Ten-year-old Jillian and Colby Wagner love Minecraft and are dressed in their favorite Minecraft outfits.
Minecraft is an online video game that allows players to construct three-dimensional virtual worlds out of textured cubes. As they build cities, they combat villains, like the Creeper, an exploding creature whose attack is dreaded by all Minecraft players.
Although their parents, Brad and Jamie Wagner, have to limit the kids’ screen time, they like that Minecraft isn’t your typical video game.
“Minecraft allows the kids to use their imagination with building, and it teaches them survival skills by having them create resources like farms and crops,” Jamie Wagner said.
Jillian and Colby like it because they can play together; collaborating and helping each other build their virtual environments.
“I love Minecraft. It’s my favorite thing to play,” Jillian said.
Jillian and Colby are both wearing Minecraft T-shirts and stocking caps depicting a Minecraft creeper. Both were Christmas gifts from their grandparents. Jillian collects microfigures, and she is holding the Minecraft character Steve on a horse. Colby collects Minecraft Legos and plush toys.
“We wear our shirts to school a lot, but we can’t wear the hat in school, just to school,” Colby said.
These are the Alexes I know, I know, these are the Alexes I know.
Minecraft
This week, Minecraft on all Xbox and PlayStation consoles will receive an update. While some of the new features will vary between the two platforms, they will all share one new addition in common: a free set of female “skins” for the game’s main character.
The “Alex” skin pack, which launched on the PC version in August and the mobile version in December, will broaden the default options for the game’s avatar for all console players on Wednesday. Alex’s default style is a mess of red hair tied up in a ponytail that has been drawn in such a way that it appears as pixels on her shoulder. Alex, just like the male “Steve” character before her, comes in eight versions in all, which means Alex also gets a “boxer,” “cyclist,” and even “Scottish” style. (There’s one exception: “Tuxedo Steve” is balanced with “Pantsuit Alex.”)
This news follows last week’s Temple Run 2 update, which added the series’ first free default female character. These changes come after a 12-year-old girl wrote a Washington Post story in March in which she concluded that most popular “endless runner” games on iOS and Android forced users to pay if they wanted to switch from a male character to a female one—and that over half of the games didn’t offer female characters at all. As that author concluded, “these biases affect young girls like me. The lack of girl characters implies that girls are not equal to boys and they don’t deserve characters that look like them.”
On Wednesday, PlayStation versions of Minecraft will also get the Simpsons skin pack that launched on Xbox in January, while the Xbox 360 version will be updated with more of the songs that newer-gen versions have already had for some time. (And if you care, there are more 360 achievements as well).
Newzoo and Octoly have begun tracking what games on YouTube are attracting the most views. The two companies have created a list that breaks down their total views, their share of the top 20 games on YouTube, and how the content breaks down between official sources and fan-made videos.
You can go to Newzoo’s website to see the full list, but the top ten games are as follows.
1. Minecraft – 3.934 billion views 2. Grand Theft Auto – 1.393 billion views 3. Five Nights At Freddy’s – 1.273 billion views 4. Call of Duty – 851 million views 5. FIFA – 770 million views 6. Garry’s Mod – 690 million views 7. League of Legends – 667 million views 8. Mario – 547 million views 9. Counter-Strike – 362 million views 10. Dota 2 – 282 million views
The next Australian national park could be designed by Minecraft fans, in a new project by the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges natural-resources management board.
The South Australian State Government is inviting young fans to design their ideal national park via the sandbox game Minecraft.
The winning designs will guide the next national-park upgrades in the area, worth around $10 million. The competition is open for upper primary school students in years four, five, six, and seven in Adelaide and Adelaide Hills. Participants will be judged on their design’s sustainability and realism. This could include bike trails, wheelchair accessibility, and campsites. To be considered, all entries must include five screenshots of their creation and a short three-minute narrated video clip of the scene.
Mojang have just released a brand new beta build of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, version 0.11.0 beta 6.
The news was announced Johan Bernhardsson, a game developer at Mojang, who has been working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition. Speaking on the social networking website Twitter, Bernhardsson simply revealed that “Beta 6 released” followed by “still no skin packs but we are working on them.”
Despite skin packs not being included the team is one step closer, as a new feature that has been added is the “skin selection player model rotation”. The only other new feature is that players are now able to swap the items then have equipped on the selection bar.
According to Tommaso Checchi Mojang hasn’t managed to fix as many this as they had hoped; commenting “MCPE build 6 is out! We’ve all been part of those ‘large team’ talks so it doesn’t fix too many things, though”. The meetings Checchi is speaking of are synchronization talks between the Mojang team and those based in Redmond who are also working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition.
Here’s a complete list of bug fixes that are included in Build 0.11.0 beta 6:
Fixed items in chest not saving when quitting
Creative/survival mode change works again
Always Day switch works again
Edited world names are now saved
Corrected entity duplication in multiplayer
Spawned players will now have the correct rotation without interpolation
Creative list was incorrect sometimes after connecting to a server
Fixed a cause of lag on the world list under slow networks
Fixed possible attacks by servers on server list
Fixed crash after death and respawning multiple times
Fixed crash when disconnecting from server
Riding non-existent entities on multiplayer could crash the game
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