41st place!

41st place!

Kyle just finished 41st place out of at least 2000 people running the Parkour course that was just designed for Minecon 2013. As a gaming father it is a great source of pride to watch him effortlessly jump from lily pad to lily pad, from stump to stump and just fly through the course, literally while scores of other avatars are running the same course constantly obscuring his view. Now many parents talk about not understanding the games that their children play, but I have been developing games professionally for 20 years and of course, I am a hardcore gamer myself.

Moments before I gave up running the course. I couldn't even finish the course. I tried about 2 dozen times, but I was so frustrated my fingers were aching from my awkward and brutally clumsy jumps through the Pirate's Retreat as the course was called.

Nearby my younger son Max who is 8 years old has been placing in the 400s place, and next to him my business partner's daughter Amanda is also happily mastering the course. Chagrined, I acknowledge my lack of skills and instead watch Kyle. When I first came up to him, he got 76th place. I watched him run the course, and was able to spot a coaching moment: One the trickiest jumps that involved angling the character for a pivot right at the jump he would charge ahead at full speed regardless of what the other avatars were doing. Sometimes the other avatars would block the critical last few hundred milliseconds before the takeoff point and he would miss the jump. The missed jump would have him landing in water swimming slowly and climbing back up to try again. I leaned down between runs and advised him to back off slowly and allow the other avatars to flow past when it gets to one of his critical jump points.

His very next run was 41st place. I took a photo of him next to his time-score and placement, and beamed with pride. When the minder came by to shoo us off the machines, I rebuffed the minder by pointing out my boy placed 41st. The minder said, okay go ahead and keep playing. His next run? Hit 38th! And he could keep an open chatting conversation with me and his younger brother who came over to watch his twelve year old brother. I was honestly pumped up and could have watched him run it many more times and I was curious if he could make it into the top 25, he was just 3 seconds behind their 1:23. But Max and Amanda were bored, so it was off to another event: Walls.

Walls is a great PvP experience. I didn't know anything about the format before, so Kyle was anxious to coach me while we waited 20 minutes or so in line. In Walls, a minecraft map is segmented into 4 seperate mini-worlds that about the size of a large city block each. Between these mini-maps are hugely tall walls that separate the teams for 5 minutes. During those 5 minutes the two players work together starting with a bare-handed Steve to gather first some wood, then use the wood to craft a crafting table, then with the crafting table make pick axes. With the pick axes it is time to dig down and mine and smelt as much iron as you can before the walls come down. With the smelted iron, you can make iron sword and much needed iron armor.

Kyle is a much better FPS warrior than I am, that was driven home to me about 6 months ago after I tried playing multiplayer maps of Call of Duty with him and just getting absolutely pwned with frag counts in excess of 10:1 in his favor. I blamed the xbox controls verbally, declaring that I am an old-school PC gamer, but in my head I knew he just kicked my ass.

So it was easy for me to accept his advice, “Dad, just mine iron and hand it to me. I will do the fighting.” So that was going to be my role – support. Amanda and Max were on another team and were quite happy to take it easy and come up with a plan once the game started.

Once we sat down, I put the headphones on one ear and one ear off with Kyle sitting next to me so we could stay in close communication. As soon as the game started, Kyle tore through the closest tree, so I had to wander over a bit and find another tree. By the time I gathered my wood I came back to the crafting table that Kyle had made and started to remember what the crafting recipes were. Kyle was already gone down below mining. I fumbled around and made a couple of wooden pickaxes.

I went down below and Kyle was happily mining up iron, but I couldn't see with just a tiny amount of dim light coming in from the surface. I was worried I was going to get lost and not be able to materially help out. I didn't understand how Kyle could spot the iron ore from the regular grey gravel in the dimness, and I forgot how to make a torch. It had been about 6 months since I played a marathon 3 day session of minecraft with my boys until I had bad carpel tunnel and then set it aside. “Want me to make you some torches?” Kyle asked? “Yes please!”.

>>> one minute left

Damn, I had just mined about 12 pieces of iron, and was just beginning to find my way around down in the cave. Welp, I had to make the best of it and tossed my iron ore in the smelter that Kyle already had going. Once the time was up we had enough for a couple of pieces of armor and a sword. I knew I had let him down and the other teams would likely being wearing full iron armor.

Up to the surface we charged in our half armor. We went for the center of the map were there was supposed to be some cool loot. Before that we saw an enemy player. Kyle commanded, “Okay, stand back and I will attack him, try to hit him from the side.”

But something clicked in my head and suddenly the WASD keys were working for me. I was closer to the enemy than Kyle and I wanted to kill! I nimbly jumped around the rocks and water and started hacking with my sword on the enemy's flank. I danced around in in a circle, going in for a few hacks without taking much damage in return. Bang! The enemy died like a pinata and I my eyes went greedy. He had a full set of iron and after flaying around the water my character had tons of armor and gear.

“Good job dad!” Kyle was beaming in returned pride.

Feeling pretty good, I started to wonder what our next goal would be. And what should I do with the coco beans that I just picked up?

