Beware if you tend to veer into dystopian paranoia: Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi offered a glimpse of moviegoing’s future Wednesday, and it includes windowless rooms where our children have replaced Little League baseball with Minecraft tourneys.
The executive said Wednesday that Cinemark anticipates virtual reality and gaming as opportunities for “significant alternative content” to the traditional feature-length films in its theater chain, which is the third biggest in the US by number of screens.
The comment is a sign of the shifting tastes of consumers. Once upon a time, a simple run of movies was enough to satisfy audiences. Now tastes have gotten more sophisticated as consumers seek more-immersive forms of entertainment.
Zoradi touted the opportunity for hosting video-gaming events both for players and spectators. Commonly known as e-sports, video gaming as spectator entertainment has been growing in mainstream popularity, with researcher Superdata estimating its worldwide audience will widen to 275 million people this year.
Plano, Texas-based Cinemark is already hosting Super League Gaming competitions, which Zoradi likened to video game Little League. “Your kids are in a league…and they’re playing literally in our seats on their laptops against another team in another city,” he said.
Zoradi also said the company is looking into all aspects of bringing virtual reality into theaters. That could be “pods” for individual viewers to watch 15-minute VR shorts in theater lobbies, or it could mean group VR experiences inside some of its small cinemas, he said, speaking at the Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York.
Cinemark is the latest to talk up virtual reality, an entertainment format that makes viewers feel like they’re in the middle of the action. It’s among the buzziest consumer technologies this year, as big investments in VR hardware by tech giants like Facebook and Samsung start to deliver those products to consumers more widely.
Cinemark’s bigger rival AMC has begun bringing virtual-reality demos into its theaters. In the last year, it’s offered some moviegoers the opportunity to check out VR experiences related to the “Paranormal Activity” franchise and “The Jungle Book.”
Last year, Zoradi said VR wasn’t likely to be a “big strategic initiative” for the company in the near future.
As Minecraft developer Mojang is gearing up for Minecon 2016 in Anaheim this weekend, the game studio has announced today that it has partnered with American toy manufacturing company Mattel to bring your Minecraft avatar to life. Minecon attendees will be able to use the company’s skin printing service to create a skin for a nice figurine with the Minecraft avatar of their choice:
It’s seriously cool. You craft the look of your unique figure by using an actual skin from the game. Mattel creates and prints a custom label based on your in-game skin (or one of the exclusive soon-to-be-revealed MINECON 2016 designs!), and then you stick it onto the figure.
dwv90_c_17_202-887×630 Mattel teams with Minecraft to deliver 3D printed skins, available at Minecon
Minecon attendees will be able to design their own Minecraft figurine.
To try the skin-printing service, attendees will have to purchase a Survival Mode Player One Figure ($15.00 + tax) at the the Mattel booth and also print their label over there. To get prepared, Mojang is inviting all attendees to check the skin editing app Skin Studio which is available on iOS and Android devices.
Additionally, Mojang has announced today the release of a new Minecraft Snapshot tagged 16W38A and you can find the full list of changes and bug fixes below:
Notable changes:
The poor squids shouldn’t spawn in lava anymore. At least I would not enjoy spawning in lava We have a new gamerule: maxEntityCramming Mooshrooms now really appreciates to walk on mycelium. Probably it feels soft and cosy on their hooves
Bugs fixed in 16w38a:
[Bug MC-3841] – Attacking an unsaddled pig while holding a saddle saddles the pig [Bug MC-36927] – Durability of Golden Swords occasionally dropped by Zombie Pigmen is not random (always 25) [Bug MC-46456] – Written books given by command crashes when copied in crafting table if “Author” is missing [Bug MC-61997] – squids spawn in lava [Bug MC-66946] – 2-block tall hitbox on small armor stands. [Bug MC-67406] – Small armor stands display items differently than normal ones [Bug MC-70424] – Baby Zombie Pigmen’s sword slightly tiled forward [Bug MC-70738] – Killing Guardian with Lava does not give Cooked Fish [Bug MC-80551] – You can place redstone, doors, rails etc. onto 7/8 layers of snow [Bug MC-86130] – Shields changes its base color when damaged & repaired / Crafting different in colors results in damage [Bug MC-86164] – armor stands can’t be renamed by name tag [Bug MC-89921] – Elytra not rendered on entities/mobs [Bug