All in all, Minecraft continues to work due to the interaction of these many factors — construction and survival, certainly, but also social interaction and iterative design. While Markus Persson and Mojang Specifications rely upon an agile model of development to iterate and continually shape the game, we can already see that its evolution from a solely construction-based game to one in which a survival mode spurred on immersion in the game was critical for its success. And, as others have made clear — ranging from elementary school children to college students to game developers such as Jason Rohrer — there is an appealing flexibility in Minecraft to serve as more than just a play space, but also be a platform for new, meaningful experiences.
As Minecraft further develops and takes hold in other systems (such as iOS and Android devices), it will be interesting to see how Persson and Mojang Specifications continue to change the game, especially taking into account how players have co-constructed the game with them. I argue that the tension between survival and construction is key to the game's success, and even to the success of the experiences that use Minecraft for other aims (such as Chain World, that successfully reconcieves the core activities of survival and construction). If the game’s long-term value is ultimately tied to how these dynamics play out not just with Mojang's intentions but also through the goals of Minecraft's players, perhaps keys to the game’s significance will end up lying somewhere within the experiments that players build atop the game as much as with the features that give rise to these experiments.
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