Minecraft is building itself a record-breaking reputation.

You’ll see it’s true for yourself if you read the Guinness World Records 2015 Gamer’s Edition. The block-building and survival-based sandbox game (which is out on just about every non-Nintendo platform imaginable) has tons of records listed in the book, including:

• Best-selling indie game: Total PC and Mac sales for Minecraft are at 16,176,201. Not bad for a studio with just 40 employees.
• Largest indie game convention: 7,500 people attended MineCon 2013 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 2 to Nov. 3, 2013. That’s a lot of people to gather for an event dedicated to just one game.
• First country modeled at full-scale in a video game: That would be Denmark, which the Danish Geodata Agency re-created in Minecraft to 1-to-1 scale.
• Most popular game beta: Minecraft’s beta had more than 10 million participants when it was active from Dec. 20, 2010 to Nov. 18, 2011
• Most-played Xbox Live game: Players of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition had spent a total of 1.75 billion hours as of May 2014.

The book also includes Minecraft-specific records, like “most concurrent players in one Minecraft world.” The  Guinness World Records 2015 Gamer’s Edition is out now for $15.

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Minecraft is a lot of different things to a lot of different people; a place to build a word processor, recreate Westeros or trap incredible monsters. For many players it’s simply about survival, which means making sure you have shelter at night, forging armor and weapons with which you can fend off attackers, and somehow finding food to keep your hunger meter full. It’s that last one that presented a problem for me when I picked the game up again recently.

I decided to stop eating meat over a year ago, around the time I turned 25. My family has a history of heart disease, and the way I saw it my life was practically half over. I also really like animals—and not just dogs, although they’re my favorites—and I got tired of killing them for their meat when I know full well there are ample alternatives in our modern society. I had to make a change. I started going to the gym, which hasn’t worked out so well, and I stopped eating meat—which has.

So now I’m a vegetarian, and I’m much happier. But when I started playing the Xbox One edition of Minecraft I found myself in a curious situation: how to play Minecraft successfully without killing any animals?

I wanted to see if I could play Minecraft as I live life: by doing as little harm as possible to my friendly animal neighbors.4

When Minecraft arrived on Xbox 360 in 2011 my friends and I delighted for hours and hours in the game’s splitscreen mode, crafting elaborate bases in which we squirreled away our valuables and set traps for one another. We experimented with redstone; I made a complex five-way track switcher—still one of my proudest gaming achievements—with help from a diagram online. We harassed one another constantly, but we played on “peaceful” difficulty so we wouldn’t have to deal with destructive creepers and that pesky hunger meter too.

I did occasionally crank up the difficulty, on Xbox 360 and again later when I built my first gaming PC. I’m not opposed to a challenge—the Souls games are some of my absolute favorites—and I wanted to feel that struggle. But the hunger thing vexed me, and I found myself spending way too much time hunting for pigs whose flesh I could roast for food. It was never long before the chicken drumsticks that represent your hunger started ticking down again, and farming seemed boring, so I eventually went back to peaceful mode and then lost interest in the game for a time.

When the Xbox One version came out I upgraded without thinking, knowing I’d probably get back into it at some point. And my prediction became prophesy when my girlfriend’s Minecraft-obsessed brother came to visit, his laptop in his bag and his pixelated pickaxe never far away. “Two can play that game,” I thought, meaning it literally. So I started it up and, knowing I’d quickly grow bored playing the same way I did three years ago, I selected “normal” difficulty. Daring, I know.

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I knew I could spend my time hunting pigs through the woods if I wanted to, but I wanted to see if I could play Minecraft as I live life: by doing as little harm as possible to my friendly animal neighbors.

But I’m also not the first person who’s had this thought. There are Minecraft Forum posts suggesting rules for a vegetarian challenge, and the same can be found on many other online communities. Some thoughtful players simply pose the question: “Do vegetarians avoid killing animals in-game?” One respondent says that any who do can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy, which I don’t necessarily agree with. Imposing your own external rule set on a game is nothing new; it’s called a metagame, and it’s common in communities ranging from competitive first-person shooter players to avid Pokémon trainers.

That’s how I saw my own Minecraft vegetarian challenge: as an extra set of rules that I hoped would force me to play the game more creatively and, ultimately, have more fun.

In the interest of honesty I have to admit that I got off to a rough start when I really quit eating meat back in 2013. I cheated. A few weeks in I drunkenly gorged myself on some home-smoked BBQ pulled pork, and for months I’d regularly eat fish, saying it was to ween myself off meat gradually, like a smoker chewing nicotine gum. I’ll still eat fish very occasionally, in sushi, because I really, really like sushi.7

My experience in Minecraft was similar. Although I didn’t have to resort to eating meat or even fish, I did cheat. I’d done a bit of research before starting my challenge in Minecraft, and had decided to start by farming wheat I could bake into bread. But the wheat seemed to take forever to grow, and in the meantime I was mining resources and trying to stay alive with just a single half heart because my hunger meter was constantly empty. I’d fall a few feet off a ledge and die instantly. It’s a pretty great analogy, actually.8

I had spawned and made my base in a jungle environment, so there were plenty of animals around. They proved a temptation—just until my crops started to grow!—but I resisted, instead abusing the game’s generous save system. I did this a lot during those first few hours, making a bit of progress, getting killed by an errant mob or a careless step, and reloading to a few minutes earlier. That probably explains why I felt like the wheat wasn’t growing, but sitting around waiting for it was like watching low-res paint dry, and I was determined to have fun.

