What's (potentially) revolutionary about this game is the deep rooted support for emergent gameplay. A telltale sign of a great game is that players themselves, in exploring the game, find new and interesting things to amuse themselves. Minecraft is an obvious example, with hundreds (thousands?) of public servers dedicated to varied pursuits.
A different type of example could be EVE, where the rise and fall of corporations is gameplay not written in by the devs, but gameplay created by the players. Any game that has developed a professional gaming community could also be lumped into the category of having emergent gameplay, since there is an entirely new game mode (spectating) created by a community surrounding the game.
When I look at 0x10c, and know that I'm going to have complete control over a CPU in game, and this CPU will be the basis of my pursuits in the game, I know that there will be interesting things to be done. This is because there's such a strong focus on allowing players to create their own gameplay. No other game (that I know of) takes its players' creativity seriously enough to rest so much of the fun on their shoulders.
Having Notch to hype the game certainly helps, but helping to create this world is alone an exciting prospect.
A different type of example could be EVE, where the rise and fall of corporations is gameplay not written in by the devs, but gameplay created by the players. Any game that has developed a professional gaming community could also be lumped into the category of having emergent gameplay, since there is an entirely new game mode (spectating) created by a community surrounding the game.
When I look at 0x10c, and know that I'm going to have complete control over a CPU in game, and this CPU will be the basis of my pursuits in the game, I know that there will be interesting things to be done. This is because there's such a strong focus on allowing players to create their own gameplay. No other game (that I know of) takes its players' creativity seriously enough to rest so much of the fun on their shoulders.
Having Notch to hype the game certainly helps, but helping to create this world is alone an exciting prospect.