Oct. 2014).