We renamed a game category because the old name promised a game we do not have

SlowDen is a free browser-game site at slowden.com. It lists 216 games across seventeen category shelves, and until recently one of those shelves was called Minecraft.

Twenty-three games sit on it. Not one of them is Minecraft.

They are obby courses, skyblock survival islands, ragdoll playgrounds and lucky-block openers, which is to say the Minecraft-inspired corner of browser gaming. By now that is a genre rather than a single game. Minecraft itself is not playable on SlowDen. There is no affiliation with Mojang, and there never was.

Why the old name was there is not a mystery. It is what a lot of category names quietly are: a description of the search rather than a description of the shelf. People type a word, so the word goes on the page, and the page collects the people who typed it. The mechanism works. That is exactly what makes it tempting.

The problem is that it is a promise the page cannot keep. Somebody arriving on a page headed Minecraft is entitled to expect Minecraft, and every one of them leaves within a few seconds of not finding it. It is also a trademark that is not ours to hang over twenty-three other studios’ work: liss48, Nepochat, gameVgames, Platonov Team, KreizLand, Square Dino LLC, MEDULTY GAMES and the rest of the people who actually built these games.

So the shelf is now called Block & Sandbox, and the page says the rest out loud. These are Minecraft-inspired block, sandbox and obby games. They are not Minecraft. Minecraft itself is not playable here.

Three things did not change, because they were already right. Every game still credits the studio that made it, on its own page. Every game still runs in a browser tab, with nothing to download and nothing to install. And the URL is still /games/minecraft/, because breaking working links to make a point is vanity rather than honesty. You can see the shelf here: https://slowden.com/games/minecraft/

The general rule, if there is one: a shelf should be named for what is on it. Where the honest name and the searched-for name differ, the honest name goes in the heading and the searched-for word goes in the sentence underneath, where it can be stated truthfully. If that costs some arrivals, those arrivals were coming on an expectation the page was never going to meet, and a visit that ends in a shrug was not worth having.

SlowDen hosts games from creators, partners and third-party sources, and every game page says which of the three it is. None of the games named above were made by SlowDen.