What is the longevity of Minecraft? As a social sandbox game, people can play for a long time. We have a habit of treating games like movies, good for one time through, and perhaps most are. But what if some games are more like Legos, playable for years? Instead of a franchise (King's Quest I, King's Quest II, ...), what if there is some other extendable model, like buying a new Lego kit? I have no idea, but Minecraft is one of a handful of long-lasting games that suggest a different business model entirely. The MMPORGs are like this, too. I'm curious to see what they do with Minecraft Realms.
There's an unofficial modding API and thousands of mods [1], some of which are extremely sophisticated. For instance, "Red Power" [2] includes an in-game 6502-based computer for which the author wrote a Forth interpreter that can be used to control in-game objects, and somebody else has embedded a Lua interpreter that can do similar things, IIRC.
There are also dozens of user-created game modes (some of which only have informally-enforced rules) and special maps like "Feed the Beast" [3].
The only games I can think of with comparable amounts of content are MMOs and possibly the Elder Scrolls series, though in both of those cases the content is nothing like as varied, nor does it rely on its user's creativity to anything like the same extent.
Minecraft is very much like Lego, only you can also program your own bricks.
The cool thing about a lot of the mods is that they don't just add more content to the game, but they add whole new ways that the game can be played. In vanilla minecraft you can build all sorts of structures, and that's very cool and has a lot of room for a creative mind to explore. But then there are mods that add the ability to build automated factories. Or robots that you can program to do almost anything the player can, like gather resources. Or movable structures which allow you to build bases that can fly around the world. Or bees that you can selectively breed or even genetically engineer, which will produce useful resources for you.
I just got into Kerbal Space Program. It's another massive sandbox game by an independent developer that's now teamed up with two other devs to build out the game. It's like Minecraft for space rocket enthusiasts.
I love the idea of Minecraft but never got into it, but KSP is irresistible to me. I just can't get enough of it. I wonder what it is about these open ended sandbox games that favours independent devs. Maybe it's the fact they don't rely on a massive ammunt of pre generated content, or even really a designed experience even. Instead they are based on a suite of components you then create content with yoursef. They're really toolkits, just as Leggo is.
