A Niche in the Library of Babel

So Microsoft just bought Mojang, the studio that produces Minecraft, for $2.5B. That sounds like a ridiculous amount for a video game, particularly one that looks so crude, unless you happen to know some boys.

Minecraft Steve with his animal friends and his diamond pickaxe

His world

For my 10-year-old son and his friends, Minecraft is mesmerizing.  They’ve been through Angry Birds and Skylanders, but Minecraft is sticking.  They play it on their game consoles, they play it on their tablets or phones, and they play it in the car when going someplace, connecting together to share a world through a local wireless link.  They play in Creative Mode, where you just build things, and they play in Survival Mode, where you defend yourself against the monsters that come out every ten-minute-long night.  They excavate huge caverns, looking for algorithmically placed gold and diamonds, craft weapons and tools, and build vast gravity-defying structures.

At 54 million copies sold, it’s the third best-selling game of all time, after Tetris and Wii Sports, and it sells for a lot more than they do.  Mojang was privately held, but was said to be making upwards of $200 million a year.  Merchandise is everywhere: T-shirts, cardboard Steve heads, guides, and even novels.  There’s even a nice papercraft version that turns the virtual world into a physical one – it lets you fold together actual blocks printed to look like the virtual ones, and assemble the animals and monsters to populate its world.

Its success is dismaying if you’re into computer graphics; it looks like renders from the 80s.  That’s a feature, actually; the simple graphics let it run fast on a huge range of platforms.  There has been an enormous improvement in graphics hardware and software over the last 20 years, all driven by the perceived need for most realistic imagery, and all ignored by this game’s fans.   The kids don’t need landscapes to look like landscapes; they need them to look like blocks that they can move around.   Real worlds wouldn’t look like they could be manipulated.

Scott McCloud talked about this in his seminal 1993 book “Understanding Comics”:

pg 31, click for link to site

Abstracting away detail makes images more universal.  It lets people project more onto them.   If they become too abstract, one’s imagination can’t get started, and the image is boring.  If they are too specific, their interest becomes too narrow.

I’ve seen this go both ways with actual building block toys.   There’s a toy called Kapla Blocks that consists of nothing but identical wooden pieces that are about 5 x 15 x 75 mm.   It’s a completely minimal building set.  Adults love them, and you see them in science museums, because they’re utterly open-ended.

Kids, though, tend to be baffled.  They don’t know where to start.   Mine at least are happier with kits that are already customized towards being castles or spaceships.  This is the guilty secret behind LEGO – they promise the parents that they are a completely universal building kit that will spark their children’s creativity, but the kids actually only ever build the X-wing fighter.

Minecraft is also playing towards parents’ desires.   The last thing they want is for their kids to be playing the #6 best-selling game, Grand Theft Auto.  It’s bad enough that they’re staring at screens instead of running around with each other, but at least here there’s some social interaction in the shared worlds, and some scope for imagination.

So $2.5B was not actually a lot for Minecraft.   At the current run rate, that’s about a 10% yearly return on the money.   If they put some effort into it, it could get bigger still.  I expect that they’ll do a Kinect version soon, where you can dig, craft, and fight by moving in front of the 3D camera.   It could ultimately become a Microsoft-controlled Second Life.  Have your users build wonderful, share-able worlds, then sit back and let money roll in.  Maybe the original Evil Empire of software still has some diabolical schemes left in it.

Sergey Brin has been watching you constantly online, but now he’s recording you in the real world too.

Google Glass has gotten enormous grief in the last few months.  Places are banning it, and people have gotten into fights over it.  Even the tech journalist David Pogue finds it creepy:

You no longer know if you’re being filmed by your conversation partner. An unspoken social rule is being violated. I didn’t like it. I wanted her to take the damn thing off.

So their first counter to that was a video about avoiding being a Glasshole.   Now the next phase kicks in – showing that cool people use it to do important things.   The first release of the campaign was a recent front-page story in the Boston Globe – Google Glass now standard in Beth Israel Deaconess emergency room. This is an interview with Dr Stephen Horng, who has been finding uses for it in the ER.  He can access a patient’s records and immediately find out about history and allergies.   I doubt that the Glasses really are standard equipment at Beth Israel, since they don’t mention anyone else but Horng.  Since he also has degrees in CS and bio-informatics, he’s likely to be a first adopter.

His system was developed by Wearable Intelligence, a startup in San Francisco that’s backed by Google.   They’ve also just out come with a staged video showing a doctor using it to deal with a stroke admission.   It shows an elderly man slurring his words and unable to keep his hands lifted, while his frantic wife is with him.   An older doc in a white coat and tie (i.e. not a hipster dude) uses his Glasses to capture a video, order a CAT scan, and contact a specialist.   The grateful couple look on, saved by this miraculous tech.

Well, it so happens that my sister is a physician’s assistant.   She says that one of the docs in her ER tried one in San Francisco and thought it was great.   However, they do already have rolling computers that give them immediate access to patient info, and it would be hard to convince providers to adopt yet another tech.   She also worries that patients would be made uneasy if they thought they were being recorded.

I suppose that lots of people in ERs really don’t want to be on video.   It smacks of police and interrogation.  Hospitals might insist that all the video is private, but  thanks to the NSA we now know that those promises are meaningless.  If the FBI or DEA wants it, they can get it. If fears like that deter people from coming into the ER, that would wipe out any medical gain that the Glasses might bring.

The long-term vision (so to speak) of things like Glass is to be an aid to our fallible memories.  So little of our lives actually sticks.  We lose so much.   We would all love to hold onto the good parts, ones that would comfort us in dark times.  Yet the unblinking eye of the camera also captures the bad parts, and captures things that can be used against us.   That’s what has people worried about Glass, and what may ultimately sink the product.