The 5 Best Video Game Prologues

Minecraft Update 1.62 Out Now for PS4 and PS3

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the cube.

I’ve recently become addicted to Minecraft, like seemingly every small child I know. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner; I’ve played similar games – like Terraria and so on – and I always enjoyed playing with LEGO as a kid, but I just never managed to get hooked by Minecraft.

Maybe it was the terrifying number of crafting recipes that (until recently) you either had to memorise or Google; maybe it was my frustration at the less-than-ideal (to put it lightly) behaviour of the game’s creator; or maybe it was my lack of friends who wanted to hang out in a server with me. Whatever it was, I successfully avoided a Minecraft addition… until now.

Recently in Melbourne I visited ACMI, where one room boasts an impressive collection of films and videogames – and artefacts related to their creation. The room was overflowing with school children when I wandered through, and many of them were drawn to Minecraft. In fact, while I was watching, a group of students were busily modifying texture packs, of all things.

I understand now why so many children have been captured by this world: it seems to have something for everyone. It allows people to understand as much or as little of the system as they like, and still enjoy themselves within the space. Children who want to modify textures or create their own mods are welcomed, but those who want to explore, or fight, or create, or mine to bedrock are welcomed too.

This is epitomised by the group I play Minecraft with, each of whom have different approaches to play. Some enjoy action shooters, and find joy in playing Minecraft in survival mode, struggling through nights of killing (or avoiding) the various hostile creatures that roam the world. Others enjoy building new structures, so spend their time in creative mode, floating around and constructing impressive homes and monuments.

And just as Minecraft offers my friendship group an array of options, it offers them to me as well. It’s a space for me to go on (slightly scary) adventures with my friends, laughing with one another via voicechat, just as it’s a place for me to lose myself in methodical tasks while I’m the only one online. It’s a place to perfect my mining style, burrowing underground while watching television shows on my second monitor. It’s a complex fidget toy, giving me something to do with my hands and head that isn’t particularly strenuous. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, where the image I’m putting together is of my own creation.

Minecraft has become a sort of self-care for me. I often struggle to incorporate social interactions into my hectic schedule, but Minecraft has given me a way to spend time with people I care about inbetween commitments. Similarly, methodical and repetitive tasks are a coping mechanism for keeping my anxiety in check, and Minecraft offers a more interesting alternative to sitting with a bunch of grapes and pulling them, one-by-one, from their stems.

It’s also surprisingly accessible. It’s the little things: depending on the day, I might want challenging adventures or relaxing exploration, and the mode I choose can account for that. And as somebody who struggles with auditory processing, being able to adjust every part of the music and sound effects using separate sliders makes it so much easier to hear what I want or need to, without it being lost in a cacophony of other sounds. Minecraft may be an obsession for a lot of kids, but I can’t see why – it’s clever.

I understand Minecraft, and the people who play it, better now. The children playing this game have found a respite from their anxious minds, an adventure through which to socialise with their friends, and a platform for exercising their curiosity and practising all sorts of skills, and I’m honestly sad it took me this long to join the party.

Doctor Minecraft

For those that still haven’t picked up the game yet, Rocket League will see another retail release next month, with a Collector’s Edition that’s being distributed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. This is a pretty big deal, and with what’s just been announced in the package, fans may find some tremendous value in picking it up.

In a new blog post, the developers at Psyonix confirmed some special bonus goodies for the Collector’s Edition of the game when it releases on December 7^th, and they’ll be worthwhile ones for DC Comics fans. That’s because the package features exclusive wheels based on the Flash. As you can see in the screenshots above and below, the wheels look distinctively like Flash logos. In addition, there will also be special Player Banners available, including ones featuring the DC Comics logo, as well as the Flash. (And you can name your vehicle “B. Allen” if you feel up to it.)

The Collector’s Edition of the game will also come with plenty of great downloadable content on the disc as well, including DLC like Supersonic Fury, Revenge of the Battle-Cars and Chaos Run, as well as premium DLC battle-cars like the Aftershock, Marauder, Esper and Masamune. You’ll also find a cool limited Art Print created by Psyonix concept artist Jay Zhang.

Now for those that don’t wish to invest in a physical copy of the game – you probably already own it – there’s no need to fret. Psyonix has made it clear that owners will be able to purchase The Flash and DC Comics content in 2018, with a “future opportunity.” A date wasn’t given yet, but it shouldn’t be too far off. So, yes, you’ll get you crack at these goods as well, as they won’t be limited to this retail release.

The retail version of the game is set to sell for $29.99, which isn’t too bad at all considering what’s all included. It’s just for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, though – the Nintendo Switch version, which launches this Tuesday, will already have its fair share of exclusive content, including the Mario, Luigi and Metroid cars. There’s a possibility it could get the Flash goodies down the line, though. We’ll see what Psyonix has planned.

Rocket League is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, and releases this Tuesday for Nintendo Switch.

Rocket League: Collector’s Edition Features Bonus DC Comics-Inspired Goods

Nintendo blew our collective minds earlier this summer when it finally announced the return of the Metroid Prime franchise, with a fourth installment currently being developed for release on the Nintendo Switch. Today, though, we learned who the development team behind the game just might be.

According to this Reddit report, the team behind the forthcoming Prime revival could be none other than Bandai Namco Games. The team appears to be working alongside long-time Metroid series producer Kensuke Tanabe with putting the game together. What’s more, we could be seeing first footage of the project sooner rather than later.

“Metroid Prime 4 should have something revealed with some in-game footage early next year from what I’ve heard,” the source noted. “I’m hearing that Direct in January particularly. Bandai Namco is developing the game for Nintendo.” That said, they did note they didn’t know specifically which studio at Bandai Namco was working on the game.

Now, take it with a grain of salt. Bandai Namco hasn’t said anything officially about the game (nor Nintendo), and it seems like a quirky choice for such a storied franchise. However, we’ve seen Bandai Namco work its magic on Nintendo franchise before. The developer worked on StarFox Assault on the GameCube several years ago, and also had a hand in development creating Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS – and Pac-Man’s in there as proof.

Some people have been wondering, “Well, why not Retro Studios?” A good question. But with the rumor that a new Donkey Kong game could be coming to Switch, they may be busy working on that.

If – and it’s a big if – this rumor does end up coming true, and we see first footage of Metroid early next year, Nintendo could be, ahem, Prime-ing it for a big 2018 release on the Switch. It’d make an ideal holiday seller, if it could be done in enough time. For now, though, we’ll just have to see what the company has planned, as it hasn’t announced too much of its line-up for next year yet, save for new Kirby, Yoshi and Pokemon games.

Metroid Prime 4 Being Co-Developed Alongside Bandai Namco Games

I

t’s always funny to hear about what might’ve been with cancelled comic book game projects, like the moody Batman: Gotham By Gaslight game or the first-person Avengers video game that never came to be. But now, the team at Unseen64 have stumbled across one of the biggest projects to date that never got to see a release – a Justice League game that would’ve coincided with a film of the same name.

The 3D beat-em-up, under the project name Justice League Arcade, was in development for some time over at Double Helix Games – which also produced games like Killer Instinct (the first season) for the Xbox One and Capcom’s reboot of Strider for various consoles. It had a great concept in mind, enabling players to take control of different characters within the League, including Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, as they took on adversaries using a number of special techniques. For instance, Batman utilizing his items alongside his fisticuffs, and Wonder Woman using her Lasso of Truth to fling an enemy around, while also using throw moves and attacks.