So just like in life, I eventually found a rhythm. The wheat did grow, and I quickly baked more bread than I could carry. I planted a mushroom farm in a dark corner of my mine so I could make stew. I eventually found a carrot on a zombie (I still don’t really get why, but that’s Minecraft) and I started multiplying those in the ground too. I added sugarcane to my farm so I could make cakes and cookies—you have to treat yourself sometimes—and I planted two rows of pumpkins, though you can’t even eat them. I just like the way they look on my farm (update: apparently I can make pumpkin pie! Yay! Thanks commenters).

I don’t think any of the blocky cows and sheep that wander near my jungle home are aware of the fate they avoided when I spawned into their world instead of some other player

Yes, I’m now, for the first time, a self-sustaining Minecraft player. It turns out challenging yourself pays off.9

I don’t think any of the blocky cows and sheep that wander near my jungle home are aware of the fate they avoided when I spawned into their world instead of some other player, but that’s part of the beauty of animals. They’re wonderfully naive. I did befriend a dog, using bones from a hostile skeleton—it was self defense!—and I’ve been trying to tame a cat, though just like in real life that’s significantly more challenging. I’m feeding it fish, which I count as the natural order.10

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I do object on some level to the hunger meter being represented by those flesh popsicles, which look less appetizing to me with every day I spend not indulging in them. If I was on PC I could probably mod those out, but oh well. I’m on the right track, and I’m not going to start over now.

Every time I pick Minecraft back up I discover something new that I love about it. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s remained so popular for so long: there’s always more to discover. And I’ve still barely mined the surface. I’m building a picturesque home block-by-block, and I have a minecart track with some simple redstone mechanisms to take me between my farm and house and mines. But I’ve never brewed a potion, or traded with a villager, or defeated the Ender Dragon or the Elder Guardian (or even seen them, for that matter).

I’m excited to keep playing and discover everything that’s been added since the last time I was into Minecraft, and there are definitely lots of unknowns. But one thing I am certain of is that I’ll never again find myself chasing a pig through the woods with a sword in Minecraft.

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For the first time ever, Mojang now has the ability to see how many people are playing Minecraft — as it happens — on PC.

And as of 9:20 AM EST, there were one million people playing Minecraft at a single moment. Not impressed? Considering 9:20 AM isn’t the peak time that people play Minecraft, that number will be spiking up at a certain time in the day.

The million morning Minecraft-ers count only looks at individuals playing on PC (Win/OS X/Linux), versions 1.3 and higher. That’s a lot of people not included in the count. Minecraft is available on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Vita, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, there are plenty of people with these devices and plenty of them bought Minecraft.

All of this news was obtained from Nathan Adams, a developer at Mojang. While he revealed this news the less thrilled fans questioned whether or not the ability to change names was coming to Minecraft. The answer is, “Very soon, yes.”

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There was a time not so long ago when Minecraft was actually a game. Now, it’s an insane sandbox where people build all kinds of incredibly complex things… like a word processor… out of blocks.

This crazy contraption is the work of a a third-year robotics student who goes by the name of Koala_Steamed on YouTube. It’s the result of nearly two years of painstaking work inside the Minecraft world. That’s not continuous, mind you. Breaks were obviously taken to do things like attend classes, use the washroom, and interact with people and things that had curves.

In the comments on his video, Koala also clarifies that it was built completely without the use of command blocks. In fact, it’s all running off a single trail of redstone. It has a predictably pixelated display that measures just five characters by ten characters, and it can handle just about any character you can throw at it: letters (bother upper and lower case), numbers, and common symbols are no problem.

Koala’s creation can even save files to and load them from integrated storage. The next step: adding support for keyboard shortcuts like a desktop text editor (control+L to load files, etc.). After that, the plan is to add RAM and turn this thing from a word processor into an actual computer.

It’s fun enough to watch, but you can actually take a closer look at Koala’s word processor if you like. The entire world is available via a Mediafire download so you can fire it up on your own system and see exactly how this amazing creation was put together.

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There is going to be a new way for gamers to explore the world of Minecraft soon as Mojang have revealed a Minecraft: Story Mode is in development. The adventure series is being created by TellTale Games and the first of the episodes will make its way out in 2015 for he Xbox, PlayStation and the PC.

The Minecraft Story Mode is going to be an original and new story that will depend on the choice of the player. The game isn’t going to have Steve as the lead character. Mojang said that the game is going to be cool. It won’t rely on players owning Minecraft and the Minecraft community is helping, though how we are not sure about.

