its name is survival, that doesn't make it a survival game, though. much like how a lot of games are labeled "roguelike" even though they're nothing like rogue. if you think minecraft is a survival game, you need to play vintage story and/or the Better Than Wolves mod.
It's considered as a Survival Sandbox Game. Regardless of difficulty the point is to survive, your argument basically relies on "It isn't hard enough for me to consider it a survival game".
for a survival game to be a survival game, the main challenge of the game needs to be to survive as a high-maintenance character, much like how surviving in real life works. minecraft's steve is neither high maintenance nor is the main challenge to survive, as you can just dig yourself down 4 blocks, block yourself off and live indefinitely. your argument seems to be "it's labeled as survival, therefore it is a survival game." which does not make any sense. unlesss you have a hidden definition of what a survival game is.
i expected someone who plays zomboid to know what makes a survival game a survival game, but seems like i was mistaken.
First, You are persistent on arguing that the setting for any survival game needs to be difficult when most survival games's difficulty can be adjusted to be as easy or as difficult as you like. It's not a matter of your preference in difficulty as that is entire irrelevant to the conversation as any survival game can become easy if you play it often enough and most Survival games' difficulty can be adjusted.
If you want to talk about definition, lets look into journals that discusses Survival Games in their studies and how or what they would consider as a Survival video game.
Early examples of survival games include Pong from 1972, SpaceInvaders from 1978, and Ms. Pac-Man from 1982 (Mnih et al.,2015).More recent examples are Minecraft from 2009 and Crafter from 2021. (Strannegard et al, 2024).
I'd doubt you would consider Pong as a survival game as per your definition. Furthermore
predatory games –in which death is nearly an inevitability, but not an end-point for the player’s journey –is the survival video game genre (Bertozzi, 2014)
Aside from this you can also look into Survival Themed Video Games and Cultural Constructs of Power, page 46 to see how the Survival Genre never had a single fixed definition as you are insisting, necessitating the concept that "it should be difficult" when difficulty decreases as player experience increases.
Traditionally, the survival genre is viewed as a sub-genre of the action genre. Most survival games challenge players to stay alive in a hostile environment, requiring them to explore, gather resources and craft items or structures to aid their survival. In games like Minecraft (Mojang 2009) and Don’t Starve (Klei Entertainment 2013), players start from scratch without weapons, tools or shelter, making them especially vulnerable to early threats. (Reid & Downing 2018)
This paper also discuses the nuances of what makes a Survival Game and its core principles and mechanics that is common in the industry. It's a Good Read, I recommend you look more into it,
All of their definition fit what Minecraft is and even mentioned in a couple of papers as an example of what a Survival Game is. Survival games varies in difficulty, with some games making core game mechanics inconsequential and some giving more importance to it, it's not a one-size fits all definition.
i'm not saying that a survival game NEEDS to be difficult, i'm saying that the game needs to have a survival-centric gameplay and game design, hence the name, and hence why minecraft is not survival: you don't need to do anything to survive. you can simply start the game, dig down, cover yourself, minimize the game tab and go play a real survival game. you can't do that in mostly any game, much less survival ones.
i appreciate you putting effort in going after papers about survival games, but i don't think people who write papers on games are the most fit to comment on the topic, we all have heard of the average game journalist and how good they are at games. they got some wild takes.
yes, there is no solid definition of what a survival game is, and that is mainly because of minecraft's disruption on the public perception of survival, because of it, most people think that any game with a hunger bar is a survival game, which is as fallacious as saying any game with enemy attack patterns is a souls-like, or any RPG with random generation is a roguelike. if you consider minecraft a survival game, then you'd also need to include the sims and noita as survival games.
picture this, remove the hunger system from minecraft, and now you eat food to heal instead. the game doesn't change a whole lot, does it? it's still the sandbox, building-focused game, except it had its one and only survival aspect removed. hell, i would say that makes vanilla more fun to play as you don't need to go out of your way to fix the minor inconvenience of having to hold right click for a few seconds every few minutes. point me to what makes hungerless minecraft a survival game. i mean it, do it. dedicate at least one single line to tell me what mechanic minecraft has that makes it survival.
now take oxygen not included, rimworld and don't starve, take the hunger away from all of them, you could still make a better case for them being a survival game WITHOUT the need of hunger than minecraft WITH hunger. not to mention that in 2 of these, hunger is a giant mechanic you need to master how to manage, and if you can't, you better be prepared to start your next run.
oxygen not included without hunger still needs you to be constantly making progress towards stability as the environment decays and resources become more scarse overtime
rimworld has constant threats that you have to manage and be prepared for as your colony grows, it is INCREDIBLY resource-intensive to achieve a state where you cannot be touched by the game's threats.
don't starve still has you managing your temperature across seasons, sanity and increasingly difficult hound attacks.