The game, which was set for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii, was meant to be released alongside a film titled Justice League Mortal, which was in the works back in 2008 under the direction of George Miller – yes, the same man that brought us the incredible Mad Max: Fury Road.

Several complications came up between the film and the game, however. While Double Helix had invested a great deal of time into its fighting engine – similar in nature to Shiny’s The Matrix: Path of Neo – Warner Bros. kept delaying the project while it was trying to find an ideal location to shoot Mortal. The film was already reportedly set to have a $300 million budget, the largest in film history at the time, and it was looking for some place to give it some tax breaks.

Alas, they couldn’t find a deal to get the job done, and as a result, the film was scuttled in 2009 – and the game followed soon thereafter, though Double Helix was pushing to give it a separate release, feeling that it could attract a strong DC Comics audience.

But don’t be too sad for its loss. Double Helix was able to recover a great deal of its assets for release in a new game, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters, which came out two years later for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – tied in with the Lantern movie of the same name. The game fared pretty well, whereas the film, well, you know.

And now we’re seeing Justice League rise again, with a new film directed by Zack Snyder, set for release this Friday. And we’re getting good in-game content with it as well, as Injustice 2 will see some premium skins based on characters from the film.

Still, sigh. We can’t help but think how awesome a George Miller Justice League film would’ve been, as well as how Double Helix’s game would’ve ended up in its original form. You can see the gameplay in action in the video above, and dare to dream.

Justice League releases this Friday.

This Cancelled Justice League Game Could’ve Been A Game-Changer

Gal Gadot reportedly plays hardball, won’t sign on for ‘Wonder Woman’ again if Brett Ratner is still on board: NY Post

Warner Bros. Pictures

Justice League

Warner Bros. has a lot riding on the release of “Justice League” next weekend following a rocky start for several franchises and a flurry of reports that’s left fans uncertain about future films.

Despite all this, analysts expect the superhero team-up movie to be a blockbuster. But better reviews, and a warmer response from audiences than some prior DC cinematic universe movies have garnered, could help vault “Justice League” over a major milestone.

“The difference between ‘love’ and ‘like'” could mean hitting $1 billion worldwide at the box office — or not, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore.

While last year’s “Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Suicide Squad” were both commercial successes worldwide, lukewarm reviews weighed on U.S. earnings, and neither managed to surpass $1 billion.

This summer’s “Wonder Woman,” DC’s first critical hit, broke records but also fell short of the high water-mark.

“Justice League” picks up where “Batman v Superman” left off. Following the death of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman recruit a team of heroes to fight an impending threat to the earth.

For DC, “Justice League” is a crucial piece of the puzzle, because the film is expected to establish several new characters who will star in spin-offs, including the Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. It’s also a test of DC’s pivot from the grim and gritty tone of its first three films, to the hopeful, more light-hearted style of “Wonder Woman.”

Over the past month, tweets about the “Justice League” trailers have been 35 percent positive and just 4 percent negative, indicating that previews are generating the right kind of interest, according to marketing technology firm Amobee.

‘Fairly irresistible’

The release caps a choppy year, during which Warner retooled its DC comics strategy, modeled after the path Disney plotted for its multi-billion dollar Marvel superheroes series.

Fan websites breathlessly chronicled a steady drip of rumored cancellations, revised release dates and mixed messages from stars and filmmakers about which films would link up. Just this week, leading man Ben Affleck seemed to cast doubt about how long he’ll play Batman.

While there’s been much hand-wringing in the fan community over these reports, the typical movie-goer is more likely to take “Justice League” on its own merits, said Dergarabedian.

“The clarity of vision hasn’t been consistent, and I think that can be confusing to true fans,” he told CNBC. “But an average viewer says you’ve got Aquaman and Wonder Woman and all these great characters in one movie, and that seems fairly irresistible.”

The film is currently expected to earn $110-$120 million during its North American opening.

Those estimates should be closer to $135 million, argued Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations Co. “Justice League” dovetails with Thanksgiving weekend, and faces little competition until “Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” premiers in mid-December, he noteed.

Bock also anticipated little blowback from Affleck’s links to Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandal. “Justice League” is somewhat inoculated because it will draw fans of the individual characters, as well as movie-goers eager to see Wonder Woman in action again, he said.

Some Twitter users demand Ben Affleck step down as Batman one month before ‘Justice League’ debut   4:01 PM ET Thu, 12 Oct 2017 | 01:01

“The great thing for Warner Bros. is there’s something for everyone there, and that will help expand the brand,” he told CNBC.

Yet if “Justice League” wows audiences, there’s no upcoming DC movie to capture the goodwill dividend, at least not immediately. The next release is “Aquaman,” which Warner pushed back to December 2018.

In contrast, Marvel Studios will follow up this month’s hit “Thor: Ragnarok” with “Black Panther” in February, “Avengers: Infinity War” in May and “Ant-Man and The Wasp” in July.

That matters in the context of a tough time for Hollywood, as superhero movies were one of the only consistent winners in 2017.

Nevertheless, Jonathan Cohen, principal brand analyst at Amobee, thinks Warner Bros. is doing the right thing by stepping back and focusing on the quality of each movie, rather than trying to match the Marvel playbook at all costs.

“Once their house style is more codified, those connective flourishes will likely start organically reappearing in their superhero films,” he said.

‘Justice League’ aims to break through $1 billion after a rocky year for DC movies

No one would ever accuse the Marvel Cinematic Universe of being dark and serious, but with Thor: Ragnarok, Marvel goes into full-comedy mode, crafting their funniest film to date. Perhaps finally realizing how inconsequential and dry the Thor films have been, Marvel hired What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople director Taika Waititi and let him go wild. The results are laugh-out-loud funny, albeit with a caveat: Thor: Ragnarok cares more about landing a great punchline or sight-gag than it does about plot.

Is There Such Thing as Too Much Fun?

But perhaps we’ve reached a point with the MCU where plot doesn’t really matter anymore. Thor: Ragnarok’s overwhelmingly positive Rotten Tomatoes score (93% as of this writing) and bonafide box office success certainly seems to suggest so. This is slightly troubling. Even more so when you realize that Ragnarok has all the makings of something truly magnificent: a talented director, an incredibly charming cast, a pop art-infused color scheme that looks like it’s a combination of the art of Jack Kirby and parade of pinball machines lined-up on a boardwalk at sunset. Yet despite everything Ragnarok has going for it – and it has a lot – there’s a curious lack of weight to all it. The film’s fun nature is charming, but it reaches a point where you start to think Ragnarok is having almost too much fun, if such a thing is even possible.

Approaching reviewing Thor: Ragnarok this way seems like a journey down a dangerous path. “Can’t you just let the movie be fun?” might be the automatic reply to almost any criticism leveled against the film. Sure. There’s nothing wrong with fun. But is it really asking too much to want more? The Thor films have always been the weakest entries in the MCU. Even the troubled production that was Ant-Man delivered a more rewarding experience than the previous Thor films. Part of this can be chalked-up to tone. Thor is an inherently comical character, and star Chris Hemsworth has impressive comedic chops. But it took three films for Marvel to fully embrace the comedy elements of Thor.