The enemy's partner! I just saw him rounding the central spire trying to come up on us. I charged after the guy like a madman, and this time dispatched him a bit more brutally and in return got my health down to 2.5 hearts.

“Whoa Dad! You got another!”

And then another enemy appeared to be running at us, I ran at the newest enemy and made once slash before Kyle said, “Wait Dad, that's Max!”

I stopped immediately. While that really isn't fair to have two teams work together, there is nothing in the map to really stop that. We lost our concern of finding diamonds in the center of the map, and instead now as a 4-person pack we took off like a tear after another enemy. This guy was smart enough to run away from us at first site. I tried cutting him off but while having the inventory screen up looking to see if I had picked up any food, I stepped into one of the lava pools that keep rising in this map format, like blinds at a poker tournament. Dead.

Just like that I was dead. Minecraft is surprisingly harsh with death often meaning permanent loss of progress. This is highly unusual in modern games, and yet young kids thrive in its harshness.

I stand up to go look over Max and Amanda's screens. They are involved in a brutal bit of PvP that ends up with both of them succumbing to the one other enemy two person team. But the did some damage. Finally it was Kyle against the two remaining. Openly anticlimactic, Kyle engaged, and the two working together were able to dispatch him in a few seconds. I think Kyle might have killed one before it ended.

However, as soon as the game was done Max, Amanda and Kyle were all smiles, and asking what was next? They had not one ounce of “Rage Quit”. They were accomplished PvPers that were happy as clams to be killed in a vicious PvP format openly on the convention floor with a few dozen onlookers. With equal measure of charity and pride Kyle, “I can't believe you killed those two guys Dad! Good job.”

Minecon is such an event. I knew it was a big deal, but I was shocked at the opening ceremony where thousands and thousands of people were assembled. I was trying to count, later Lydia helpfully filled me in – 7,000 people.

The opening ceremony was oddly beautiful to me. It reminded me of Blizzcon with the same happy sense of being surrounded by gamers. But it was much more real, and less commercial. There was a funny skit at the beginning where Jacob and two other guys from Mojang pretend to have forgotten the video for the opening trailer and goof off about uploading times and file sharing. The attendees were enthralled. Then Lydia came out, and her first order of business was to introduce all of the 30(!) people who work at Mojang. There were all dressed as they were on any day, all in normal gamer geek gear. Their intros were not polished, and it seemed like we the audience were borrowing just a bit of their time and in a few moments they would go back to making games. Despite the mega success of Mojang, they all acted warm, goofy and simply themselves. It was moving and enduring.

Minecraft is the defining user-created-content game of the last decade, and it is fitting to me that the people themselves were so down to earth and accessible. It permeated the whole show. The whole concept of minecraft is community building and sharing. Of the four largest sponsors, there was Lego, Jinx the gamer clothing gear company, and ThinkGeek. The fourth was Microsoft showing off Minecraft 360 and Skyrim, which was receiving polite attention from the attendees, but nothing at all like the crowds of people around the folks selling “paper-craft” or the Lego booth. The Xbox version is essentially a crippled version of Minecraft designed for “the mainstream” despite the fact that Minecraft has already sold millions. I was most impressed with google which was also a sponsor, being behind using minecraft to explore quantum physics, but they had the good sense to be descrete and let minecraft shine.

I ran into Min Kim, my friend and CEO of Nexon, North America, he was there with a half a dozen leaders from the game studios in Korea and Japan. My kids standing next to me I introduced them, and proudly declared that Kyle is a big Combat Arms fan. Min smiled and pointed to his colleague who leads combat arms globally. Kyle smiled at him and nodded, but then an awkward silence opened up. Very successful Nexon delvelopers from Korea, and 3 kids, while Min and I looked on. I realized that everyone just wanted to get on with seeing minecon!

At the show I bought the book: Minecraft, The Unlikely Tale of Markus “notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything. It was a great and fast read and I finished on the plane back from Orlando to Austin with 10 other kids besides ours in Creeper hoodies.

I am left feeling very optimistic about the future of entertainment. Sparkles' parody of Ushers song Revenge is all about a minecraft character and his troubles with thieving creepers and at 110 million views has more views than Ushers original video!

In the book it talks about Valve giving notch a standard programming interview and then offering him a job – at the same time that he is selling 25,000 copies of minecraft each day.

I remember one thursday at Zynga in 2011 when Mark Pincus was at a meeting and told all the GMs there that he had his bags packed and that he was planning on dropping $1B to buy Mojang. We all loved minecraft, but their were no applause, just quiet and very polite skepticism. Pincus flew to Sweden and back, and at the estaff meeting on Monday he had to report that notch was not interested.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but with notch turning down Valve, turning down Zynga, and quitting from his job at King.com, all three of those put a smile on my face. To be clear, I have respect for all three companies, but to think that notch and now just 29 more happy, independent game developers of Mojang can not only plot their own path – but they can shape the future of so much of the game industry – makes me feel very confident on the health of games.

Originally posted on Facebook on November 03, 2013.