You observed the oddity that people lump all World of Warcraft players into the same bunch. This is due in large part I think to that special effect where anything that is the biggest and most popular – or is perceived to be such – is stereotyped, and any association with the most popular thing is treated as a pejorative. It’s hip, basically, to be counter to ‘mainstream’.
World of Warcraft enjoys much the same backlash as the Wii’s expanded audience does, and for much the same reason. “Hardcore” gamers felt instantly threated by the awareness that the Wii was successful with the true mainstream, and so dived in to typify all Wii owners as soccer moms and grandmothers who knew nothing about “real gaming” and were irrelevant. Likewise, WoW was and still is beset by constant attacks for being the “McMOO”: a terrible game that isn’t suitable for *real* gamers, played only by a huge, faceless army of “casuals”.
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I can recall back to people saying the same thing about why Blizzard’s Warcraft 2 or Starcraft were ‘popular’ when it “clearly” wasn’t as “good” as other RTS games. Hell, I remember people saying the same about the popularity of Super Mario Brothers. “It’s just Nintendo’s advertising…”
Ironically, those games are today hailed as ‘classics’.
Blizzard is an interesting company to study. They were this tiny little company who made games for the Super Nintendo like ‘Rock and Roll Racing’. So how did they get to where they are today? Note how there are no ‘game gods’ at Blizzard. No Miyamoto figures. But what I do see is very smart businessmen behind the company who seem to smack down any developer drift. For example, after Warcraft 3 and with World of Warcraft, the orcs were made to be ‘noble savages’ instead of the demonic warriors they were in old Warcraft. Players complained. In most game companies such as Nintendo, the players would be told to go pound sand. “The developer is a genius. This was the intent.” The point is not to let amateurs decide the content, the point is that customers wish to flow downhill and their ‘complaints’ are actually signals of an obstacle that is in their way. In Cataclysm, the old Orcs appear to be back. No more ‘noble savage’. In fact, Blizzard killed off many of their main Warcraft 3 characters. How many companies would do that? Or to use another example, many players were unhappy with the sense of Starcraft 2’s story going to make Zerg feel ‘pacified’ and ‘peaceful’ not unlike the ‘noble savage’. This is pretty critical since Starcraft 2’s single player is told in three retail releases with only the first one published. But Blizzard announced they ‘do not know how the Starcraft 2 story ends’ which is an absurd statement considering that they already are making people buy the game three times in order to see the story. Blizzard knows it has to change where the story is going and is willing to do so. Why? Because customers flow downhill.
I’m not surprised to hear about indie game makers hating Notch. You know, I do not believe for a second that Notch is this ‘aw shucks’ type of character where success just “happened” to him. He didn’t quit his professional job to hopefully get ‘lucky’. He had an idea of what he wanted to do. His theory of jam packing as much emergent gameplay possible in a little java applet about blocks payed off very well.
Any game developer should be very excited about Notch’s success. It shows that one person CAN make a game and that one game CAN make tons of money. I’ve been wondering if there is too much competition in gaming today that doesn’t allow breakout hits as easily (as the creator of Pac-Man says). But Minecraft’s success shows that this is possible.
I haven’t looked at these complaints you’ve mentioned. But I wonder. Minecraft’s game design is really no design. There is no ‘narrative’. The game has no art design. It is just blocks. Minecraft is the epitome of the opposite of what many indie game makers think a game should be.
Many of the indie game makers are vanity game makers. They already think they are the next Shigeru Miyamoto and the only thing that is holding back the grand success of their game is…. evil corporations with fat marketing budgets. Notch isn’t a big corporation with a huge marketing budget. Are they really attacking Minecraft or are they just trying to prop up a mental image of themselves?