The first Thor film, helmed by Kenneth Branagh with a Shakespearean touch, is a world removed from Ragnarok. It’s stuffy and dour in comparison. The ever-shifting tone of Thor plays hell with the character; we’ve now settled on Thor as a dumb blonde, a handsome oaf who is heroic when he’s not bumbling about. It suits the character well, but you can’t help shaking the sense that Marvel has had no idea just who they want Thor to be up until now.

These problems would be a lot less of a concern if this were the first entry in the series. But it’s the third. And what’s more, the film knows it’s the third entry: there’s literally nothing going on here to make Ragnarok stand out on its own in terms of storytelling. If you were to go into Ragnarok without having seen any other Thor or Marvel movie, you’d be absolutely lost as to what the hell is going on here. That’s weak storytelling. It’s the sort of approach that entrenches Thor: Ragnarok firmly into a middle-of-the-road bit of entertainment. It’s a brilliant distraction, but it could be so much more.

That said, when Thor: Ragnarok is working, it’s working really well. This is due almost entirely to the cast, who are individually stellar, and even better when working together. Almost every member of the main cast here has their own moments to shine, with some shining brighter than others. Even if Ragnarok’s script had been worse than it ultimately is, the film would still be worth it because it gave us the opportunity to spend time with these actors playing these characters. If only they had been able to come together in a better film.

“So much has happened since I last saw you!”

Thor: Ragnarok finds Thor, the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) returning to Asgard after a failed quest to locate missing Infinity Stones (remember those things?). Before his homecoming, he’s had a run-in with the demonic Surtur, who warns Thor that he will bring about Ragnarok – the destruction of Asgard and the Gods. Thor mostly laughs these threats off, defeats Surtur, and comes home to find Asgard much changed. Heimdall (Idris Elba), the former guardian of the Bifrost, has vanished and been replaced by the bumbling Skurge (Karl Urban). Thor’s father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) has forgotten his duties and spends his days lounging about. There’s a reason for this: Odin is actually Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in disguise.

Almost instantly (Thor: Ragnarok is allergic to taking its time), Thor and Loki head to earth to find Odin. Along the way, they encounter Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in a funny sequence that nevertheless feels absolutely pointless to the film itself as a whole, but is simply in place to tie-into the post-credit scene at the end of Doctor Strange. After their brief sojourn with Strange, Thor and Loki locate Odin, who warns them that their evil sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), whom they never even knew about, is going to return soon. Then he promptly dies.

Before we have any idea what the hell is going on, Hela arrives, smashes Thor’s mighty hammer Mjolnir, and sends Thor and Loki flying off into the galaxy. Hela arrives at Asgard and swiftly begins a reign of terror, assisted by a somewhat reluctant Skurge, who both wants to be powerful and famous but also clearly has qualms about murdering his fellow Asgardians.

Thor ends up on Sakaar, a planet strewn with garbage, and is quickly captured by the drunken Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson, phenomenal), who transports a confused Thor to the palace of the planet’s head honcho, the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum, at his absolutely Jeff Goldblumiest). The only way Thor can win his freedom is by taking part in the Grandmaster’s gladiatorial matches and fight the Grandmaster’s mysterious, deadly champion. While still super-strong, Thor is hammerless, and thus not nearly as powerful as before. He agrees to fight anyway, and grows furious when he learns that Loki is on the planet too, living as a free man after having wormed his way into the Grandmaster’s good graces.

Meanwhile, back on Asgard, Heimdall has returned and is rounding up Asgardians and hiding them safely away from Hela, but it’s only a matter of time before Hela catches up to them. The only hope is for Thor to return and save the day.

Back on the Sakaar, the Grandmaster’s champion turns out to be none other than the Incredible Hulk, who doesn’t seem to remember Thor and promptly beats the shit out of him. Thor survives the brawl, however, and eventually convinces Valkyrie, a former Asgardian, to help him escape to save Asgard. The Hulk, transformed back into Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), comes along as well. Loki, ever the trickster, tries to turn on Thor, causing Thor to leave him behind. But since the MCU can’t decide what the hell they want to do with Loki, the character eventually has a change of heart and follows after Thor to help.

Back on Asgard, Thor and his new team – jokingly dubbed The Revengers – battle against Hela and her zombie army. Skurge has a change of heart, rebels against Hela, and is killed for his troubles. Thor is able to summon up his powers of thunder and lightning to best Hela, but she eventually proves too powerful and ends up causing Thor to lose one of his eyes. With all hope seems lost, Thor realizes the only way to stop Hela is to destroy Asgard completely. Loki unleashes Surtur, the demon from the beginning, who swiftly destroys Asgard as Thor, Loki, Valkyrie, Hulk, Heimdall and the surviving Asgardians head off into the galaxy aboard a huge ship.

Because That’s What Heroes Do: The Good

Valkyrie, Valkyrie, Valkyrie! Everyone in Thor: Ragnarok is a hoot, but let’s talk about Valkyrie, shall we? It cannot be overstated how wonderful Tessa Thompson is here. Thompson’s star has been on the rise ever since her break-out role in Dear White People, and with Thor: Ragnarok she gets to flex her acting muscles in a big blockbuster setting. A brawling, boozing ass-kicker, Valkyrie is now the best hero in the MCU. Valkyrie has a tragic past: she was once a warrior on Asgard, but Hela destroyed her entire army of female warriors, and left her disillusioned. Her arc in Ragnarok involves the character slowly coming around to be a hero again. Truth be told, there’s not a lot to Valkyrie on paper. What makes her so memorable, so remarkable, is Thompson’s charming, funny performance. The type of iconic scene-stealing that leads to deserved hyperbole. She’s like Han Solo and Snake Plissken rolled into one, and she steals every scene she occupies.

Thompson is tied for MVP of the film with Jeff Goldblum, who plays the sort-of-villain the Grandmaster. The best decision director Waititi made with the film is to point a camera and Goldblum and essentially tell him, “Do whatever the hell you want!” Goldblum has blossomed nicely into an elder statesman of weirdness, and he brings his distinct hemming and hawing to a deranged character with gusto. Every single thing Goldblum does here is incredible, garnering huge laughs with a wink or a nod. It’s a joy to watch him work.

Chris Hemsworth has great comic sensibilities. These have been teased with his Thor performances in the Avengers films, and exploited to great effect in Paul Feig’s unjustly maligned Ghostbusters reboot. Here, he gets to be funny throughout, while occasionally slipping into a more serious mode. But it’s the comedy that shines through the most, and Hemsworth portrayal of Thor as a dumb but ultimately noble character is charming.

The rest of the cast are also a treat. Mark Ruffalo’s constantly befuddled Bruce Banner is a lot of fun, and he and Hemsworth have surprisingly great chemistry together. Hiddleston’s Loki is good too, although his appearance here feels extraneous (more on that later). Cate Blanchett gets to ham it up as Hela, but she’s perhaps the performer most underserved by the script.

A brief word on Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins’ role here is little more than a glorified cameo, and his death scene, as written, is not nearly as emotional as the screenplay seems to think it is. But Hopkins sells it so well, bringing pathos and sadness to a throw-away part that could’ve easily been a quick bit of check-cashing. It’s a testament to his talent that he elevates the moment above the slapdash nature it truly is.

