Why Minecraft Won

Minecraft is culturally dominant. How did a blocky game from nowhere take over the world?

Here's the video on YouTube.

How this video happened

Listen, I'll be honest. I thought my video about frozen orange juice would be a huge flop (it wasn't!), so I was like, I have to do something in the news. And the Minecraft movie is coming out next week.

But as I got into this, I really fell in love with the innovation that happened and the fascinating parallels to a book that (confession time) I had always heard about but hadn't yet read. The result is this look into Minecraft as a disruptive technology.

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Here's a link to the commentary video (for some paid tiers).

Why The Innovator's Dilemma is special

So if you've watched the video, you know that it analyzes Minecraft through a lens of disruptive innovation — a giant homage to Clayton Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. (FYI the affiliate links flow like wine in this article — it's about business!)

I hadn't actually read this book before — I'd read this nice New Yorker profile, but not the real book. I'm pretty wary of business books for a lot of reasons, and even The Innovator's Dilemma has some of the traits I hate. It's got about a billion spinoffs and different editions, and it's been completely stripped of meaning by hustlers and "grindset" influencers whose only experience with disruption is what their protein shakes do to their digestion..

But the second I started this book, I realized it was something special. I'd recently been burned by a couple of big idea books. Barbarians at the Gate, about the 80s takeover of RJR Nabisco via leveraged buyout, was really well reported. But it failed to zoom out and give me a bigger picture about buyouts, junk bonds, capitalism, or whatever it could have actually been "about." On the other end of the spectrum, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, a long rant about media, had almost no facts and consisted mainly of easily refuted hot takes.

That's why I love The Innovator's Dilemma. It features case study after case study to justify what is not a hot take but, thanks to the evidence, an ultimately obvious one. I tried to echo that in this video as well. Analogies can reveal so much about the way the world operates, but they can be brittle if constructed too tightly or like jelly if they apply to everything. Over and over again, Christensen compiles specific case studies of industries to prove his case. It actually helps make it more riveting, in my opinion, that these case studies apply to steel mills, and disk drives, and other unsexy lines of work, because it allows us to avoid being lured in by flashy marketing or cultural evolution that might muddy the analysis.

Yet even with Christensen's great attention to detail, he always has a couple of missions in his writing that helped orient me as a reader. As I mentioned in the video, he is profoundly empathetic to the managers of big companies who find that their marquee products are disrupted. I suppose you could cast him as a corporate sycophant for saying, "Managers are awesome," but I really read it as a sign of kindness and empathy. And he also is laser focused on the theme that his paradox of disruption — seemingly worse products, smaller markets, or just plain weird ideas — can be king-killers. Then, he provides instruction for how companies can stanch the bleeding (I don't know how true the analogy is to Minecraft after their Microsoft acquisition, but the idea is to set up independent companies as much as possible).

I can't really tell you why I decided to make this week's newsletter into a cri de coeur for books like this one — maybe it's because I was worried further analyzing Minecraft as a disruptive force might lead to the sort of limp analogies I hate. But I can say that I hope we all find a time to celebrate the thought leaders who do the work in addition to the ones who just make buzzwords.

Sources

• The Clayton C. stuff is linked above, obviously.

• Watch the two old school Mojang videos for yourself! Here's the first, and here's the unlisted one. I think I found it via this site, which helps people find mysteriously disappearing videos.

• Feels weird to list a corporate book, but I thought this history of Minecraft was pretty good. It doesn't fully get into Notch's downfall (though neither did I), but I did think it covered a lot of bases and provided some good timelines.

• Minecraft stuff! Here's Cubecraft, Minecraft Online, and, if you were curious, a basic workflow of how I got those titles and Graza bottles into Minecraft.

• This isn't really a Star Wars video, but if you're curious about the game's weird "huge-success-yet-a-failure" arc, this article is a starting place.

• I barely scratched the surface when it comes to this stuff. If you'd like a straightforward history of the game's creation, check out Neo's video.