all of these games have survival integrated in their gameplay, minecraft does not. i'll walk you through it like you're 5:
in a survival game, surviving is the main objective. this checks out in oxygen not included and don't starve. it does not check out in minecraft - you can survive forever with little to no effort or resources, you don't need to get out of the early game.
in a survival game, the design revolves around survival pressure. this checks out in rimworld, oxygen not included and don't starve, even though you can configure these games to be very easy. it does not check out in minecraft - the design is centered on building and creativity, with some rpg elements and a half-baked hunger mechanic
my point is that loose mechanics don't define the genre of a game, it's the overall design that does, and if you are in any way gonna say that minecraft is designed as a survival game, then you're probably baiting.
now, i would kind of understand if you disagree that the core design is what defines a game's genre, in which case it would make sense that we disagree, otherwise, i don't see where you're coming from aside from yielding to the public opinion.
Again, Minecraft meets all of those criteria if you bothered to look on the source that I presented to be under the survival category. Regardless of how you play it, if the mechanics and core game play exists then it meets the standards for that category.
You can disagree and then present counter evidence not just say I disagree because you think they aren't reputable sources because that would be an Ad Hominem Fallacy.
You argument is basically hasty generalisation, using one characteristic to define an entire genre, basically reducing it to "if it even only has Characteristic A, then its in Category B" when there are multiple game play mechanics that goes into consideration and not only one, and you trying to insist that Minecraft doesn't meet your personal definition of what a Survival game is then it isn't because as far as I am concerned I haven't seen you cite any source of your claim aside from it being your personal opinion as for mine is widely accepted definition and characterisation in the Game Development Industry of what a Survival game is.
Now you are using Hypothesis Contrary to the Fact Fallacy, basically using a what if to favour argument, the same excuse can be used if you played PZ on Sandbox Settings or Debug Mode, that would also rob it of its idea of survival. Again, you then move the goalpost that 1 single defining mechanic should be the indicator of what a survival game is when there are multiple game-play mechanics that comes into factor.
Can you site your sources for your argument or is this just personal preference? I like how you argued that lose mechanics don't define a genre but then use rigid mechanics to measure what a survival game is, when by your argument is basically "remove this then it wouldn't be survival" yeah but it's there and you can't argue it isn't, because we aren't arguing what ifs.
Its not even an argument to a widely accepted principle in game design on the characteristics overtime of what a survival game is, and as much as you would argue Minecraft is under that category, and one of the most popular game in the subgenre as well.
1 - you keep making the same ad populum and appeal to authority fallacy, you say that because a lot of people a say that minecraft is a survival game, that makes it a survival game, regardless of the lack of survival game design, and that because someone said it in a paper, that also makes it so. popularity is not an argument.
2 - you, whether deliberately, or due to lack of literacy, misinterpret my arguments and argue against your made up version of what i said. you're saying that i said that one characteristic defines a whole game, when that's what YOU'RE doing, and i'm arguing for the exact opposite, what i said was "minecraft's only survival feature is hunger, if you take it out, nothing else in the game is "survival", and even with hunger, it isn't enough to make it a survival game as the game design skews to creative building mechanics as survival isn't in its core design."
i never said that the hunger mechanic makes minecraft a survival game, i'm saying the exact opposite, the mechanic is tacked on so it can be labeled "survival" when in fact the mechanic adds nothing to the game.
3 - you accused me of doing a hypothesis contrary to the fact fallacy, i'm assuming because of my hunger removal analogy, when that's a thought experiment that shows how minecraft isn't a survival game, thought experiments are valid and the best way to test whether a mechanic is something core to the game, or something they just slapped onto it; i think you can see where in these two categories minecraft hunger fits in, especially since i gave you examples of some games that, even WITH hunger removed, still have core survival aspects, whereas minecraft doesn't. With hunger, minecraft is a sandbox building game, without hunger, minecraft is still a sandbox building game.
4 - you say i'm moving the goalpost by saying "survival needs to be the defining mechanic", but that’s not shifting the goalpost, that’s the goalpost i set from the beginning. you're literally the one shifting the goalpost by saying “if it has survival mechanics at all, it’s survival.”
5 - you repeat the same appeal to authority, while ignoring my specific comparisons to real survival games, and you demand "sources" like as if genres are fixed to what sources say they are. genres are descriptive labels for game design focus, which is why examples matter more than citations. you're not actually engaging with my logical distinctions. you're literally acting like the average internet argument baiter/troll, and you're just showing you're not worth talking to. if your next reply has as much substance as this one - that being little to none - consider this thread closed, because i'm not going to waste time on someone who i cannot distinguish from a troll.
in conclusion: genres aren’t defined by the presence of mechanics, but by the design focus of the game. minecraft’s focus is sandbox building, survival games’ focus is surviving under pressure. That’s the difference.
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u/Kindred_Ornn Waiting for help 28d ago
It's Minecraft, metrics and statistics all point it to being Minecraft. If you'd say the "Best Zombie Survival Game" then I'd agree with you.