As mentioned a dozen times already, Thor: Ragnarok is funny. It’s funny as hell, in fact. This is less a superhero movie and more of a high concept comedy, loaded with jokes and physical humor that almost always lands. You can thank the hilarious Taika Waititi for that, who brings his comic sensibilities firmly into the MCU, with fabulous results. Waititi even gives himself a scene-stealing part as Korg, a laid-back rock monster. The comedy is what elevates Ragnarok above the other Thor films, and what also helps hide the threadbare story. You’re too caught up in hysterics to pay attention to how muddled the script by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost is.

The score, by Mark Mothersbaugh, is a synthwave dream, and the cinematography, by Javier Aguirresarobe, is often vibrant and eye-popping. This all combines to make Thor: Ragnarok one of the best-looking Marvel films, free of the parking lot gray color scheme that seems to be so prevalent in most of their other adventures (although Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 still reign supreme in the Marvel cinematography department). Honestly, overall, Thor: Ragnarok is colorful, comedic fun. There’s nothing to hate here. But that doesn’t mean it all works.

Like Smoldering Fire: The Not-So-Good

What the hell is Loki’s purpose in the MCU at this point? Not even the filmmakers seem to know. Late in the film, when Banner and Loki come face to face, Banner says, “Last time we saw you, you were trying to kill everyone. What are you up to these days?” “It varies from moment to moment,” Loki replies cheekily. Ha ha, get it? This character is kind of pointless and the film is acknowledging it! Hilarious.

Look, Hiddleston is very good at playing this part. He brings the right touch of aristocratic smugness to the role, but continually bringing Loki back again and again reeks of little more than fan service. The Avengers had Loki willing to commit genocide. Here, he’s mostly comic relief. That’s baffling. You could argue it’s character growth; that he’s evolved from the evil murderer he was to a more playful trickster, but it doesn’t quite work. He doesn’t seem like he’s evolved at all.

Villains have never been the MCU’s strongpoint. This was a problem that could’ve possibly been resolved in Ragnarok due to casting alone. Cate Blanchett is one of the best actresses working today, and giving her a chance to strut her stuff and ham it up as Hela, the Goddess of Death, adorned in a set of crazy antlers, was promising. Alas, while Blanchett gives it her all, Hela as a character is severely underwritten, to the point that there are long stretches of the film where you might completely forget about her.

Why does Skurge, a secondary character, have more character development and more of an overall arc than the main villain of the film? Skurge goes from comical bumbler, to hesitant accomplice, to ultimate hero. Yet he’s almost inconsequential to the plot, unlike Hela, who is supposed to be driving things. It’s disappointing. In truth, almost everything that happens on Asgard is disappointing here, and you get the sense that the film would’ve triumphed completely had it just removed Asgard entirely.

The problem is that at its heart, there are two different movies here. One is about Thor saving Asgard. The other is about Thor on the Grandmaster’s planet, regaining his confidence. These two would both work best on their own, but don’t quite fit together here. They could work, of course, if the script was willing to let them unfold organically. But there’s no room to breathe in Thor: Ragnarok. The opening section alone moves at a breakneck speed, jumping from one location to the next, with the hopes of quickly setting everything up without stopping to think. It’s exhausting. I’m all for brevity in Marvel movies, and superhero movies in general, which tend to be lengthy, bloated affairs – but Ragnarok is pushing it.

While the comedy that prevails all through Thor: Ragnarok is welcomed, there are times where the film is too frothy for its own good. At the end of the day, this film is about the end of Thor’s world. At least, his world as he’s known it for so long. One of the final scenes involves Asgard being blown to smithereens – a moment that should be played as tragic, yet is handled with a joke (an admittedly funny joke, but still one that seems out of place). The overall takeaway is that Ragnarok cares most about getting laughs, and everything else has to take a backseat to that. It’s an uneven balance.

Waititi’s skills as a comedy director are unquestionable – he’s one of the best in the biz. His action direction skills, however, leave a lot to be desired. The action scenes in Ragnarok are terrible. Even the big Thor/Hulk battle that was teased in all the trailers is lackluster and disappointing. There’s a scene where Hela quickly kills a bunch of Asgardian soldiers that is so devoid of energy and excitement that it almost looks unfinished – that perhaps this was just a special effects demo test that made its way into the final film. Ragnarok would’ve been better served if it had just found a way to forego action entirely and focused 100% on the banter.

Phase 1 of the MCU had a distinct problem: the films seemed like all set-up, with little individuality. It’s a problem Marvel has mostly gotten over recently, but Thor: Ragnarok finds them completely back in that set-up mode. Almost everything that happens here feels secondary to the fact that this is leading into Avengers: Infinity War, particularly the ending, which has Thor cruising off into the galaxy. The MCU films that work best are the ones that can stand on their own, as their own individual experiences, where cross-promotion is almost secondary. Ragnarok is not one of those films, and it suffers a bit because of that.

Beyond Asgard

Ultimately, Thor: Ragnarok is critic-proof. The film is already a hit, and also one of the best-reviewed MCU films to date. The simple fact is, people loved this movie. That’s fine. This is pinnacle escapism, at a time when escapism is much needed. This is the film equivalent of an exciting amusement park ride. When you’re on it, the thrill is there – excitement mingled with the sights and sounds of the carnival grounds whooshing by. Then you step off the ride, and move on, and the excitement fades. The memory dulls. The real world comes seeping back in.

Still, it’s almost impossible to dislike Thor: Ragnarok. The cast is too wonderful, the jokes too funny. It’s hard to fault any film that gives Jeff Goldblum a chance to do his thing while also making Tessa Thompson an even bigger star. This is ultimately the best of the three Thor films, but that’s not saying much. One almost wishes this had been the first film in the series, with a script more fleshed-out to set things up for future installments. Instead, as the third, it suffers, and grows ultimately forgettable.

Yet more adventures with these characters would be welcomed. Thompson’s Valkyrie in particular needs an entire franchise of her own, one where she can step out in front to be the lead rather than a supporting player. Hemsworth’s Thor is also worth spending more time with, although Ragnarok seems to confirm that the character works best when he’s a team player rather than a lead. While Ragnarok is focused on Thor, it’s never entirely Thor’s movie. It belongs, instead, to everyone – to the wonderful cast of vibrant, funny characters. Perhaps the real lesson here is what all these wonderful elements really needed is a better script; a script that was worthy of the performances.

Where does Thor: Ragnarok fit into the ever-growing ranking of the MCU? Somewhere in the middle. It’s funny enough, colorful enough, and entertaining enough to strike a chord, but it’s ultimately hollow. It’s a beautiful bauble on display that’s a treat to look at, but one that fades from memory as you move on to something else. In the end, I wanted more from Thor: Ragnarok. Perhaps that was foolish of me.

‘Thor: Ragnarok’ Spoiler Review: Marvel’s Funniest Film is Surprisingly Forgettable

The social-media feeds of Marvel concept artists Andy Park and Ryan Meinerding are littered with character designs that didn’t make it to the big screen. (Did you know that Mantis in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 used to be yellow and more bug-like? Or that Vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron was once Marvel’s literal golden boy?) Soon enough, they’ll probably show off nixed versions of Hela, too—once Marvel gives them the O.K. to release these alternate designs.

