It doesn't even sound like a minecraft mod. It's clear from the article that he didn't even edit out signs, since he had to ask players not to use them. He put minecraft on a 4 gig drive and made it into performance art. Is that even legal?
Then he insists you can't talk about it, so nobody can see his game is just minecraft.
It was made before modding was available.
The idea I believe is that in a multiplayer game of minecraft you have loads of fun looking at the creations of others and interacting with them.
The idea is cool, I get the idea. I'm just bothered by the idea that he took minecraft, put it on a flash drive, made up a rule that you can only play it once, and then wins an award for it, without so much as mentioning the name of the game he copied shamelessly in pursuit of said award.
Maybe that's not what he did. Maybe he didn't use minecraft. It just seems incredibly unlikely due to the comments about spiders and zombies, and the fact he has to ask you not to use signs when if it was original he could just not add signs.
It doesn't help that the article is all about Rorher the visionary rather than talking about the game he 'created' to win this praise.
The other games presented get a sentence each to describe them, written by a writer who clearly scorns them and wants them to seem small and meaningless. Perhaps the writer is just playing up Rorher as more the visionary and the real man is much more humble about what he did, but nothing in the article helps either case.