There is a peculiar process in modern economics which goes like this.
First, the energetic, thrilling, imaginative breakthrough. Next, the success of the unconventional. Then, selling out to the corporate giant, which systematises, brings in celebrities and fills the whole experience with complicated rules until dullness whittles away at its success.
Maybe this applies to a forgotten but trendy high street. Or a small, innovative restaurant. Maybe, as in this case, it is an imaginative online start-up – like the game Minecraft, which just sold out to Microsoft for $2.5bn.
“I’m never going to play with it again,” my 10-year-old exclaimed when he heard the news, and you can see why he fears the worst. What will his game become if it is less than the edgy, slightly innocent and amazingly simple idea – so simple that the Danish government commissioned a Minecraft version of the entire country (which was attacked in the summer by online vandals)?
But what is really extraordinary is the game itself. Minecraft isn’t necessarily a household name yet, but it has sold 35 million copies worldwide without a penny spent on advertising – it has been spread entirely by word of mouth.
What’s more, the Minecraft instruction manuals occupied four of the top five bestselling children’s books slots for part of the summer. There is a YouTube channel about it called Stampylonghead, and the online pictures – of Minecraft versions of the Brooklyn Bridge, or St Peter’s in Rome or the Titanic – get millions of hits.
Something is going on. It can’t be because the name trips off the tongue – Minecraft sounds like a set of DIY instructions by Adolf Hitler. I have to conclude that its success is because there is something compelling about the game – broadly a gentle cross between Lego and Sim City, using a variety of materials in cube blocks.
There are darker elements if you want them – zombies and dragons – but my children would spend hours (if I let them) just building the most extraordinary structures, and looking after fields of horses and sheep, or (unusual this one) watching each other doing so.
Minecraft was the brainchild of a Swedish programmer called Markus “Notch” Persson, and it is his company, Mojang, that has been bought. He is leaving, reportedly fed up with being a chief executive.
The game has no objectives, and there is a breathtaking simplicity about this virtual world (it has 10-minute nights and usually no gravity). The whole point is that you can build whatever you like with it, and in an almost infinite direction horizontally. The success of Minecraft in my own household has made me wonder whether my own children would be perfectly satisfied with no other toys apart from Minecraft and Lego, both of which share this quality of freedom.
This is possible because they are both so simple, paradoxically allowing buildings of almost infinite complexity. Other online games have obscure rules which constrain the imagination – I spent ages once playing with a virtual game about a ship trying to get the man to jump overboard. He wouldn’t.
My recent visits to toy supermarkets, with wall-to-wall TV and film tie-ins (Toys Are Rust, my seven-year-old calls it), reveal them to be almost empty of customers, and I wonder if there is some connection.
Lego is familiar to most of us, especially to those of us with children who have trodden on it in bare feet in the middle of the night. The company famously rescued itself recently with in-depth research on childhood. There was a lightbulb moment when they asked an 11-year-old German boy to show them his favourite toy, and he came out with a battered old sneaker. Every mark showed where he had mastered a new trick on the skateboard.
It led to an important insight: children have not changed. They didn’t necessarily want toys that were glitzy, shiny, hi-tech and new. They wanted to be able to experiment.
That seems to me also to be the secret of the Minecraft phenomenon. Lego suffers some of the corporate disease, Star Wars tie-ins and so on, but – unlike most of the TV tie-in tat – Lego and Minecraft release the imagination.
For the sake of my children, I hope Microsoft keeps it simple, stupid.
