More than 55 million men, women, and children play Minecraft in an average month. Many of those players enjoy using “mods,” third party tools that further customize the game, to tweak things to their liking.
Children play the Minecraft video game at a Microsoft Store. Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg
Different mods can change Minecraft in all kinds of ways. Often it’s as simple as altering a player’s in-game appearance (a process known as “skinning”). When you’ve got 55 million people playing a game where they can build a unique digital world, it’s to be expected that they’ll want to put a personal stamp on their avatars.
It’s an opportunity that cybercriminals seized upon recently, according to security researchers with Symantec. Software quality assurance engineer Shaun Aimoto reported on the company blog that a handful of mods for Minecraft: Pocket Edition were hijacking player’s smartphones and tablets and using them to power a ad fraud botnet.
According to Aimoto, the malicious apps were distributed via the Google Play store and advertised as character “skins.” Based on the numbers shown in the apps’ descriptions, Symantec believes that somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million (primarily U.S.-based) Minecraft players installed the shady apps.
While the primary purpose of the mobile malware is to generate fraudulent ad revenue for its criminal creator, it could evolve into something even more dangerous. Because it’s now running on a large number of devices and has access to network connections, the malware could potentially be used to launch crippling DDoS attacks.
Gamers are often targeted by cybercriminals because some of them engage in incredibly risky online behaviors. Some seek out tools for removing copy protection from games or generating free in-game currency. Hackers respond by leaving booby-trapped versions of games on filesharing sites and torrent trackers.
Other gamers — like the ones victimized by the malware Symantec found — find themselves in the crosshairs simply because cybercriminals know just how popular mods and skins are. And they also know that many of the gamers looking for such tools are young enough to not understand that someone lurking in the shadowy corners of the internet wants to prey on their fondness for a popular video game.
The answer, Symantec says: keep a good malware scanner installed on your devices, make sure it’s up to date, and always check the permissions a new app requests before you install it. A simple Minecraft skinning app, for example, should never need to access your location data like this one did.
Keyboard Geniusesis our weekly glance at a few intriguing, witty, or otherwise notable posts from the Gameological discussion threads. Comments have been excerpted and edited here for grammar, length, and/or clarity. You can follow the links to see the full threads.
Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing, and I’m surprised at the amount of anxiety this game’s sound design is able to conjure up when I’m venturing below ground. Hearing the growls in my headphones without being able to see where they’re coming from puts me on edge, and being surprised by a monster I didn’t know was there consistently makes me panic and fight sub-optimally. There’s a sense of dread from getting lost in the winding passageways of a cave while running low on rations, or climbing up from the underground only to realize that you were down there too long, and now you’ll have to sprint for shelter in the middle of the night. I find it remarkable how the emergent play provides such a vivid horror experience, especially with Minecraft’s complete lack of violence and how lo-fi and abstracted the designs for the monsters are.
Speaking of abstraction, the environments of the game strike me as having a natural beauty despite the deliberate unreality of it all. I try to alter the landscape as little as possible, feeling that the results of the world-generating algorithm have an aesthetic that would be difficult to reproduce if I were to reshape the terrain myself. I’m hesitant to flatten areas and construct cobblestone roads; content to place a trail of torches to mark my path through a forest instead of simply chopping it down. Even my structures, the safehouses whose beacons dot the horizon, are based around this aesthetic: My castles are always built atop a stone surface whenever I find one poking up through the dirt and the foundation sets the shape for the whole building. By making each project unique—as I assess the site and figure out what it wants to be—making progress never feels like work.
Punch-Out Love
Screenshot: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
This week, I celebrated the 30th anniversary of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! by talking about why I think the game holds up better than pretty much any of its contemporaries. It comes down to the simplicity and purity of its puzzle-like boxing matches, something Unexpected Davebroke down in the comments:
It’s often been said that Punch Out!! looks like a fighting game but is actually a rhythm or puzzle game in disguise. If you approach the game like a straight-up arcade brawler, you can probably get through Piston Honda, but you’ll get slaughtered in the second tier. That’s when you really have to learn how to respond to your opponents’ tells and know exactly when and how to counterattack.
But the brilliance of the game is that it never loses the “illusion” of being a fighting game. It seldom feels like a purely mechanical exercise, like a game of Simon, and that’s all down to the character and personality of the opponents. It’s a shame that Nintendo relied on racial stereotypes to imbue that personality, though. (And the Wii version really doubles down on them.)
Elsewhere, M_squaredremembered how the game turned into a playground sensation:
I love this game. As a kid, it was always one that we talked about on the playground, sharing methods and things that worked on the opponents. This was a game that really brought people together. You could sit with people watching you and yelling “He’s charging! Punch now! Now! You did it too late!” or you could talk about it away from the game, “How do you beat King Hippo??” and things like that. It always brought out the liars, though. “I beat Mike Tyson with one punch!”, “I swear King Hippo got up, and I had to knock him down again!”
But overall it’s timeless because of the precise controls and the easy beginning. If it was really tough at the outset, it wouldn’t have caught on as much. But getting past Glass Joe is simple enough for just about anyone to do it but also gets you just hooked that you want to continue. Then as the difficulty ramps up, it doesn’t feel like cheating but like you’re earning your victories (and defeats).