MC-91383] – Horses (now only skeleton horses and zombie horses) drop different amount of loot than before [Bug MC-92772] – Saddled pigs don’t drop saddle with doMobLoot=false [Bug MC-92776] – Ink sacs are fished in stacks of 1 instead of 10 [Bug MC-93435] – Cobblestone walls listed in “Building Blocks” tab [Bug MC-93609] – Player is floating above the saddle of a mule [Bug MC-93824] – Feeding golden carrot to breed horse works if InLove is greater than 0 [Bug MC-94476] – Killing Rabbits with Looting does not give more raw rabbit [Bug MC-94947] – Chicken “steping” sound still works when the chicken is swimming [Bug MC-95450] – Villager Loot Table missing [Bug MC-95469] – Middle click / pick block on farmland gives dirt [Bug MC-96499] – Boats collide with any entity (Arrows, Paintings, etc.) even if Marker:1b is on (armor stand) [Bug MC-98260] – Water bottles have inconsistent NBT tag depending on how you obtain them. [Bug MC-99602] – Impossible to detect Water Bottle from ocean in player’s inventory [Bug MC-100950] – Boats can travel / remain on the fog of lingering potion / dragon’s breath [Bug MC-101615] – Silverfish do more damage to players on easy difficulty than on normal difficulty [Bug MC-101642] – Iron golem / VillagerGolem is holding red flower client side 400 ticks too long [Bug MC-103339] – Mushroom Cows do not path to mycelium, but grass. Causes unintended spawning requirements [Bug MC-105071] – Random green/gray dot in anvil GUI [Bug MC-106485] – Banner applied to a Shield doesn’t change the shield correctly [Bug MC-106747] – Wither bosses break structure blocks / structure voids [Bug MC-106842] – Target selector stops parsing its arguments if an entry is not = [Bug MC-106896] – Crash when using backspace after deleting all the characters in the name of anything with a custom one [Bug MC-107054] – lit_furnace item model but no item [Bug MC-107055] – 2 models for old wooden slab’s item [Bug MC-107062] – Hitting backspace in the anvil naming field when empty causes the game to crash
For those of you who can’t wait for the release of the 1.11 build of Minecraft, the game developer added that it will reveal “info about several new exciting 1.11 features” during Minecon 2016. The annual event will take place on September 24-25 at Anaheim Convention Center and those of you who can’t attend will be able to watch the live stream on the dedicated website.
At 8 PM ET/PT on September 21st, the 33rd season of the CBS reality series Survivorwill begin. This year’s competition carries the subtitle Millennials vs. Gen X, and it will pit contestants from two neighboring generations against one another. For fans of YouTube, there will be a familiar face in the Millennial camp. Mari Takahashi, known for her videos on the Smosh Games channel, will attempt to outlast her fellow competitors to earn the title of Sole Survivor.
As Takahashi told Tubefilter, she was introduced to the CBS team behind Survivor after two fellow YouTube stars, Joslyn Davis and Erin Ward of Clevver TV, were contestants on another CBS reality series, The Amazing Race. Davis and Ward are friends of Takahashi’s (and fellow Defy Media partners), which led to her selection for the new Survivor season.
To prepare for her Survivor role, Takasashi “binge-watched” all of the show’s previous seasons. “Good thing for me,” she told Tubefilter, “I’m actually really good at sitting on the couch and watching television.” She also noted that several of Smosh Games’ more physically-demanding videos, such as those in its Smosh Summer Games series, helped her prepare for the challenges she would face while on the Survivor island.
While Survivor filmed in Fiji earlier this year, Takahashi’s team at Defy Media had to pull off a digital media magic trick of sorts: They had to make her seem active in Smosh Games videos even when she wasn’t there, in order to maintain the confidentiality of her agreement with CBS. To pull that off, she had to film several videos ahead of time. “We shot about two months worth of videos in advance to make it look like I didn’t go anywhere,” she said.
When the broadcast of the new Survivor season begins, Takahashi expects to see many new viewers migrating from CBS to her videos — and that’s where a new series, titled Maricraft: Outlaster comes in. Launched two days before Survivor’s season premiere, Outlaster is a semi-scripted series that creates a mock Survivor setup within the world of Minecraft. All of the Smosh Games hosts will be present, and their avatars will participate in challenges, confessionals, and other typical Survivor fare across six episodes.
While Takahashi thinks longtime Smosh Games fans will enjoy Outlaster, she also believes that new viewers from CBS will dig it as well. She says the series is “the bridge” between YouTube and TV and “the way for us to say ‘this is what we do, let’s put it in a perspective you might understand.’”