Morrison, who typically comes aboard a Marvel film as early as pre-production, describes the process of designing Hela as “a crazy free-for-all.” Why? Blame (or credit) the script: “She has to get stabbed in the suit, and then the suit heals around it. There’s a moment where her cape absorbs bullets . . . there were moments where we actually had the antlers”—their affectionate nickname for Hela’s battle headgear—“turn into face-mask shields and stuff like that, almost like samurai-style outfits.”

The team was initially inspired by the comic-book imagery of Jack Kirby—what Morrison describes as “the Kirby crackle” of lightning that illuminates a darkened Asgardian sky. But with Taika Waititi aboard Ragnarok, the director wanted to take the film in another direction: more Flash Gordon 2 than Thor 3. “Taika actually took all us heads of the departments into a screening room, and sat us all down, and had us watch Flash Gordon at one point,” Morrison says. Luckily, Kirby also dabbled in sci-fi stories like Amazing Adventures and World of Fantasy—so the team turned to those for inspiration as well.

Hela also comes with some baggage in the form of her very own dire wolf. In Norse mythology, the end-of-days that is Ragnarok involves a giant wolf named Fenrir devouring the sun. That doesn’t happen in Marvel’s interpretation of the concept, but our villain does get Fenris, a 35-foot-tall black beast with glowing green eyes.

“Having just done Ant-Man for two years, I can tell you that scale is one of the biggest challenges in any sort of storytelling,” Morrison says. It’s a matter of perspective: a movie can’t just blow up a standard-sized wolf because it would look fake, largely due to the amount of hair on a normal dog.

“So what happens is you have to maintain this plausible deniability where you go, ‘Well, actually . . . Fenris’s hair is maybe a little thicker than a normal dog,’” he says. “And then all of a sudden you end up with—and I’m just gonna pull numbers out of thin air—if you end up with, like, 10 million hairs on a typical dog, all of sudden you’re gonna have like 200 million hairs on this dog, because you can’t just make the hairs bigger.”

The first image to be released from Ragnarok was concept art of Hela, antlers extended and standing with her back to the viewer as she prepares to unleash hell on the soldiers of Asgard. This became a keyframe for Marvel, a benchmark of sorts the production team used as a guide for the rest of the sequence.

“You start with that artwork, and then literally we start to do choreography with our stunt department,” Morrison says. The biggest question they had to answer: how does Hela fight? “Is it more of a wushu style?” Morrison asked himself. “Does she spin? We know she’s got to throw out these blades one after another, so maybe it’s more like wushu—but instead of holding the knives, you’re throwing the knives.” These questions help form the basis for the character’s own unique “language” of movement, he says, which the stunt team can feed off of.

For this film, Marvel developed what Morrison calls “the smallest, active motion-capture markers that have been made yet.” Instead of wearing the standard gray motion-capture suit, the crew placed those markers all around Blanchett’s Hela costume. The Oscar winner and her stunt double, Zoë Bell, were then filmed performing the majority of the sequences, and their movements influenced the C.G.I. wizardry that would come in post-production.

Her invasion of Asgard was a particularly tricky sequence that went through three fundamental reconstructions. “At one point, it was one continuous shot. I kid you not,” Morrison recalls. “We went a long way down the path with that . . . and actually it was a revolving camera as she tracked through and killed everybody.” In the end, though, they completely re-edited the sequence because they found it more “percussive” broken up.

Another challenge? The scene in which the wolf Fenris fights a hero in a waterfall, which was particularly difficult for the V.F.X. artists: not only did they have to animate millions of hair strands, but each needed to look convincingly damp. No wonder Morrison called the scene “absolutely cracked.” In the end, all their work comes back to the idea of plussing: “There’s no sacred cow, that’s for sure,” he says.

Thor: Ragnarok is now playing in theaters.

Thor: Ragnarok: How Marvel Conjured a Hela-Awesome New Villain

Minecraft Can Transform Your World Language Classroom

Minecraft meets museum in the de Young’s latest exhibition – a virtual recreation of the ancient Mexican city Teotihuacan, designed with help from a Marin teenager.

The Minecraft recreation is part of the de Young’s “Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire” exhibition, featuring artifacts from the Mesoamerican metropolis located 25 miles northeast of Mexico City. The wildly popular video game enables museum visitors to virtually walk the streets of the now crumbled city, before time wore its pyramids and pathways down to ruins.

The map marks the first time an American art museum has employed Minecraft – a block-building game released in 2011 – in its digital outreach efforts, de Young officials said.

Trevor Fox, a 14-year-old San Marin High School student with a knack for Minecraft, assisted in the creation of the digital map, which features major Teotihuacan landmarks like the Moon and Sun pyramids.

Marin teen’s Minecraft creation gets a spot in SF’s de Young Museum

A group of Minecraft developers and streamers have organised a series of events to raise money for disaster relief. LoveTropics’ first event will raise money to assist with relief efforts in Puerto Rico following this summer’s hurricanes.

Check out our list of the best Minecraft mods.

LoveTropics is a weekend-long livestream marathon featuring a collection of Mojang developers, as well as Minecraft streamers, YouTubers and modders. Donors will be able to play alongside the streamers on a private server. The effort was inspired by Tropicraft, a topical Minecraft mod itself inspired by a trip its creators took to Puerto Rico in 2011.

Charity efforts will be donated to DirectRelief, who have been working on relief efforts throughout Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria landed in September. LoveTropics is hoping to raise $3,000 over the weekend of November 10-12. So far, two of the creators of Tropicraft, as well as streamers Darkosto and Wyld, and four Mojang developers, will be featuring over the weekend. LoveTropics’ stream will kick off at 20:00 GMT on Friday, November 10.

Charity Minecraft marathon LoveTropics is raising money for DirectRelief

Lydia Winters is living the dream.

As the brand director at Mojang, she’s responsible for maintaining all aspects of the massively popular Minecraft brand — from tiny collectible figurines to international events, Winters has her hands in pretty much everything. It should come as no surprise, then, that her work has landed her on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, or that she was named one of Sweden’s most powerful women in digital in 2016, or that on Nov. 18, she’ll be cohosting the company’s annual Minecon event with none other than the brilliantly funny Will Arnett. What will come as a surprise is how she got to where she is — and what her job entails on a daily basis.

I interviewed Winters by phone in October, and the first thing she told me — from her office in Stockholm, Sweden — was that she was born in Florida. “I have an elementary education degree, and I taught fourth grade in Florida for a year before I decided that I didn’t want to teach anymore — but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” she said, laughing. “I was just trying to figure it out, I was 21 or 22, and I started doing a lot of photography and shooting weddings, taking portraits of babies and kids.”

It was only after Winters did a photography workshop in 2010 that she was introduced to video blogging, the medium that would eventually land her in her current role. “I was making these really weird daily videos about a lot of random things,” she told me. “In the house that I lived in, I had baby turtles — so one day I’d be singing about baby turtles, and the next day I’d be like ‘I’m sick! I don’t know what to talk about!’ and the next day I’d be talking about cameras. It was always about different things.”

But despite the initial popularity of her work, Winters knew that she was very much living day to day and didn’t have a plan. After successfully raising $10,000 for breast cancer research (and shaving her head, as she promised to do if she hit her goal), she had begun to question the path her life was on once again. “I was like, ‘OK. Now I don’t have a job. I just shaved my head. I’m making videos and things appear to have gone terribly wrong. What do I do now?'”

