Edit: 6/18/25 to be more reasonable…

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 and armor repaired in anvil do not lose their enchantments and there is no XP cap

• Remove mending

• Items do not burn in lava.

• Enchantments in the enchanting table can be chosen except on books which are random (villagers can give books which are not random, giving them a use) 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.

• 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. Knockback and punch should be merged.

• 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. Not sure how I feel about this limited and rare item being possible to destroy by falling in the void…

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.