Last week, American tanks rolled into Denmark and the Stars and Stripes were hoisted over a park in downtown Copenhagen. But you will not have seen this particular invasion on the news. It happened in the pixelated world of the video game Minecraft.
前一阵子，美国坦克驶入丹麦，星条旗在哥本哈根市中心的一座公园升起。但是你在新闻上看不到有关此次入侵的消息。这件事发生在电子游戏《我的世界》(Minecraft)的像素世界里。
Minecraft is an oddity in today’s games industry, where there are two shortcuts to making a smash hit. The first is to develop a smartphone or tablet game whose simple puzzles get dramatically harder after a few hours. The developer can make the game itself free, then tempt players to pay up when they get stuck on a tricky level and want to skip ahead. This is the business model behind King, maker of Candy Crush, and Zynga, creator of FarmVille.
《我的世界》是当今游戏业的一个另类。在游戏业蹿红有两个捷径。第一个捷径是开发一款难度在开玩数小时后急剧增加的智能手机或平板电脑游戏。游戏开发商可以推出一款本身是免费的游戏，然后诱使玩家付费，以跳过不易攻略的关卡。这是King和Zynga两家公司的经营模式，前者是《糖果粉碎传奇》(Candy Crush)的制造商，后者是《FarmVille》的创造者。
The second approach is to spend millions on a console game with a huge marketing budget, high-tech graphics and perhaps even some Hollywood talent (Kevin Spacey stars in the latest Call of Duty). It is a high-risk strategy with potentially high rewards: Grand Theft Auto 5 clocked up $1bn in sales in its first three days when it was released last September.
第二种方法是投入大笔资金开发单机游戏，并投入庞大预算进行营销，以绘有高科技图形海报做宣传，甚至是邀请好莱坞巨星参演（凯文•斯佩西(Kevin Spacey)就在《使命召唤》(Call of Duty)最新款游戏中担任主角）。这种策略风险大，回报也高：去年9月发布的《侠盗猎车手5》(Grand Theft Auto 5)在开售3天内就取得了高达10亿美元的销售业绩。
Minecraft is altogether more wholesome. A stealthy success, it now counts 100m users without the snazzy graphics and steroidal storylines of a studio blockbuster, or the time-wasting ease of a mobile game. You start in a blocky landscape of trees, flowers and earth. There is no tutorial level to ease you in and no prompt telling you what to do, yet somehow you work out how to build an elaborate world. Then, at night, the monsters come out.
《我的世界》总体来说更为健康。它悄无声息地取得了成功，现在有1亿玩家，但它没有通常的游戏巨制里炫目的画面或故事情节，也不像手机游戏那样允许玩家悠哉地花大把时间攻略。你在一片只有树木、花朵和土地的斑驳地貌上开始了游戏。没有练习模式供你练手，也没有提示框告诉你要去做什么，然而你在不知不觉中摸索出了一套创建复杂世界的方法。到了晚上，怪物开始出没。
The uncompromising interface is probably why so many parents are baffled by their children’s love of Minecraft. (The game’s primary audience is boys between 11 and 16.) Neither a violent power fantasy nor a mindless button-mashing cartoon, Minecraft is more like Lego – and by that I mean the Lego of my childhood, a squat tub full of bricks, not a special £70 kit tied to a movie. It is about imagination, and – just as important – the long, slow process of turning your imagination into reality.
许多家长对孩子热衷《我的世界》百思不得其解，很可能是因为其游戏界面有些单一。（该游戏的主要受众是11-16岁间的男孩子。）《我的世界》既不是一款“武力制霸”的幻想游戏，也不是一款漫不经心地点点鼠标就能通关的卡通游戏，它更像是乐高——我是指我儿时那种的一大桶乐高积木，而不是与某部电影绑定的标价70英磅的专款积木套装。它是关于想象力的游戏，且同样重要的是，它是一款关于将想象付诸现实这一漫长缓慢过程的游戏。
Minecraft does not come with predetermined goals. Most of the biggest worlds were made in “creative” mode, where you have instant access to all the textures items available in the game and you never run out of life. But there is also a “survival” mode, where even the sword you need to fight off Zombie Pigmen has to be forged from planks and ingots.