Don’t think for a second, though, that Takahashi will leave her fans behind as she appeals to TV viewers. Survivor is a fun jump to TV for her, but in the end, she’s still a YouTuber at heart. “I’ve never been more grateful for what I get to do and the people I get to do this with,” she said. “I went a month-and-a-half without technology, without any connection to friends and family, and when I came back, it was the best homecoming I could have possibly asked for.”
Time moves differently in Minecraft. A day lasts 20 minutes. A night lasts only seven. With the right conditions, Rome can be built in a day. And with the right supplies, a troll can burn it to ashes in minutes.
2b2t, a malevolent form of Minecraft, is full of such ruins: It’s a place of beauty and terror.
Ranked among the world’s most popular video games, Minecraft is often praised for fostering creativity and constructive play. It is the parent-approved successor of Lego, even used as an educational tool in schools. In addition to the usual gameplay modes, multiplayer servers turn the game into a social activity. These communal worlds are subject to rules: Start a fight or destroy property, and a moderator will usually ban you.
2b2t is an “anarchy server,” the oldest and most infamous of its kind. It offers a world without rules, where aggression is encouraged and survival is rarely assured. 2b2t plays out like a Cormac McCarthy novel built with thousands of 1×1 digital bricks.
While Minecraft is the terrain of the imagination, 2b2t gives free rein to your darkest impulses. And now, 2b2t is being ravaged by war.
The Facepunch Era
Anarchy servers are a dark tradition within Minecraft. In a standard game, you are dropped into a randomly generated world, where you mine for resources and build structures, one block at a time. There’s a survival mode—players have to scrounge for food and fight off zombies at night—and a more free-form creative mode, where players have unlimited health and resources. Players can join friends and strangers to play in servers online, though they are discouraged from attacking others, laying waste to buildings or using pornographic terms to describe someone’s mother.
Its first colonizers were users of the Facepunch forum, hence 2b2t’s seminal “Facepunch Era.” Members began to map and establish bases. The first factions were formed as rival forums signed up to the server and began to launch raids to destroy each other’s work.
Today, the server is more chaotic still. Players are divided into two camps. “Rushers” are disorganized newbies seeking to infiltrate 2b2t’s settlements and claim them as their own. They battle the “veterans,” more experienced residents who have rigged the “spawn” (the point at which players arrive in the game) with traps to kill off new players.
The newbie invasion was triggered by TheCampingRusher, a YouTuber whose video exploring the server was posted on June 1 and already has over 2 million views. In the video, his elation is palpable as he enters this previously hidden world. Almost immediately after it was posted, new players began to flood into 2b2t, throwing the server deeper into chaos.
Since then, the battle lines have become more ambiguous: 2b2t’s oldest users have retreated to edges of the map to preserve their settlements and sit out the siege in peace, leaving the newbies to attack each other.
My Time in Minecraft Hell
Much of the appeal of 2b2t is about learning what is possible—a world with few limits other thanone’s will to power and survival. In the server, cuddly Minecraft becomes a horror game, one that demands a Zen-like sense of self-effacement as you die repeatedly and re-spawn back to where you started. In the chat window, a stream of insults and shitposting blends in with server updates. No arrival goes unannounced. No death goes unsung. While playing, I’m informed that a player called Dr Funky Pepper has just “become lava.” Two others get “slashed into gibs by a zombie pigman” and reduced to “a bloody meat pile with just fists.”
To traverse 2b2t is to feel lost and overwhelmed, and to play is to accept this pain and confusion as a condition of existence. The ordeal begins even before you enter: The queue to join the server is over 1,000 players long. A very slow-moving countdown appears on screen; when it reaches zero, you’re allowed in.
It took me three tries and over four hours to join 2b2t. It was worth the wait. I spawned before an abyss—I was standing looking at a heady drop into sea and stone and lava. After I overcame my virtual vertigo, I edged my way up a gigantic craggy mountain.
Hidden across the landscape are some especially cruel traps: fake sanctuaries that explode in flames, pits that drop you into a river of lava and false floors that open into prisons built from obsidian, with no way to dig out. (Players entombed there have no choice but to log out and sit through the queue all over again.)
To navigate this land requires an arsenal of hacked clients—altered versions of the game with enhancements, similar to cheats, like X-ray vision or teleporting. Popular cheats include the power to see through walls to find supplies and victims and one to improve aim. (This might explain how a figure in the far distance was able to shoot me down with a crossbow. In the dark.)
As I played, alerts in my chat window listed the deaths occurring by the second; the calming, ambient Minecraft theme song played as body after body hit the floor.
