Notch has an interesting post up about a new mob in Minecraft. Notch talks about trying to make creepiness.
For the most part, games revolve around imagination (that is, the imagination of the player, not the developer. Sorry Sakamoto). The most powerful imagination is fear.
Fear is incorrectly confused to be part of the biological process with people too drunk on Darwin. Reflexes are biological. But fear is a product of the imagination. As we have noticed, dogs and cats dream. They too possess imagination. My cat perhaps imagines me always feeding it, always petting it, and doing nothing else. But for those who have had a ‘scaredey cat’, you know the cat always imagines disaster. The cat will run under the bed.
We see this behavior in children. Children are scared of the dark, they fear monsters in their rooms. This is the children’s imagination at work conjuring up these fears.
Imagination is the most productive and most destructive element on Earth. In order to invest in anything, one must possess the imagination to see the future. But fear is extremely destructive in that people’s imagination paralyzes them from investing. It is fear which makes people poor. This is why with your financial education, do not get hung up on ‘books’ and ‘terms’. Most financial education really involves your personality and emotions. Emotion is energy in motion. If you cannot control your emotions, they control you. If you cannot wrestle with that fear, that imagination, you will forever be poor and be a wage slave.
Video games deal with fear all the time. The best video games I’ve played made me feel fear. I was scared playing Super Mario Brothers. Those Hammer Brothers scared the hell out of me. As well as those huge jumps. And the Koopa at the end. Super Mario Brothers was not rainbows and sunshine. The game was quite terrifying.
Legend of Zelda was filled with fear. If you had one heart left, you heard the ‘beep’ ‘beep’. Boy, did you get filled with fear. Or if you got lost, you got scared. Or you encountered very strong enemies (like in Death Mountain), you got scared.
In Zelda II, I was very scared. That game still scares me to this day. The Final Palace is terrifying.
Metroid filled me with fear. The game was so creepy. I was so scared that I am conditioned, to this day, that upon seeing a Metroid that I turn around and RUN. I was really disappointed how easy sauce the Metroids were in Super Metroid to kill.
Remember Shadowgate? The game is now somewhat comical, but the game inspired fear. The game was consistently creepy. The music helped. But what created the fear was your imagination. If you opened the wrong door, incredible death would result. And Shadowgate went really far out with how you would die. If you shattered an incorrect mirror in a room of three mirrors, one of those mirrors opened up to space and the universe (WTF!? Am I not in a medieval castle?). Shadowgate really reminds me of a Choose Your Own Adventure book in a good way.
When Minecraft began to explode (naturally, I was there), I said, “This is the scariest game I have ever played!” It is! The game is terrifying. From that ‘thwack’ of an arrow being shot at you from the darkness, to you seeing a creeper coming at you, to running around at night with monsters all around, or my favorite: fall down a hole to a pitch black labyrinth when you can hear zombies and skeletons everywhere. Absolutely terrifying.
This fear depended on the player working his imaginary forces. When you saw an unlit tunnel worming its way around, you got scared because you imagined monsters inside it. So you run around throwing torches everywhere and run out, panting in real life.
Minecraft really does revolve around fear. The beginning of the game is total fear because the player is trying to build shelter before the sun goes down. This rite of passage is necessary for the rest of the game. Every Minecraft player fondly remembers building their first shelter because of it.
And Minecraft becomes boring when the fear disappears. Once you build a fortress, you know that nothing can ever get you. And the game begins to fall apart at that point.
The solution to this is to create a time envelope for the game beyond ‘night and day’. It would be to scale the game to ‘days’ or ‘weeks’ (in game time). The mobs need to scale in power as the player gains power or else there cannot be any fear. Just like how Civilization (one of Notch’s favorite games) has the enemy scale with the player, so too should the danger scale with the player in Minecraft. Classic computer strategy games (like Master of Orion) often threw in ‘random events’ or if they detected the player getting too far ahead would cause a computer player to suddenly ‘declare war’.
Minecraft needs to detect when the player is doing ‘too well’. And then, there needs to be an appropriate reaction. The detection and reaction are two different topics. I suppose the detection might be if the player hasn’t died in a long while. A reaction could be an invasion at the player’s shelter or a spawning of dangerous mobs.
I don’t know the full context of Notch’s new mob, but it seems he is making mobs for the sake of making mobs. The context of the fear in Minecraft doesn’t revolve around what the mobs do. The context of the fear in Minecraft revolves around what the player does. Notch already added ‘Hell’ and the screaming, flying fire exploding jellyfish. But they weren’t really scary. Notch’s idea of the sky turning red and zombies invading seems to me to be far better. Fear can only be created by the player’s imagination of loss. The tension of Minecraft revolves around the player trying to build a sanctuary while the game seeks to undermine it. Minecraft is currently broken in that after a while, the player’s sanctuary’wins’ over the game. The player must not be allowed easy sanctuary.
Notch said something else:
This is somewhat related to my dislike of mazes in game design, where the player has no way of knowing or figuring out before hand what decision is the correct decision. Don’t penalize the player for things they can’t control.
He isn’t talking about mazes. He is talking about puzzles. Minecraft is full of mazes such as the underground tunnels (and the player makes his own maze. The overworld is a vast maze). But Minecraft doesn’t revolve around puzzles which is why the game is so refreshing.