LogFAQs > #938127561

wwinterj25 posted...

Nah. They are both creation games.

Minecraft is creation/survival/exploration, SimCity is management. They both involve creating stuff at a very fundamental level, but the underlying game mechanics (namely the conflicts that drive the actions of the player) are radically different.

Now, saying that Minecraft created the entire genre of sandbox building isn't very accurate. As mentioned above, Dwarf Fortress did a similar thing years earlier, just not nearly as accessibly (people like modern conveniences like GUI's in their games). There are also even older examples than that, such as 1998's Lego Creator (googling that to find the release date and seeing pictures was a huge hit of nostalgia. Hoo boy.). Minecraft's significance is not that it created the genre, but that it popularized it, and more significantly, indie games as a whole.

wwinterj25 posted...

You don't play a role in all games though so try again.

No, you very much do. Sometimes that role is a faceless "hand of god" that just manipulates stuff toward some goal, but the player plays a role of some sort in every single game. If you're not playing a role, you're just watching it happen (though even then, "observer" is also a role).

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