“Maddeness Indeed”
Screenshot: Madden NFL ‘18
Also this week, William Hughes wrapped up his four-part attempt to learn a thing or two about Madden and football. Unfortunately, he ultimately fell into despair and sought to destroy the game from the inside. Thundawgdid some commiserating down in the comments and poetically summed up the whole endeavor:
This is a perfect encapsulation of Madden. Few games come close to the all-consuming rage that burns deep within after a loss. Madden might be the worst, as William noted, since you can do everything right and still ultimately lose. This game is not a quest for the virtual Super Bowl to win an oddly polygonal Lombardi Trophy. No, that is merely a byproduct. Madden is a journey into one’s own mind. It is the video game equivalent of Heart Of Darkness masquerading behind Tom Brady’s steely stare. The game will test the limits of your mental fortitude, push you to the edge of sanity. It will, inevitably, break you, leaving you to pick up the pieces of your shattered mind and shattered controller.
But through that, I believe William got closer to sports fan nirvana than he thinks. Will Madden teach you to be a ra-ra sports fan? No. But the discipline, patience, and resolve that playing sports requires and teaches? Certainly. The utter destruction you wreaked upon the Seahawks organization is a manifestation of what every fan felt when Pete Carroll opted to pass, not run, the ball in Super Bowl XLIX. It is not just the helpless roller coaster but viscerally feeling the depths of defeat and the supreme elation of victory. That collective emotion lies at the core of fandom.
That’ll do it for this week, Gameologerinos. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you all next week!
Back in August, it was announced that Minecon — the annual celebration of all things Minecraft — would take an altogether different form for 2017. The newly branded Minecon World aimed to expand the festivities well beyond the confines of the single city chosen to host days full of activities each year, instead taking the form of a 90-minute jam-packed event broadcast live from Atlanta to viewing parties and movie theaters around the world.
And if that wasn’t enough to catch your eye — which, let’s be real, is very appealing to those of us who love Minecraft but maybe don’t have the ability to travel to the highly hyped event each year — on Oct. 19, it was announced that there would be another familiar face hosting the event beside the legendary Lydia Winters: Will Arnett. That’s right; the man formerly known as GOB Bluth, Devon Banks, and Bojack Horseman is a Minecraft fan, too.
“My boys and I have so much fun playing Minecraft,” Arnett said in a statement about the event, adding, “but even more than that, I love how Minecraft inspires so much creativity in them. I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of MINECON!”
Check out a full rundown of everything Minecon Earth over at the official site, the official launch trailer (featuring Arnett) above, and, for good measure, the best Bojack Horseman-inspired Minecraft video ever below.
Of all the current generation consoles on the market right now, Microsoft’s Xbox One is by far the most impressive when it comes to its commitment to backwards compatibility.
At the moment there’s an extensive list of Xbox 360 games that can be played on the Xbox One and while that’s continuing to grow, Microsoft announced plans to add original Xbox games into the mix at E3 earlier this year.
Microsoft hasn’t been forthcoming with details on exactly which original Xbox titles will be coming to Xbox One – at the moment we only know about Crimson Skies and Fuzion Frenzy. However, in a recent interview with GameSpot, Xbox head Phil Spencer did say we’d see the first of the batch released before the end of the year.
Throwback
When asked about the status of the backwards compatibility project by GameSpot, Spencer stated “We’re close, we’re really close.”
“I have a little dashboard I go to and I can see all the games [and] where they are in getting approvals in the pipeline,” he continued.
“I know the games that are coming for the original Xbox but I don’t think we’ve announced them all. We have to do this in partnership with partners, but we’re still on track. I feel really good. The games look great.”
Backwards compatibility on the Xbox One X will, apparently, work slightly differently to the Xbox One S. According to Spencer, Xbox has still to reveal some “interesting” details on how the feature will work on the upcoming 4K console but seems fairly certain that people will find it “interesting.”
There’s plenty of interest in original Xbox games coming to the latest consoles and although Spencer says that some of the games hold up better than others, we imagine the memories and nostalgia will more than make up for anything lacking in the visuals.
Though we still don’t have an exact date for when this backwards compatibility extension will go live, we imagine Microsoft will wait until after the launch of the Xbox One X on November 7. Some time between this new console launch and Christmas would, arguably, make the most sense for the company.
We imagine original Xbox games coming to the Xbox One would tie in very neatly with the release of the revamped Duke controller which was also announced at E3 this year. Though this controller doesn’t have an exact release date, either, it’s also scheduled for before the end of 2017.
Xbox One S is the pinnacle of what Microsoft set out to create three years ago. But being sleeker, cheaper and more powerful than its predecessor, the One S could also rub early adopters (who shelled out for Kinect) the wrong way.
This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) had a lot of surprises for the fans. From Nintendo’s spectacular comeback to Microsoft’s Xbox One X, the gaming community was left reeling from the events.
One of the treats were given to Microsoft’s fans was Xbox One’s backward compatibility, which will equip the latest console with support for the original games that were previously released. With the anticipation at an all-time high, rumors have begun circulating that it might never come. However, recent reports have revealed that it is actually on the way.
“We’re close, we’re really close,” Xbox’s chief Phil Spencer told GameSpot when he was asked about the status of the development. “I have a little dashboard I go to and I can see all the games [and] where they are in getting approvals in the pipeline. I know the games that are coming for the original Xbox but I don’t think we’ve announced them all. We have to do this in partnership with partners, but we’re still on track. I feel really good. The games look great.”
Considering the nearing release of the Xbox One X, many were also curious as to whether or not the feature will be available to the world’s most powerful console. Spencer was determined to remain tight-lipped, but he did tease that there were features that will need to be discussed before the console arrives in stores.
Furthermore, Spencer also gave some form of relief to the fans. He said that they will not have long to wait to enjoy the features that the backwards compatibility will offer. For those who have been waiting to play the original games that they got to know in the previous consoles, they will be able to play it again before the year ends. No specific launch date was given but fans are expecting to hear more details in the coming months.