Nazi propaganda, racist slurs and a succession of death threats pour into the chat window with mechanical efficiency. Their sheer volume negates the effect, and they become part of the background. I want to beat this. I want to feel at home in chaos.
I too am cursing now, shouting very loudly at my screen. I fall. I re-spawn. I fall again.
A Story Written in Blood
For several years now, Devi Ever has been known on 2b2t as something of a pirate and a griefer (those who terrorize other players for their own amusement). She says the best sights in 2b2t are far out from spawn, logged by players on interactive maps where the distance is measured in bricks—one brick is roughly equal to a cubic meter. “The million [brick] mark…that’s where all the cool stuff is,” she says. “The thing I enjoyed the most wasn’t destroying, it was exploring.”
She adds, “Exploring 2b2t is like archaeology.… There’s so much that it says about the nature of Minecraft itself and about the design of the game. 2b2t deserves a book.”
As a seasoned player, Ever has access to the priority queue, which allows her to skip the four-hour wait (some fans believe this is an artificial barrier, one thrown up to slow anyone who joined after June 1, the date TheCampingRusher’s video went live). Players have approached her asking to buy her old accounts for their quick access privileges. Sometimes they’re looking to trade intel for espionage or offering payments of hundreds of dollars. Information is currency in 2b2t: Ever traded a spare account for the location of 2b2t’s fabled Jesus statue, built in homage to the Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro.
The server’s massive size and ephemeral nature make it difficult to track its history. Still, there are attempts to organize its past into a coherent narrative. Redditor ArchCrono, known in-game as ArchQuantum, authored a series of posts detailing 2b2t’s history, which eventually made it to the site’s front page. Their popularity is why he was asked to lead a faction into 2b2t, a challenge he reluctantly accepted.
Why do players queue for hours just to spawn and be killed off in seconds? “Minecraft notoriously lacks a standard story mode,” ArchCrono theorizes. “This is a very real void the developers have not chosen to directly address.”
2b2t provides a meta-narrative beyond the game, similar to the halftime show during sports broadcasts. Players post about the server on YouTube and Reddit, like amateur sports analysts. “If you are on 2b2t, what you do matters more than what you do on a single player or local setting, because it is available to so many people,” ArchCrono says. “The YouTube channels that cover 2b2t, particularly TheCampingRusher and FitMC , are providing commentary that crafts the plot of a story mode. When I posted on Imgur, I basically added an entire new section of plot.”
The rushers, then, are queuing up to play a role in Minecraft history.
Not Safe for Life
Hausemaster, the founder of 2b2t, is a quasi-mythical figure both praised and trolled . He says he set up the server in 2011, when Minecraft Multiplayer was first released. Players flooded in, forming settlements and communities. He picked 2b2t’s final setting, “anarchy” mode without moderation. “I wanted to see what destruction would be made, but also whether there would be connections between players in such a chaotic, rule-free environment.”
I assumed Hausemaster would disapprove of the current influx of rushers, but he’s happy to see the server getting attention, even if the world he helped create erupted in violence. “2b2t is definitely not ruined—in my opinion it’s how it should be: absolutely chaotic.”
2b2t gives players free rein to abuse, destroy and self-destruct. It is essentially nihilistic, as players thrash against the walls of their virtual cage, taking out their disaffection on the same technology they are addicted to. Their behavior is more than not safe for work: It is not safe for life itself.
Perhaps enduring this noxious landscape is ultimately 2b2t’s true appeal. “2b2 is about pride,” says Ever. “Pride in being able to flourish in what is considered the most notorious environment you can play in.”
Nobody survives very long in 2b2t—the pride comes from having died there.
Minecraft is a very popular game for a reason – it lets players experience a vast world that they can shape into their own, mining resources, crafting items, building structures and defending themselves against adversaries. Its clever concepts and throwback visual style have spread themselves across the gaming industry, defining the genre of world-building games.
Here, we’ve rounded up five entertaining titles inspired by the things that make Minecraft special without stealing its identity. If you like exploring vast, randomly generated worlds and changing them into creations of your own, you are sure to like at least one of these intriguing games. And if you don’t, there’s always one more Minecraft session to play!
Roblox
Roblox is a fantasy world in which you hang out and interact with other players’ blocky characters. You can participate in many activities, such as playing paintball, running a pizza shop, battling pirates and zombies, racing, and many other mini-games. The world-building aspect isn’t as prevalent as it is in Minecraft, but the sheer amount of mini-games and possibilities turns Roblox into quite the multiplayer adventure. You are, of course, free to message and chat other players to organize activities and have a good time. So if travelling across a big open world is something you’re into, you’re going to like Roblox as a more “civilized” alternative to Minecraft.
