I don’t know how much you guys follow the gaming conference circuit. Despite the fact that I write for a gaming blog, its pretty rare that I’m shocked by anything coming out of the various conferences throughout the year. Most of the larger developers like to save their major announcements for a day that they will be the only developer making noise. Still, the annual development competition at GDC caught my eye this year, mostly because it involves Minecraft.

Every year at GDC, a pool of developers is asked to design a game for a specific challenge. This year’s theme was “Bigger Than Jesus,” tasking designers with creating a religion/religious experience within a game. The winner, Jason Rohrer, came up with something truly awesome. His game is called Chain World and it’s designed to mimic the way we experience powerful people and ideas that we have no carnal attachment to.

As an example, Rohrer cited his own family, which had built up a sort of mythos around Jason’s grandfather. Though Jason didn’t really know him, he still retold his grandfather’s stories, traveled to places his grandfather had lived and so on, all because of his devotion to this idea of a person. Chain World recreates that devotion by giving the player a world populated with structures and places without a real explanation of where their origins.

The twist is that only one person is playing Chain World anywhere in the world at a time. Chain World is a Minecraft world on a thumb drive. When you die, you take the thumb drive and give it to someone new, who then goes and plays the game until he dies, and so on. It’s an interesting concept, one I can hardly give due justice. The video above is long, but it’s worth a watch. I’d stop after Rohrer’s presentation. The other contestant’s weren’t nearly as good.

If someone walks up to you some day in the near future and hands you a USB drive, you better take it, and when you die, ship that bad boy my direction.

Mythic did something at GDC this week that I honestly don’t expect from any developer: it acknowledged mistakes. Not just one mistake, either, but a slew of them that kept the Warhammer MMO from becoming the best new thing on the market. I appreciate the acknowledgment for a couple reasons. First, the game was a letdown, and a pretty big one at that. Second, the things the Mythic staff pointed out gives us a close look at how small changes can affect the scope of a game in a big way.

Here’s the bulk of Mythic’s comments from VG247:

There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use. One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

All I can say is, “yup.” Those are exactly the sorts of things that sound great in theory but in practice create an uninspiring world, one you’ll find hard to justify spending money to be a part of.