After consulting with friends, she realized that the only way to get her life back on track was to try to do something consistent with her videos, to focus all of her energy on one single topic. Winters decided to focus on video games, but there was one problem: the only video game she’d ever played was Oregon Trail.

“My friends thought it would be hilarious if I played Minecraft from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about playing games,” Winters recalled. “This was after I had done this Susan G. Komen 60-mile walk, and someone had given me a hot pink wig. So I was like, ‘OK. I’ll wear a pink wig, and I’ll call myself — I wanted to be Minecraftgirl, but that username was taken — I’ll be Minecraftchick.'”

So, with a pink wig and a second-choice username, Winters began the next stage of her post-teacher life: becoming the lovable woman behind the cult YouTube series The Misadventures of Minecraftchick.

The concept was simple; Winters learned how to play Minecraft in a series of heavily edited shortform videos, interspersed with snarky, self-deprecating commentary. But in a genius twist, Winters chose to film herself as she played, using the video of her facial reactions as an overlay over her gameplay — something that was unheard of in 2010. “Everyone who was doing a very standard, ‘this is my voice, and I am playing right now,'” she said. “I got so much flak for [showing my face]. Now, everyone does it. It’s weird if you don’t show your face when you’re playing, because it’s so much more fun to see someone’s expression and what they’re doing.”

“In the first video, I couldn’t even figure out how to walk,” Winters recounted. “I just opened [the game] on my screen, and was like, ‘I am starting this game. I’m so excited!’ And then I was clicking everything, and I’m like, ‘How do I move? I’m clicking the mouse, I’m using the arrow keys, and nothing is working.’ So I’m like, ‘OK. I’m going to google this. Pause!’ and then I come back and say, ‘AH! I figured it out. It’s W-A-S-D,’ which obviously I didn’t know as I had never played games. So of course then I’m like, ‘I can walk! I’m amazing!’ and I’m walking and walking and I go into water and I’m like, ‘Wait, which key do I use to swim?’ and then, of course, I drown.”

An innovative format may have made her videos stand out, but it was the combination of a severe lack of resources around how it was exactly that one actually was supposed to play Minecraft and her charming, quirky persona that really won YouTube viewers over. Winters says her “black and white commentary” — noting that she was from Florida, and as a result obviously knew how to swim even if her avatar didn’t — was what made the videos feel less like a how-to and more like a show. And that show format quickly started gaining followers; in the first week alone, she jumped from 0 to over 2,000 subscribers — and it’s then that she decided to up the ante to making daily videos. For five months, she made the videos every single day.

“I was going through a separation at the time,” she said, “and I was like, ‘Oh, man, I really don’t know what I want to do. I’m making these videos and it’s really fun, but I’m doing a lot of odd jobs on the side – little ad listings and writing for people, or editing or posting stuff – whatever friends had jobs to do, so I can support this pretty hobbyish thing.’ But I was gaining tons of subscribers and it was really fun. Every day, my dad would text me and tell me how many new subscribers I had, which was the sweetest thing.”

But in June 2011, Winters again began to question what she was doing. The revelation came while she was living with her ex-husband in her uncle’s trailer park house — “the most Florida story I can tell,” she said — and found herself once again struggling to get by. It’s then that she came up with the idea of going to video game conference E3 and interviewing the creators of Minecraft for her YouTube channel. She wrote them a cold email that said quite simply, “Hi, I’m Lydia. I’m a serious person. Here’s My YouTube channel. I used to be a teacher. If you need any help at E3, I can do whatever. I would just love to interview you for my channel. Super short, whatever you want.”

Carl Manneh, the former CEO of Mojang, wrote back with a much bigger offer: asking her to host the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Minecraft portion of their booth. Winters questioned whether she was qualified for the role, but with nothing to lose, she dyed her hair pink to match her online persona and flew to LA.

Winters instantly hit it off with the team from Mojang, and she aced the job she had signed up to do. But things took an altogether different turn after she ran into a friend from the internet. The friend had just applied for an art position at Mojang and asked Winters to introduce her to the team — a favor that she obliged — but Manneh informed the friend that the position wasn’t in the US and would require a move to Sweden. It’s here that Winters did the unexpected.

“Unplanned, I turned around and I said, ‘It’s too bad I’m not an artist because I would totally move to Sweden.’ And Carl was like, ‘We want someone to work with the community. Let’s talk more about this tonight.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And I walked away — I remember very vividly being in the LA Convention Center and trying to find some internet because I was thinking, ‘Where is Sweden? I know it’s in Europe, but is it in the middle?’ But then I googled it and was like, ‘That is SO far north. That is really far north in the world.’ But I thought it was all very funny, because obviously it was just a weird conversation and nothing else will come of it.”

Later that evening, Winters attended a mixer — and Manneh essentially told the Mojang team that they were bringing her back to Sweden when they went home. None of the staff could tell if he was serious, but for her part, Winters was over the moon. “I’m texting my mom like, ‘I’m going to move to Sweden, everyone who thought I didn’t have a plan.’ And she’s like, ‘What? No, definitely not.'”

It took until the last day of the event, however, for Winters to finally get a formal interview — and even after all that, she went home to Florida, thinking, “OK, this was all crazy, but they’re going to go back to Sweden — they’ve been swept up in this sort of very American craziness, they’re not going to follow through on this because it’s crazy and they don’t know me. We don’t know each other, and this is insane.”

Two weeks after E3 ended, Winters had been hired by Mojang full-time. Six months after accepting the job, she left Florida and started a new life in Stockholm, Sweden. And she’s never looked back.

A little over six years later, Winters still loves her job. Her American-ness and penchant toward talking (and talking loudly) made her an enormous asset to the Mojang team, composed mainly of Swedes who prefer, in her words, “next-level quiet.” The role that she took initially saw her looking after the community building related to the Minecraft brand but evolved to become a more senior role looking after all of the merchandising, events, and licensing as well.

“Each thing that has happened in the company has kind of always been like, ‘Well, I can do that,’ and you kind of raise your hand and think to yourself, ‘Actually, I don’t know if I can,'” she said, laughing. “But six years later I can spot the smallest detail in [something related to] Minecraft that is incorrect and people are like, ‘How did you do that?’ And it’s because I’ve looked at it, and I care about it, and I’ve seen it for so long. So the tiniest thing I can spot in a slide that was two slides ago, like, ‘Hold on. Can you go back a second?'”

There’s a reason that Winters has trained herself to spot these sorts of things, and it comes from the best imaginable place: for the love of what she’s doing and the people she’s doing the work for. “The amazing thing about Minecraft is that it’s way more than a game,” she said. “It’s a life-changing thing. It’s a way to spend time with people; it’s a way to communicate. It’s so big, and it’s so important that every day I’m like, ‘This is too important to screw anything up.’ I have to make sure everything is amazing, everything is perfect for this incredible brand that I get to have so much ownership over.”

Every day presents something new and different, and even she herself admits that no two days in a row are ever the same. I asked her to walk me through a typical day at the office, and what became immediately clear is that she really does have her hands in pretty much everything the company does. But naturally, there are some things that are set in stone.

One of those things is her morning routine. “I get up and work out with my personal trainer or at the gym, because I’m on the road to Minecon and I want to look very buff on stage,” she said, laughing. “After that, since I’m a very late person by nature, I’m always on the run from my apartment [to the office], which is on the South Island in Stockholm. My home is a 10-minute walk from work — but I can make it in seven minutes if I run. I’m usually running with a really delicious coffee that my partner has made for me, and I’m kind of spilling it and drinking it as I run into the office.”