《我的世界》不预先设定目标。大多数规模最大的世界是在“创造”模式下创建的，在“创造”模式中，玩家可以及时获得游戏中出现的所有种类的方块，而且你永远不会玩完。而在“生存”模式中，即使是用来击退僵尸猪人的剑也需要玩家用木板和铸块来锻造。
You can build anything. Minecraft players have made cruise liners, rocket ships and even basic computers, as well as pixel-perfect recreations of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings. The version of Denmark recently plundered by American users’ tanks was created by a Danish government agency to show off its mapping data; the one terabyte download was so popular that extra servers had to be installed to deal with demand. (The agency reacted stoically to the destruction of its model and has pledged to reboot it from scratch. As one user pointed out on the Minecraft forums, Vikings are no strangers to destruction.)
你可以建造任何东西。《我的世界》玩家已经造出了游轮、火箭船甚至是初级计算机，还用像素完美还原出了《指环王》中的米那斯提力斯城堡(Minas Tirith)。近日被美国玩家的坦克攻陷的丹麦国模型，是一家丹麦官方机构为显示其地图数据的强大而创建的，该模型在玩家中大受欢迎，容量有1TB，开发商不得不安装额外的服务器来满足玩家的下载需求。（该丹麦机构对其模型遭毁给出了坚忍的回应，保证要重新建造一个新模型。就如一位玩家在Minecraft论坛指出的那样，维京人对破坏并不陌生。）
To those who hope that the computer games industry has something to offer beyond beefcake soldiers and money-grabbing puzzles, this cybernetic dreamscape is cause for optimism. In 2013, its developer Mojang made profits of SKr816m (about £74m), and employed 39 people. It has rejected the quick cash-in IPO in favour of slowly developing new titles. As a result, the Minecraft community is thriving, with stars such as Joseph Garrett, 23, who has earned enough from the 159m monthly views of his YouTube tutorials to quit his day job.
对那些期望电脑游戏业除猛男士兵和捞钱的智力游戏之外还能提供某些新东西的人来说，他们有理由对此款由玩家操控建造梦境之地的游戏感到乐观。2013年，该游戏的开发商Mojang只雇佣了39名职员，却创造了8.16亿瑞典克朗（合7400万英镑）的利润。它摒弃了通过上市筹得快钱的道路，而选择慢条斯理地开发新游戏。《我的世界》玩家队伍因而发展壮大，23岁的约瑟夫•加勒特(Joseph Garrett)就是其中一名明星玩家，他在YouTube上的视频教程有1.59亿的月点击量，他因而获得了可观的收入，也辞掉了日常工作。
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attributes part of Bill Gates’s success to having been born at the right time to take advantage of the Altair 8800, an early do-it-yourself computer kit. The popularity of Minecraft offers the same sort of opportunity to today’s children: the next Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid is probably building their own private city somewhere in its landscape right now, block by block.
在《异类》(Outliers)一书中，马尔科姆•格拉德韦尔(Malcolm Gladwell)将比尔•盖茨的成功部分归功于他出生在了正确的时机，因而可以充分利用“牵牛星8800”(Altair 8800)，一款早期个人电脑。《我的世界》的流行为现在的孩子提供了同样的机会：下一个弗兰克•格里(Frank Gehry)或者扎哈•哈迪德(Zaha Hadid)很可能正在《我的世界》中的某处一砖一瓦地创建自己的城市。
In fact, that is probably Minecraft’s biggest success. It has smuggled an educational game past children, and few of them have noticed that it is the pixelated equivalent of eating their greens.
事实上，这很可能就是《我的世界》的最大成功之处。它把教育游戏悄悄带到孩子们当中，但是很少孩子注意到这款像素游戏像吃蔬菜一样有益。
The writer is deputy editor of the New Statesman
本文作者是《新政治家》(New Statesman)杂志副主编。