Recently Ive been playing a lot of vintage story yet another voxel survival crafting game. And yes i know you have read the title of this article and have gone “oh boy another article comparing a voxel game to minecraft” and yes you are right. However, within this article i want to dig deeper in to the differences in philosophies within these games and their communities not just the game mechanics however there will be a bit of that in here too.

the mechanics

lets start with the thing most people care about the mechanics. A little background Vintage story funnily enough also started out as a minecraft mod which primarily focused on the new survival mechanics and realism. Some of these mechanics include but are not limited too

• leather working: where the player has to tan their own hides in lime water then put them through tanning solutions until leather is made
• smithing: where the player are expected to heat nuggets up and pour them in to mold at least for the lower melting temperature metals, for higher temperature metals like iron blooms are to be made then forged in to ingots on an anvil. with the forging process requiring the players to move individual voxel to the correct location to forge them
• season: there are the standard 4 season where crops cant grow in winter and your hunger rate increases
• crop cycling: different crops use different minerals within the soil and as these deplete the crop growth speed decreases so you swap what you plant each harvest in order to maximize growth speed.
• food preservation methods: food in vintage story eventually spoils so you need to store it in cellars where it will still go bad if not eaten
• lighting: light can only be gain from a few sources. where torches will eventually go out (unless in a torch holder which can only really be gotten in end game) lanterns which take a large amount of materials and candles which requires the player to find bees which is a pain in the ass

as you can see all these mechanics have 2 common theme A) they are quite realistic B) they take a large cognitive load to keep track of. These although are not bad in a sense as these are part of the game. However after playing for a decent quantity of time i decided to swap back and play some minecraft. This change allowed me to see the shear cognitive load it took to remember when i had to plant my crops what was about to go off in my cellar and how much food i had left in my stores when the next temporal storm is going to happen, how long is left on my leather tanning processes if i needed to feed my sheep etc. Suddenly I wasn’t keeping track of an excel spreadsheet in my head and i was just playing a game. This shear change in cognitive load made me reflect on how i play minecraft. This made minecraft feel like almost a vacation when compared to vintage story suddenly i didn’t care about the harvest, the coming seasons how much food i had, i could light up any space i wanted and i could just build something nice. It felt truly relaxing like i could spend my time building and focusing on making the world my own rather then when my next meal is.

the philosophies and community

Before i played vintage story i used to artificially limited myself when playing minecraft in order not to jump too far ahead. I would limit myself with challenges and rules such as holding off on diamond tools not using automatic farms, no abusing villager trading and forcing my self to only eat processed food like pumpkin pies, making sure i go through the levels of the enchantment table and not jump directly to level 30 enchants. This is what a lot of minecraft players would call un-optimal as they will instantly start to build these automatic farms for resource gathering, abuse villager trading mechanics, and collect end game gear as fast as possible only to start building a mega base and burn out within 2 week. Giving rise to what is colloquially know as “the two week minecraft phase”. This method of playing aligned with Soren Johnson quote of “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” in which he noticed during the creation of civilization players will take the path that guaranteed winning even if it was at the cost of their own enjoyment, additionally this has also be seen in other strategy games like xcom where it was found players would not take risks in the game and only take shots if they were 100% sure it would work. These ideas have also been shown in multiplayers games as can be seen in the article “The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices”. This article looks in to theory-crafting in online games (mainly world of warcraft) and see how players practiced what they call instrumental play and players who played for fun and enjoyment. Within the study it found that players would coproduce when theory-crafting which saw players standardize their play with each other essentially creating highly optimized methods of play which in turn reduced the game in to a set of predefined choices. This can be clearly seen in minecraft where when playing with other people standard questions start to appear such as “wheres the iron farm” and “where is your village trading hall” these show a clear parallel with the paper where players ousted as bad if these standard choices were not made. which in turn creates an elitist class of players that require some form of perfect play in order to be “good at the game”.

These ideas contrast for the most part with what i have seen in vintage story. Perfect game play is rarely done partially due to the difficultly of the game and partly due to the game mechanics themselves, where the players cant optimise the fun out of the game as the difference between optimal play and normal play and purely optimal play is smaller. lets say in vintage story you optimise your crop perfectly good job you just got another harvest its still to much food for you to eat. However this is not to say there are not places where you can optimise within vintage story such as windmill height to get more torque or gearing speeds. Although these are not to the same effect as they are in minecraft as faster speed just lets you mill and create plates faster there is no true optimization as soon as winter appears suddenly you have plenty of time for these tasks so the efficiency you did in the rest of the seasons are now lost.

the conclusion

in conclusion the vintage story and minecraft both have the same themes at the core playing the game. However in minecraft there is this “optimal” method of play which sees you playing in such away that ends with you actually playing the game less and having less enjoyment. Where on the other hand in vintage story the design of the game creates such an environment where that type of “optimal” play is not rewarded as much, which in turn allows the user to focus on playing the game rather the playing the game in the right way. Although vintage story at the same time takes a much largest cognitive load in order to play when compared to minecraft. so to concluded what I’m trying to get at its stop playing games as optimally as possibly and instead just have fun as thats what its all about. Stop worrying about building that next automated farm, stop worrying about making sure you are using your windmill power as optimally as possible.

just have fun.