Minecraft - New Development Ideas

I'm an avid minecraft player. However, I think the game has a huge amount of untapped potential, which perhaps (I hope) the developers will begin to take advantage of. For starters, lets summarize what the game currently has to offer, and then talk about what these offerings can do for game mechanics.

Minecraft is a game which creates a huge (semi-infinite) procedurally generated world, separated into biomes with unique resources, textures and landscape features. There are evil monsters that come out at night to hunt for you, and there are passive creatures which you can enlist for aid, or farm for resources that come out at day. The terrain has spectacular features, rendered in a charming blocky style. There are etherial dimensions with fabulous vistas and dangerous creatures, and scattered throughout the world are hidden portals to these dimensions.

Alone in this world, you must start with your bare hands, survive the dangers at night, and eventually carve out a strong-hold for yourself. You're given nothing, and, with some strategy, you can craft special items with gathered, rare resources to build yourself a fortress from the elements, powerful tools to reshape the world around you, defend yourself from enemies, and grow crops of food. With enough effort, you can even craft complicated rail-way networks, machines, and various mechanical structures from basic elements such as moving pistons, electrical circuits.

The game as an amazing lego set, filled with dynamic pieces and huge opportunities for story, quests and adventures. What if Notch were to include factions offering competing quests, with rare-resource rewards? What if the tedium of mining for resources could be replaced or supplemented with questing for resources? What if the game could contain several sub-plots of story, interweaving, and taking the player from one fantastic location to the next, allowing the player the freedom to stop, build bases, and connect to an existing transportation network? I think this could allow for a richness of content as of yet unheard of.

What if, players could create a 'quest engine' and NPC or player civilizations with stories, plots, etc, that were uploaded to a central sever, and downloaded by other players for free, dynamic, and ever varying content? I think that minecraft is on the precipice of emergent, user generated gameplay. With this set of tools, and a relatively simple interface, users could create templates for buildings, templates for quests, etc, and get so much more from the game.

The current state of the game is a gigantic world to explore, reshape, but no real motivation to do so. The problem is that there could be story which motivates the game play, which could even allow the player time and space to pause in the story, and be creative, and alternatively, take advantage of a vast fantasy world full of quests and adventures. The game literally has nothing to lose by implementing this sort of play-style, and a huge player base to gain.

Just some thought. Maybe I'll write some tools some day that allow for this kind of content creation.

Just think of it:
1. NPC villages care how you interact with them, and which other villages you form ties with
2. Questing and rewards centered around exploring new content - finding hidden treasures and rare items
3. Trade networks between NPC villages
4. Storylines unique to villages
5. Larger city-state villages

Minecraft seems to be at 'critical mass' regarding possessing all the pieces needed to produce endless quests, heroic journeys to far off dimensions to conquer great evils, find powerful relics, ally with cities, you name it!