I’ve been trying to understand what makes a boardgame, or a video game, or some other piece of media fun. To me, fun is something that’s elusive. Like happiness, it’s something you try to chase that can never be captured and controlled. It just… happens.

But, there are some ideas I’m working out and I thought I’d share them here.

Balance between work and fun.

This one should be obvious to most people. There is a element of work, labor, challenge present in most forms of media. Even non-interactive media like movies will engage you in a mental challenge. Maybe a character behaves in a way that is morally dubious, making you reevaluate your moral positions or make you think about what you would have done/not done.

I believe one of the things that makes Minecraft work is this element of challenge, more specifically, the labor you must perform in the game. Mining, farming, getting the right villager trades, finding the right biome, etc - is all work.

This aspect is executed very well in Minecraft. If you play with your friends at the same time, it can create a feeling not unlike talking with coworkers at a job. The work takes on new meaning when you’re working with other people.

However, certain aspects of Minecraft lean too far into work and not enough fun. Mojang is only exacerbating this by making some items more difficult to get, like Netherite requiring smithing templates, implementing physics changes to break mob farms, or making arguably necessary enchantments extremely tedious to get. Mending, which allows you to repair your tools with experience, is completely necessary to avoid the tedium of making new tools, weapons and armor when they would otherwise break.

So, the changes I would implement here:

• Tools do not break.

• All necessary, time saving enchantments like Efficiency are included in all tools (remove them but add the effects of Efficiency 5 to every tool by default)

• Enchantments in the enchanting table can be chosen. You can choose any enchant you want and pay XP for it. The current XP mechanics are OK, once you have 30XP only 1-3 levels are consumed. Remove lapis from the enchanting equation.

• Keep inventory on death is default.

• Remove armor. Once you have it, it becomes invisible in the gameplay (except dying less fast) and so, getting it is mostly an extremely tedious exercise. Default character should take less damage as if they were wearing max protection on everything (fall protection and general protection, specifically - fire, blast and projectile protection do not need to exist)

• Merge/remove enchants. Aqua affinity and respiration should be default to the player. Looting and fortune should be merged, flame and fire aspect should be merged, unbreaking should be removed and tools should just last as if they had unbreaking 3 (if tools break at all) knockback and punch should be merged, bane, smite should be removed and only sharpness should exist.

• Maintain the difficulty of finding an elytra. Flying is very unnatural and it did not exist in survival Minecraft until recently. I will admit it removes the tedium of traveling long distances, so I would keep it in the game.

Ok, that’s all unless I think of more. I just feel like the fun parts of Minecraft are none of what I mentioned above. The fun parts of Minecraft are exploring, building, working with animals, and collecting stuff/mining. As it is now, the game only really becomes playable when you have everything listed above. On hard mode, you die too easily, you lose your stuff too easily, everything just takes too long. Much like wooden tools and leather armor, there’s just no reason for this stuff to exist, it’s not fun, nobody is using it. Playing the game to accomplish these things, I would argue, leads to the Two Week Minecraft Phase problem.

Bonus even more controversial ideas:

• Tools do not exist. Like in creative, all blocks break instantly and you only need your hand.