The Blockheads
Blockheads is a sandbox game inspired by Minecraft’s activities and blocky visual style. You are to explore, mine, craft and build things in a big and detailed game world. There’s a full temperature and climate system, season changes, an equator, and the frozen poles as well as cave systems, pools of water, deserts, and snowy mountains. You will have to keep watch over your blockheads in a randomly generated world – caring for their basic needs like food, clothing, sleep, and shelter; craft tools with the resources you find, such as precious stones and metals, or rare plants and animals. You can also build a boat and navigate the oceans guided by an accurate night sky. All adventurers are welcome!
Terraria
Terraria is a well-established Minecraft alternative where every world is unique – be it floating islands in the sky, or the deepest levels of The Underworld. You’ll be able to adventure to the ends of the Earth, battling villainous bosses along the way. The game features over 1300 crafting recipes for weapons, armor, potions, and other items. You will fight over 450 types of enemies and 20 bosses, mine more than a hundred block types, and explore over a dozen environments with their dynamic water & lava, or day and night cycles.
Growtopia
Growtopia is a sandbox platformer MMO where you get to build all sorts of things, such as houses, dungeons, songs, artworks, and puzzles. You will collaborate with millions of players, playing mini games like parkour, surgery, quizzes, PVP battles, capture the flag, and races. Advance your world by planting seeds to grow trees, trading items, exploring other people’s worlds, chat, and hear an original soundtrack.
On My Own
On My Own is a game of balancing between the serenity of experiencing the outdoors with the reality of struggling to survive in nature. You must stay alive by finding food, crafting useful items, and adapting to the changing seasons. There are four different “biomes” to explore, rendered in a throwback visual style with modern effects to the tune of an original soundtrack.
Minecraft is not your average video game. It’s phenomenally popular, yes, with more than 40 million people playing it every month. But Minecraft is a crossover hit: it’s the rare game that’s big among four-year-olds and forty-year-olds alike, and it boasts more female players than many other hit games. The second-bestselling game of all time, Minecraft has proven itself to be an enduring cultural phenomenon.
It’s also unique because it’s no longer just a form of entertainment: its endearing world of textured cubes is officially becoming an education product.
Microsoft snapped up the company behind Minecraft, Mojang, in 2014. Since the acquisition, one of Microsoft’s top priorities for Minecraft has been to develop it as a classroom tool. For years educators have been using the original game and its modified versions (mods) to teach subjects as diverse as ancient Roman history and computer programming. This flexibility has led Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a video game designer, to hail Minecraft as the equivalent of Legos or a microcomputer for the younger generation.
A human eye built in Minecraft Education Edition. (Credit: Xbox Wire)
“It’s game-changing because of the way it has broken the market and cultural barriers between commercially successful entertainment games and educational games,” says Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on learning and new media. “Specific educational features of Minecraft — shared virtual world, construction tools, hackability— are not new, but what’s really new is the fact that it has been put together in a package that is embraced at a massive scale by kids, parents, and educators.”
This fall, Microsoft plans to weaponize Minecraft in the war for classroom mind-share by selling an education edition. It could prove an unexpected advantage in Microsoft’s increasingly fierce battle with rivals Google and, to a lesser degree, Apple over the education market. Microsoft’s Windows operating system still rules the global education market, but Google Chromebooks, which are cheaper laptops designed to run Chrome OS and primarily use online apps, have grown to dominate U.S. classrooms. In 2015, Chromebooks topped 50 percent of personal computer sales in the U.S. K-12 education market for the first time, with Windows PCs trailing at 22 percent, according to a Futuresource Consulting report.
Microsoft has also been dueling with Google over education software, especially for managing and grading assignments. In April, it announced a Microsoft Classroom update to its Office 365 cloud service as a direct challenge to the Google Classroom and Google Apps for Education platforms. But a version of Minecraft tailored to K-12 classrooms could prove the truest arrow yet in Microsoft’s quiver as the tech giant aims to win over educators and students.
By the time Microsoft acquiredMinecraft, the game was five years old and had sold more than 50 million copies for PCs, smartphones, and video game consoles.