On the day I spoke to Winters, she had kicked off her day with a three-hour meeting with one of Mojang’s merchandising partners, who pitched a whole host of new ideas for her team to consider. Winters, who said she was “maybe the eighth person hired at the company,” now has a team made up of product designers and project managers who help her with the approval process on each and every piece of merchandise. Her focus is making sure that everything that gets made has an extraspecial touch and “isn’t a label slap where the same artwork goes on everything.”

“There’s always a reason why something is positioned the way it is,” she said. “There’s a reason why a skeleton is being chased by a wolf [on an item] and it’s because wolves like bones and that’s kind of funny, because it’s something that would really happen. A little kid is not going to say, ‘I understand this shirt was very thoughtfully picked for me,’ but they may say, ‘Yeah, that is exactly what a skeleton does.’ And then there’s the adults who buy products, and you want them to go, ‘Wow, there was extra care put into this. This is more special than I thought it would be.'”

It’s not just animals and baddies that get a critical look, either. Minecraft used to predominately focus on a guy named Steve, and Winters was instrumental in getting a second main character, a female named Alex, added into the game as well. “I was like, ‘We have all this merchandise and it’s only a guy!’ and everyone was like, ‘No, Steve is genderless.’ And I was like, ‘He has a goatee. He is definitely a guy. He can be whatever gender he wants to be, but his name is Steve. How many Steves do you know that aren’t male?'”

Alex has red hair like Jeb, the lead designer, and green eyes like Winters herself — injecting a little bit of the Mojang personality into the game they spend so many hours each day perfecting. But she’s also a focal point for many of the conversations that Winters has with her merchandising partners on a day-to-day basis, pointing out the type of relegation that can happen to a female character without a critical eye: “If you’re not really careful and vigilant, Alex is always pushed behind Steve. Or she’s loving animals, and never doing any of the fighting. They both have to be shown in many different roles, because we have so many different players — on a daily basis, I’m talking about this, and looking at it constantly.”

The conversations that Winters has on a daily basis to avoid gendered typecasting are, in her eyes, crucial to putting forth the best possible version of the game to its users. One example of this is the struggle she went through with a specific brand who didn’t understand the importance of equally weighted roles for the “male” and “female” characters.

“There was a description of Steve and a description of Alex,” Winters said. “In the description of Steve, he was an architect, a designer, or a geologist or something. For Alex, it said, ‘She likes to build, explore, and mine.’ The two were sitting next to each other, and I was like, ‘Look at the difference between these two descriptions. You are saying that because Steve is male he has a job — Steve’s not an architect, he’s just a dude that builds. But if you’re going to say he has a job, at least use the same language for both of them. Either they both have jobs or they both like to do certain things.'”

Over the years, Winters has seen countless examples of Alex being mentioned with regard to fashion and Steve in relation to great careers and always puts the kibosh on it immediately. “You know that this will never go through,” she has told numerous clients, adding, “This isn’t OK. There’s no world in which we will approve this. Rewrite it. This not gender equal.”

The statement applies not just to descriptions of the two characters, but their positioning, the weapons they use, and the real-life models that are used to show off the goods that the company signs off on. In her mind, both characters should be portrayed as badasses — not one over the other. “I’ve had pink hair, I love pink, I love purple, I love animals,” she explained. “That’s fine, but there are also girls who don’t love any of that.”

It’s clear in looking at Mojang’s myriad offerings that these “soapbox moments from Lydia” have made a tangible difference — and an unexpected extra benefit is that it has also affected the workplace culture of Mojang as well. Winters, who once saw herself as a lone wolf hopping around doing whatever needed to be done, now has five people reporting into her and a whole lot more women standing by her side when she has these conversations.

“I was the first woman in the office, and then there were two of us — our CFO and I — and now, I’m happy to say, we have a huge amount of women working in the office,” Winters said, noting that she spent her lunch hour after the merchandising meeting doing a one-on-one with one of her direct reports. “They’re all amazing and incredible and save me so much time and have so many amazing ideas — and I’m transitioning into a better leader and a better boss because I take it very seriously, making sure that they’re developing as much as possible, just like I’m trying to.”

But she’s not just a manager and a brand champion. She’s also a brand ambassador, so Winters spent the afternoon before we got on the phone planning out the big reveal for this year’s annual Minecon: that she’ll be joined on stage with Will Arnett.

“It’s both the most exciting thing and the most panic-inducing thing I’ve ever done, because it’s like, whoa, this is the big leagues now – I’m going to be on stage with Will. And I think he’s amazing and I have for so long that I’m like, oh my god I’m going to pass out. And it will be so bad if I just faint,” she said, noting that while she may be fangirling out now, the most exciting part of him hosting is that he’s a huge fan of Minecraft himself.

“He was super interested in cohosting Minecon because he and his kids play together. And we always care about someone having a personal connection to Minecraft. I want everyone to play, but I get that it’s not for every single person — and there’s something really special about finding someone who’s not just awesome at what they do but they also like Minecraft, too.”

The rest of the hours of her workday are spent scripting and shooting the video Mojang will release to the public the following day. Minecon planning takes up a big chunk of the year — involving meticulous strategizing, researching, and surprising — and as a result her day-to-day workload is some combination of scripting, shooting, and merchandising. But that’s on top of the mentoring and managing she does, and the work she undertakes as part of Mojang’s leadership team. In short: it’s damn near impossible to sum up everything Winters does.

Even so, the excitement and energy that Winters brings to her job is palpable in everything she does — and it’s clear that she’s come a long way from her days in Florida, wondering what would happen next. Winters is now an inspiration to millions of women and girls around the world and proof that anything is possible so long as you put your full heart and mind into it and aren’t afraid of what might happen if you fail.

“I have yet to have a day where I’ve felt bored in over six years,” she told me, humbly. “So I feel like something I’m doing is right.”

The Incredible True Story of How a Florida Teacher Became Head of 1 of the Biggest Brands on Earth

Dive Brief:

• Wabasha-Kellogg High School (MN) Spanish teacher Glen Irvin writes for EdTech: Focus on K-12 that Minecraft enhanced his language teaching efforts by allowing him to build virtual worlds where students could create and interact with one another while practicing Spanish vocabulary.
• Irvin suggests that educators looking to utilize Minecraft in their curriculum can test the waters with short projects when starting out, having them write, for example, sentences about a place using the language that they’re learning and then creating parts of that place in Minecraft. They can then create a virtual walkthrough that involves having them practice speaking that language in the narration.
• Eventually, Irvin writes, he used Minecraft to create an immersive virtual role-playing game called “El Mundo de Leyendas,” in which students were required to communicate entirely in Spanish, and he notes that engagement with the Minecraft approach resulted in 100% assignment completion.

Dive Insight:

Minecraft has proven beneficial in a variety of learning environments in recent years due to its existing popularity with students and the malleability of its open-world sandbox design. Basically, the game is what the user makes it. To make things easier for educators, however, an edition specifically designed for the classroom is also available.

Perhaps the game’s greatest benefit is that no matter what primary subject is being taught through its lens, it also offers secondary learning opportunities for SEL and creative thinking. As a Getting Smart report detailed in August, 97.7% of teachers surveyed cited problem-solving as the top skill imparted by the game, with additional positive impacts on students’ creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, decision making, communication and empathy

How did a Spanish teacher boost engagement through Minecraft?

