Analyzing the User Experience of Minecraft’s Multiplayer Experience
(And making it better)
About Minecraft’s Multiplayer Experience
The reason why I chose this was because this was a game that I’ve played a lot ever since I was a kid and the way that they designed the multiplayer experience is something that bugs me even until now. Despite being a game with over 126 million players (statistica), the way to play with friends is as confusing as ever. For example, to play with a friend in minecraft you can either join a public server, start your own private server, or purchase a “Minecraft Realm” for 10$ a month with 10 players maximum (Minecraft Help Center). Furthermore, if you want to join a massive multiplayer server (play with people all over the world online) you must find one outside of the Minecraft Client. For reasons I will get into later, this is one of the most frustrating ways to play minecraft with others as a consumer.
Stakeholder Research
The primary stakeholders are the players that play the game with others. Their primary motivations are to be able to play minecraft with other people. The reason why the design falls short is because there isn’t a way to play multiplayer without complications unless you pay ten extra dollars a month. I think that these people are a direct stakeholder group for this design because the reason multiplayer is a feature in Minecraft is because there is a high demand for people who want to play the game with others. Some research methods I’ve used are youtube videos on the subject, Reddit posts from users on minecraft, as well as my personal experience. Youtube videos on the subject provide a very in depth and specific details about the a single person’s experience, posts on reddit provide many perspectives on the subject including many commenters whom can agree or disagree with the original post, and lastly myself because I have a lot of personal experience with the game and a personal interest in the game because I like the game a lot.
My research revealed that the primary concern is accessibility. For example, in “u/popquorn” post on reddit a year ago he stated that,
“I really want to know what other easier routes we could take just to start a vanilla play through with each other, because that’s all we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but we can’t because of how fucking hard it is for no damn reason!”
This gives us tremendous insight on how terrible it is to be able to play with a friend on Minecraft. An educated inference from the way he worded his words will show a burning sense of frustration from this stakeholder, a feeling that I’ve also experienced while trying to play with friends. Furthermore in cravclips’s youtube video on the subject he says, “come on bro, i mean like I have to go into command prompt and spend hours basically hacking the US pentagon only for it to not work in the end. Almost every game out there has the ability to invite friends, Java (minecraft) should be too.” As a player I have experienced the same frustrations as well and for a game where 53% of kids aged 6 to 8 play the game (in the city of Melbourne with a sample of 753 parents with children) it is very arguable that the product is contradictory to their interests, given that they want to play with other people. For this reason, for both adults and children alike, Minecraft Multiplayer isn’t easily accessible enough and causes significant frustration to those who play the game.
Indirect Stakeholders
One indirect stakeholder are Microsoft stakeholders (literally). Those who own shares in Microsoft are impacted by the design of Minecraft’s multiplayer because Microsoft owns Minecraft. So if you have a monetary interest in a company that makes a bad business decision, it will impact the worth of your shares. In this case Microsoft has spent 2.5 billion dollars on a game, and they aren’t fixing a big problem, which once fixed could sustain its current player base for years or get even more players. In either case, the action of taking no action to fix this problem, which is likely already known by the developers, comes at the expense of the potential for the company to make more profits which would increase prices of shares owned by investors.
Design Critique
Playing Minecraft with Friends is too complicated
This is a screenshot from a blog informing users on how to play Minecraft with friends. This is a problem because over 19.7% of Minecraft players are under 15 years of age according to a poll conducted online.
This poll is also skewed towards older people, because people aged younger don’t go on minecraft blogs and forums as much as older people. But whether or not it is skewed, if your player base is at the very least 20% young kids it is counter productive to make playing multiplayer that complicated. I’m 19 years old and I don’t even know how to “grab files from MOJANG” or “create a batch file to run the server.” without significant research much less children. Furthermore if you have multiple people playing in a world, others can only play while the host is on the server. This is a problem because if that one person is not playing nobody in the group will have access to the world and be able to play themselves.
The only way that fixes this problem is a purchase of $10 for a “Minecraft Realm” for each month it is active. From a business perspective this is pointless, because usually to make money you have to create some sort of value, usually a solution to a problem consumers have. However if you sell a solution to a problem you create how is that any different from being a racketeer? In this case, in order to play multiplayer in Minecraft there are a bunch of loops you have to jump through, which can be avoided for a price of $10 a month. For this reason, I believe it should be easier to play minecraft with friends for free without any additional purchases.
Playing Minecraft on a Server is not Player or Creator Friendly
One of the biggest parts of minecraft are creators, in fact, everybody who plays minecraft is a creator to a certain extent. Whether you are building a house, farm or castle, Minecraft’s entire value as a game depends on the player’s ability to create. Although for most players this usually happens in a single player game, there is a certain segment of creators that create game modes on servers in Minecraft with tens of thousands of players daily. However, the only way to find and access these servers are off-client, usually on websites such as: https://minecraftservers.org/ or on forums. These are very real talented creators that are able to make a living off of creating and running a Minecraft Server making money through micro-transactions, donations and advertising. Although a few people are able to make a living, these servers are painstakingly monitored and maintained by hundreds of people, a very significant amount of whom do so because they love it, and as a result do not get paid for any of their work. These creators bring in millions of players, yet their work is not recognized by Microsoft. In order to connect to a server you still have to find the specific IP address to the server and connect. I find this detail of Minecraft Multiplayer to be very insulting to the creators that put hundreds of hours of providing value to Minecraft because of their love of the game.
This is an example of how to connect to a server.