The game’s popularity grew in part because it was accessible: plenty of four-year-olds could start playing it with almost no instruction. But advanced players stayed engaged by discovering a complex world of hidden in-game mechanics and additional creative possibilities through player-made mods. In the game’s Survival Mode, players must withstand attacks by monsters while figuring out how to mine resources, farm animals, and crops; they also have to craft increasingly complex tools and technologies. In the sandbox-style Creative Mode, a player might build a virtual version of the Eiffel Tower. Or recreate the city of King’s Landing from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Or construct a working 32-bit calculator within the game.
But by 2014, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson had grown weary of managing the expectations and complaints of Minecraft’s player community. When he posted a half-joking message on Twitter asking if anyone wanted to buy him out, big companies took notice. He entertained offers from video game behemoths Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts before eventually going with Microsoft, according to Forbes Magazine.
On September 15, 2014, Microsoft announced the $2.5 billion deal to purchase Persson’s company, Mojang, and the rights to Minecraft. He and his co-founders gracefully bowed out and handed over the reins to Microsoft.
Most media attention at the time focused on how Microsoft could leverage the game to bolster its mobile presence and prop up the popularity of Windows. The following year, journalists gravitated toward Microsoft’s demonstration of an augmented-reality Minecraft as seen through HoloLens goggles. But a few shrewd observerspointed to education as the place where Microsoft could get a major boost out of Minecraft.
(Credit: Xbox Wire)
In the two years since Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang, Minecraft has continued to collect new players by the cartful. Sales have doubled to almost 107 million copies sold as of June 2016. If you were to count each copy sold as representing one person, the resulting population would be the world’s 12th largest country (after Japan). In 2016 alone, Minecraft has sold more than 53,000 copies on average each day.
But Microsoft has bigger plans for the game of cubes and creepers. Earlier this year, the tech giant made another acquisition that led directly to its new Minecraft: Education Edition initiative.
The MinecraftEdu story begins in 2011 with Joel Levin, a computer teacher at a New York City private school. Levin became a leader in Minecraft education by blogging about how he was using the original game in his classroom. He eventually joined two Finnish entrepreneurs in co-founding Teacher Gaming LLC and licensing Minecraft to create MinecraftEdu, a modified version that gives educators the tools to create lessons within the game.
By the time Microsoft approached Teacher Gaming, MinecraftEdu had been deployed in 7,000 classrooms across 40 countries. On January 19 this year, Microsoft announced it had bought MinecraftEdu and planned to build out its own version of Minecraft for classrooms called Minecraft: Education Edition.
Minecraft: Education Edition promises classroom management tools that will allow teachers to more easily coordinate students in a multiplayer environment. New tools will let teachers create their own lessons or use ready-made lesson plans, such as “City Planning for Population Growth,” “Exploring Factors and Multiples,” or “Effects of Deforestation,” according to a Microsoft spokesperson.
In June, Microsoft announced a free early access version of Education Edition. “More than 25,000 students and educators in over 40 countries around the world experienced the early access program and provided feedback to help us fine-tune the product,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. So far, though, not every feature of Education Edition is being met with whoops of joy. For example, Microsoft chose to include in the game virtual chalkboards — a decidedly old-fashioned tool plunked down into a 21st-century game.
“I would like it if what Microsoft had to say is that schools should be more like Minecraft, not that Minecraft should be more like a classroom,” said Chad Sansing, a web literacy curriculum developer at Mozilla and a former teacher, in a Motherboard interview.
UC-Irvine’s Mimi Ito, in her work using Minecraft to educate kids, has found the game better suited to less formal, more kid-native uses. In mixed-age summer camps and after-school programs, for example, she’s seen teenagers mentoring younger kids on shared Minecraft projects. “It’s magical for kids to connect with and learn from experts who are just a little bit older than them and who are passionate about the same things,” Ito says.
By tailoring Minecraft to formal school settings, Microsoft runs the risk of sacrificing some of the game’s inherent strengths. But it’s still a no-brainer for Microsoft to leverage Minecraft in its broader struggle with Google for control of the education market. Google may have Google Classroom to match Microsoft Classroom, but there’s nothing else quite like Minecraft.
Even if Minecraft: Education Edition falls short of conquering classrooms, plenty of schools, libraries, museums and summer camps will continue using the original game to captivate kids in more freewheeling learning environments. All Microsoft has to do is keep supporting it.
“I’ve been studying learning games and edutainment for 20 years,” Ito says, “and I actually never believed there would be a game that would really cross over between the commercial entertainment market and education in a mainstream way.”
Microsoft is right to keep burnishing its unusual jewel. When the kids get out of school, they’ll still be spending hours playing in their generation’s shared virtual sandbox. And wherever Minecraft goes, Microsoft is there.
