How to beat the competition: Buy them a copy of Minecraft
At a local nerd get together the topic of Minecraft was a common discussion point, due in large part to the highly addictive nature of the game. A quick Twitter search would indicate that this is the new World of Warcraft, in terms of addictiveness and customer loyalty. I've noticed that this game really seems to attracts the problem solvers, the people who love a good challenging puzzle and will work at until they figure it out. It's like a giant Choose Your Own Adventure puzzle, zombies and giant spiders included.
An interesting aspect of the game is that it is currently in alpha stage, so things are changing all the time, stuff that worked yesterday (like using ladders to climb down into water without drowning) may not work tomorrow if the developer "fixes" a glitch, while other things that don't yet work but hint at coolness (like fishing poles that don't do anything...yet) might provide some cool new opportunity tomorrow when the developer adds that functionality.
Even when things aren't changing, there are such a huge number of possible combinations of events and materials to be discovered, it's truly awe inspiring. Throw in a little bit of "my friend built a glass tunnel under the lake, I have to have my own glass tunnel under the lake!" and people building insane stuff inside the game like a 16 bit computer, and you've got a game that will really bring out the nerds.
But this wasn't meant to be a game review, or a sales pitch for Minecraft (or Minecraft Addicts Anonymous, as the case may be), in fact it's meant to be a warning to the storm weary sailors adrift on the sea of Startups: Don't waste all of your valuable time playing Minecraft while your competition is hard at work building something better than you. I'm not saying don't take time for yourself, and I'm not saying Minecraft is bad, I'm just saying that if you spend your late night hacker sessions hacking at zombies in Minecraft instead of knocking out those features or fixing bugs, you're probably going to have a hard time keeping up with your competition.
Which brings me to the main point of this blog post, which is to say that if you're working on a budding startup and you really want to put Minecraft to good use, buy a copy of it for each of the competition's developers. It's like a tar baby for tech nerds. In a weeks time all work will have stopped over at the competition and you can plug ahead with churning out new functionality and completely overrun the other guys. Shoot, you may bring things to such a grinding halt that you could still put in an hour or two here or there playing Minecraft yourself, just as long as you remember that you're the pusher, not the addict.
I promise this isn't just a ruse to get a free copy of Minecraft. In fact I've somehow been able to keep myself from burning up hours and hours playing it, but please don't send me a free copy, my will is only so strong.
