Accio Minecraft! Play Journal #1
A friend of mine recently approached me about a goal of his. He wanted to reproduce the Hogwarts Castle from the beloved Harry Potter Series in minute detail. He had no intentions of using wood or stone or glue, however, but rather the platform of Minecraft.
As you may know by now, Jen is not great with gaming. Sure she’ll watch games or gameplay for hours on end, giving her unnecessary opinion to those that surely know better than her, but hand her a controller and she turns into a screaming, jumpy, all out button masher that can’t seem to walk a straight line or keep from smashing straight into a wall. I remember a conversation I had just last week:
Me: “I always use Bowser in Mario Kart.”
Tommy: “Why? He’s so slow.”
Me: “But his turn radius is MASSIVE.”
Tommy: “Right. Which makes him slow.
Me:“Dang it Tommy I NEED THAT TURN RADIUS TO
SURVIVE.”
So when my Harry Potter Fan Friend invited me to play on his Server early on, it made me nervous. I was decent in Minecraft—that is, I could survive several nights until I got into some altercation with a Skeleton, but I could handle myself in decent fashion. So I agreed.
Minecraft, for anyone who doesn’t know, is defined as as “Sandbox” game, which means you are free to explore and alter the world as you see fit. The game is rendered entirely in 3D “Blocks” which gives one the sense of playing Tetris horizontally. The world is populated with various enemies (the aforementioned skeletons, Creepers, Blobs, Ghosts, Zombies and Spiders) along with real-life creatures such as Sheep, Cows, Wolves, Rabbits, Fish, Humanoid Villagers and Pigs. The game is a “Survival” game, in that you are dropped into the world with nothing on your person (or in your inventory) no house, no neighbors and nothing necessary to stay alive. The Survival portion of the game comes into play immediately, as the world is also set with day and night-times, and surviving alone at night is nearly impossible. It is your loosely defined “goal” to build a shelter, find food, fight off enemies and Mine, building up XP (experience) as you do so.
Upon spawning (coming into being, being born, etc.) on my friend’s server, I immediately died. The spawn point was placed upon a small, three or four block island surrounded by water, which I immediately drowned in. Luckily my friend was there to encourage me via the Text feature.
YOU NEED TO SWIM SILLY.
After finding shore, (by now, night had fallen) I managed to evade a flock of dedicated arrow-flinging skeletons by diving back into the water and swimming until day. My friend helped to teleport me to where he was, where he had built a small shack. I was among the first on the server, and it was apparent (after a frantic chest search) that no food had been found yet. I complained, and it was then my friend revealed that he was playing as Newt Scamander, and so he had every intention to play vegetarian in-game. (Which is fine, but also…really?)
A handsome Minecraft Skin indeed. But also, vegetarian. For reasons
I spent the next two hours trying and mostly failing to fill a hole with water for a garden, finding some iron ore and smelting it (I should have made some armor for myself at this point, but I was feeling pretty confident) and also filling the transporter shed full of chickens. (I’m really good at coaxing chickens into sheds.)
And then, as things usually do in Minecraft, everything went south.
As I was walking out the double door one fine morning in-game, I was suddenly face-to-face with a Creeper. Now Creepers, other than being Creepy, are also incredibly powerful in-game enemies. They act as mini suicide bombers, scrambling quickly up next to you and blowing up you, and everything around you. Unfortunately for me, I was standing in the mouth of the cave everyone had been using for mining, and also right next to the supply chests. All of them.
Kaboom.
In 5 seconds I was dead via Creeper blast, another Creeper had joined the party and blew up the chests, and all the useful items I’d been collecting for the past three and a half hours went up in flame. I logged out and quickly sent my friend a text.
“Hey. How are you? I’m fine. So...Creepers just blew up everything. Everything. Also, I may or may not have filled the teleporter shed with Chickens.”
Minecraft as a game is being used quite frequently in classrooms to teach everything from Biology to Physics. This real-life application is important because it allows students to free-roam an environment (in either Survival or Creative mode) and allows teachers a more broad teaching plant that can be based around a student’s real-life interests. Recreating famous architecture or examining cave systems are all feasible lessons, with the help of Minecraft curricula and Mods.
Learning in this way can be restricted, however, via some necessary game mechanics. The game requires the use of a keyboard, using the WASD keys for movement. Gamers with limited finger dexterity will find this game more difficult, and thus with inhibited learning. I am very interested in finding scholarly articles that address this issue, as gaming restricted to keyboard or controller use is a rather able-ist notion. (If you have any suggestions for reading, shoot them my way via the Contact Tab.)
I have noticed, though, that Minecraft content is rather kid-friendly, and I wonder if this is because the entire game looks like a world of LEGO’s which in and of itself is very kid-oriented. This online social/content, then, is more accessible for younger players and Minecraft “experts” are very open with sharing their tips and tricks. This is heartening for me as an educator of elementary-aged kids.
I look forward to jumping back into my online world of Minecraft, and I hope I can help construct a working replica of Hogwarts. Until then, I’ll just keep herding chickens into sheds.