Redesign Proposal
I will be fixing both of the problems that I’ve identified both of which are fundamental to Minecraft multiplayer. The current way Minecraft Multiplayer is now, it breaks many important guidelines in good design principles as I will show you in this one screenshot.
This is the user interface that will allow you to play games with others online, whether it is with friends or in creator-run servers.
Affordances: This single user interface is how you’re supposed to play online and it has enormous capabilities in connecting you with people all across the world. Unfortunately it doesn’t give this affordance to a large segment of players who don’t know how to navigate this.
Signifiers: This single screen doesn’t communicate any of the capabilities this software has. To a person who is new to minecraft, they wouldn’t be able to know they are able to connect with thousands of other players in creator run servers with many different game modes.
Mapping: There is no clear relationship between what this page would allow you to do with others. You can add a server, but how would you know the IP addresses of the best games? How do you find out how to create a server? How are you able to play with friends?
Feedback:
This is a screenshot from a person who had problems connecting to a minecraft server. Although it makes clear that they had failed to connect to the server, it is very unlikely that they know what is wrong. This happened to me many times, and every time I was so confused on what to do as a kid, but how was I supposed to know what this meant or how to fix it?
Design
This is my first design and I will mention other variations on each redesign.
This design will both allow people to be able to play with each other more easily, as well as be more creator friendly. I changed the entire layout, but the first important change I made was to add an option to join a friend, create a server and join a creator run world. This took the method of joining servers from an IP address to a single click, creating servers in a single click as well as being able to join a friend in another world. This means players would no longer have to painstakingly find IP addresses and although it’s not shown in the design, I would have the world be able to run from anybody who decides to join and play on it, a feature not on regular Minecraft.
When a player clicks on the “join a creator run world” button it shows in the center some of the most popular servers to play on. This will give additional traffic to these servers which could hopefully bring up their profits, and allow players to explore these worlds in-client as opposed to on a non-affiliated website.
Some variations that I could see for the design in the future are:
In-client Messaging; this is common in many games, and especially with your friends spread across many different worlds you would want to contact them while they’re playing.
Add Mods Button; Modding the game is a big thing in minecraft at the moment, and many creators mod the game in order to add new features. However, once you mod the game you cannot play with a player without the same mods. That being said, I think it would be cool if different worlds needed mods to have their unique features and the Minecraft client would automatically download them once you try to join a world that requires it.
If this layout seems familiar that is because based it off of the ROBLOX user interface:
I have based it off of ROBLOX because both Minecraft and ROBLOX are creator driven games, but ROBLOX takes it to a next step and embraces it with this user interface that allows creators to thrive, as well as to let players play with each other. I think Minecraft would do well following a similar design.
In conclusion, Minecraft is a creator driven game that isn’t capitalizing on its strengths. A big part of the game is playing with others, but the game makes it incredibly complicated to do so. To fix this we have to simplify the entire process of playing with others, and turn all the steps needed to play with somebody into buttons that are easily identified.
References
C. (Director). (2021, January 2). Minecraft JAVA Multiplayer SUCKS!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1mBWu9cTvE [Video file]. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1mBWu9cTvE
Clement, J. (2021, January 29). Minecraft number of players worldwide 2020. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/680139/minecraft-active-players-worldwide/
GretchenMCGretchenMCView User ProfileView PostsSend Message Diamond MinerJoin Date:2/21/2011Posts:819Member Details, HackasauresHackasauresView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageGold MinerLocation:MalaysiaJoin Date:12/6/2010Posts:402Member Details, MojaveMojaveView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageEnd DwellerLocation:SwedenJoin Date:9/8/2010Posts:7, MegakniteMegakniteView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageZombie KillerJoin Date:12/24/2010Posts:251Member Details, OpticalShadowOpticalShadowView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageRedstone MinerJoin Date:8/3/2010Posts:562Member Details, NotSidNotSidView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageDiamond MinerLocation:TerraceJoin Date:9/30/2010Posts:776Member Details, . . . StudnickystudnickyView User ProfileView PostsSend MessageLapis Lazuli CollectorJoin Date:1/17/2011Posts:947Minecraft:StudnickyMember Details. (2011, March 28). GretchenMC. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/129318-demographics-age-poll
How do I play multiplayer? (n.d.). Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360035131391-How-do-I-play-multiplayer-
Jane Mavoa PhD candidate researching children’s play in digital games, & Marcus Carter Lecturer in Digital Cultures. (2020, June 16). Minecraft teaches kids about tech, but there’s a gender imbalance at play. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/minecraft-teaches-kids-about-tech-but-theres-a-gender-imbalance-at-play-89496#:~:text=The%20results%20show%20that%2053,to%2021st%2Dcentury%20play%20repertoires.
Minecraft Servers. (n.d.). Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://minecraftservers.org/
R/Minecraft — Why the Hell is Java Minecraft Multiplayer So Hard To Host?? (n.d.). Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/eubz0c/why_the_hell_is_java_minecraft_multiplayer_so/
Ryan, B., Ryan, Virginia, Kendall, Pete, ID Tech, . . . Alycia. (n.d.). How to Play Minecraft with Friends: Multiplayer on Java, PC, Consoles. Retrieved February 01, 2021, from https://www.idtech.com/blog/how-to-play-minecraft-with-friends
Appendix
The User Interface I based my design off of.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/
Where to find information about the product and purchase it.
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Menu_screen
History of the User Interface of Minecraft (not much has changed)