Holiday 2017 preview: Four driving games for September to November

eSports battle for a knockout at Tokyo game show

Almost a year ago, Microsoft acquired the Seattle-based Beam game streaming service, a member of the TechStars Seattle 2016 class, co-founded and led by Matt Salsamendi, then 18 years old. The deal gave Microsoft a rival to YouTube Gaming and Amazon’s Twitch, letting users livestream and watch games and other content.

Fast-forward to today: Beam has been renamed Mixer, and Microsoft has integrated the service into Xbox One and Windows 10, with Salsamendi continuing to lead the product team. Mixer seeks to differentiate itself with features including low-latency streaming, the ability for up to four broadcasters to stream to a shared chat experience, and ways for viewers to interact with games as they’re streamed.

Another advantage is Mixer’s close ties with Microsoft’s PC and video-game platforms. The Xbox One and Windows integration has resulted in “crazy awesome growth,” Salsamendi said during a talk last week at the Casual Connect gaming conference in Seattle.

He didn’t give specific stats, but Microsoft reports 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices and more than 50 million monthly active Xbox Live users, so if even a small fraction is using Mixer, it’s a significant number. Twitch, widely regarded as the market leader, was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. It now reports about 10 million daily active users.

However, Salsamendi said, what’s most important to Mixer isn’t user growth but maintaining the focus on the “very community-oriented experience” that led to the success of the service in the first place.

So how does he view Mixer’s competition with Twitch? GeekWire asked Salsamendi that question during the audience Q&A at the event. Continue reading for his thoughts on that topic, where Mixer is headed next, the potential for eSports, the technical infrastructure needed to support sub-second streaming, and other comments from the Casual Connect session.

How he views the competition with Twitch: “My perspective is a little bit unique in that I started on Twitch. I think it’s really important to respect the communities that are there, and the platform that they’re building. But ultimately I want Mixer to be the best place to broadcast your content regardless of what you’re streaming, and I think we’re doing a good job of that, and we’re continuing to see growth through it.”

“In terms of our content acquisition strategy, being very respectful and cognizant of the communities that are being built there is very important, so we’re doing a lot with natural and viral growth, and the product speaks for itself in that regard. We get tons of huge broadcasters on board just because they like the product. I’m excited to see more. Definitely keep an eye out for more people coming over. I don’t personally think of it as much about competition, but in reality it sort of is. I think that our North Star is always going to be those interactive broadcasters, and continuing to build features for them and socialize what we’re doing.

Mixer’s growth and focus: “From the very beginning, it hasn’t really been much about the numbers. More so about the communities that we’re building. What we’ve been doing with the Xbox integration, with the Windows 10 integration, we’ve seen crazy awesome growth. If you look at the platform if you’re a user, I think that’s something that’s super exciting for you. But really it’s all about continuing to help foster that very community-oriented experience even, I guess the word might be in spite of the growth, because it can be hard, as communities grow, to keep things feeling connected, keep people feeling united around this goal of making streaming interactive.”

“That’s really how we focus. We’re doing things around chat moderation. We’re doing things around the interactive platform, getting more games on board, working with broadcasters directly to help be the focal point to look to as to the kinds of communities that we want to build. Those partner broadcasters, we work really closely with, helping them ward off trolls, helping them build the kinds of streaming experiences that they want to see, and so those are things that are big focuses for us.”

What’s next for Mixer: “I want to continue to grow, focusing on those communities. My vision really involves us scaling the way that we accept feedback, scaling the way that we develop product such that, with all these new awesome Mixer Create apps, with all the new Xbox stuff we’re working on, we still maintain that North Star of broadcasters.”

“I think that’s a really important thing, and it’s not something where you can just sit back and say, ‘Oh, we’re doing it.’ You actually have to go and make a concerted effort to do it. You have to build tools. You have to bake it into your development process. And you have to do things differently in an effort to cater to those users from the start. So that’s something I’m really excited about scaling.”

“From a product perspective, you’re going to see more interactive games. That’s the most obvious thing. As game developers, that’s a little bit of a longer lead there, but you’re going to start seeing more and more games supporting this stream-first functionality. We’re at the forefront of that, and we’re going to continue to be. Those are ways that I’m excited to see it expand.”

On the potential of eSports: I think eSports is cool. We’re still really, really early on. One of the things I’m particularly excited about, if you look at traditional sports, since they’re built historically primarily via cable TV and set-top boxes, there’s not as much opportunity to get in there and get statistics and actually be a part of that kind of gameplay. I think that, as eSports continues to evolve you’re going to see a lot more viewers becoming fundamental part of the experience. Not just watching but actually participating in the eSports, being able to drill down and see player statistics, the ones that you want to see and not just the ones that they’re showing, and actually get better at the game yourself through those things. I think that’s going to be one unique aspect of eSports, because it’s delivered over the Internet and all the challenges but also the possibilities that that entails.

On the infrastructure needed to support sub-second streaming: “We were very lucky early on … because we had existing points of presence in something like 24 different data centers all over the world. Having the data centers is one thing. The interesting thing about what we do is really all about the underlying transports that are used to deliver video, the recovery mechanisms we use when there are network faults, and then the way that we redistribute traffic between our ingest systems and the distribution systems to actually serve that traffic to the viewers.”

“That whole stack is almost completely in-house, almost completely proprietary, which is something that we’re really proud of building. We’re the first company, as far as I’m aware, to do low-latency, large-scale streaming. If you look at what we did with E3, we had 200,000 concurrent people watching E3 in 4K — not 200,000 in 4K, but we were offering it in 4K — and that pipeline held up really well. Of all things, the chat was actually one thing that actually had a little bit of trouble with that scale.”

“But those aren’t fundamental problems, those are things that we’ve worked through, and we’re always iterating on that. It’s all about just continuing to work through trial and error. It’s something that is very new. We use a technology called WebRTC to do video delivery in the browsers, which is a very, very new technology. It hasn’t even been fully standardized yet. But it does exist in most browsers, and there’s libraries to do it on mobile for example.”

“So we’ve definitely been pioneers in that community, and we help wherever we can to help foster that. And it’s been a really exciting journey for us, going from my personal background, I didn’t know much if anything in video streaming and I think that’s actually a blessing in disguise, because it means that you can start fresh, and you can look at ways that you can improve the systems fundamentally because you’re naive to everything else that everybody else has been doing. It’s worked well for us. I have an awesome team. Stefan (Slivinski), who’s our principal video engineer on the FTL (Faster Than Light streaming) side, does an awesome job at what he does, and we’ve got a great team with him that continues to integrate that and more technologies, more browsers, and get it to more people.”

“The great thing is we use H.264 for our video delivery, which has hardware acceleration for both playback and encode pretty much everywhere. So we’re using the hardware encoders on devices for things like Mixer Create. We’re using the hardware decoders wherever they’re available — just pretty much everywhere. It doesn’t use materially more battery life or bandwidth than other platforms, which is really great. The underlying compression and such is the same as what’s being used. It’s more so about the transport and the way we deliver the video that makes it

Microsoft’s Twitch rival Mixer sees ‘crazy awesome’ growth, aims to maintain its focus on community