Along with the Minecraft Story mode game, there is also going to be a movie based around Minecraft. More details are to be released early 2015.

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Not too long ago, this game made headlines due to its developer Mojang’s recent $2.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. That’s way more than the price of recent acquisitions like Facebook’s Instagram takeover ($1 billion) and Yahoo’s Tumblr ($1.1 billion). For many over here, it came as a shock because a lot of people in Bangladesh are actually almost completely unaware of Minecraft.

WHAT IS MINECRAFT?
It’s a sandbox game. And it’s just that. You get to do and create whatever you want. Ever wanted to make a replica of your own house but with a 24/7 supply of electricity? Now you can with Minecraft. It’s like Lego for adults who can’t afford Lego. A bunch of survival elements can be thrown in. These involve Creepers which creep up on you and explode. There’s an abundance of spiders, skeletons and fish which try to kill you. Except you kill them and harvest their bones and string to build your castle on their dead bodies. Minecraft is what would happen if you were thrown in the middle of Rangpur with nothing except your bare hands to build civilisation. And if you had the work ethic of 10,000 Egyptian slaves to go with it.  Unlike Terraria, which is Minecraft’s 2D action-adventure cousin of the same genre, Minecraft does not have any quests.

WHY IT’S WORTH THE PRICE TAG
According to Satya Nadella, “If you talk about STEM* education, the best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it’s Minecraft.” But there are more factors at work over here. All over the world, kids love Minecraft. A few weeks back, I saw a post in DSD about a woman asking what platform (Xbone, PS4, PC) would be best for her eight-year-old daughter’s requests for a console to play Minecraft. This was after the kid wanted to move out of the Android version of Minecraft on her tablet. When I was eight, the maximum creativity I could express on a computer was on MS Paint and now we have kids everywhere building houses with Minecraft. For Microsoft, owning Minecraft is a statement—it’s about owning the childhood of a
generation.

THE EXTENT OF MINECRAFT’S CREATIVITY
A group of players made a computer inside Minecraft. So to speak, you can create a computer inside a world inside a computer. Although, the Minecraft computer is very basic and can only load 16 lines of code into its RAM, it’s still a feat. Now, for all the Game of Thrones fans out there, a group made an exact replica of King’s Landing. The amount of detail put into the map is insane. A lot of gamers will think that with enough people, an exact replica of Dhaka is very much possible or maybe something less ambitious like your school classroom just as you remember it. It’ll be even more fun if you can get your friends to do it along with you. For some, recreating places from memories can be an extremely rewarding pastime.

MINECRAFT IN BANGLADESH
It took me quite some to actually figure out where the Bangladeshi players are. After doing several searches on Facebook, I finally found the 50 member Facebook group “Minecrafters BD” where I was welcomed quite warmly. Here is a community that has been struggling to play together the video game they love. Their dedication is one to admire and it’s just the thing that often breeds great gaming communities. Every now and then, one of the members host private servers on their PCs but that just doesn’t cut it when you’re aiming for a large community. According to one of the members, Istiak Al Nur Niloy, “It’s nearly impossible to set up a server for 24/7 uptime let alone moderate the server to keep everything in check. We as the hosts have no admin power and no one can keep their PC running 24/7. The servers that we are hosting irregularly at the moment are enough for the community but if a time comes that when we need a 24/7 server we can always rent servers from providers like Atrinos. For now the dream of a 24/7 dedicated server sounds a bit far-fetched.”

GRAPHICS?
There’s another problem when it comes to attracting newer players who’re into flashy games to Minecraft: the graphics of the game are pretty blocky and old-school. But to that, Siam Shafiq, who hosted a Minecrafters BD server at the time, said “Overall with some time and dedication I believe Minecraft can take off in Bangladesh but only if the people judge the game by its gameplay, not its graphics. Based in a 3D world of cubes it’s only normal to have that sort of retro graphics but that’s the entire point.” But then again, if you treat each block like pixels are on a screen, a lot of detail CAN be added to the game if one is patient with the amount of blocks taken.

While Minecraft is taking off globally, very little is done over here in Bangladesh. Some of the players urge the ISPs to host a dedicated server like they do for CoD and Counter-Strike but until the community grows enough to turn the extremely stiff heads of Bangladeshi ISPs, there’s little that can be done; unless you are like Ayaan Manzur from Minecrafters BD and his friends who rent a server for Tk. 400 every month from Singapore.

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Notch now owns a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion, but we bet he’d rather live in this swank Minecraft recreation of the property…or maybe not. We can’t say what he’d really like.

Last week, Minecraft creator Notch bought a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion before Jay-Z and Beyonce could snag the property. We all stared in awe at the extravagance, but now we can stare at awe at this Minecraft recreation of the home. Notch’s life has started to come full circle; pretty soon his entire life will be inside the matrix.

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Minecraft has been making a lot of news this year with the game debuting on a number of consoles. One of the biggest news involved Mojang studio being bought by Microsoft.

The game’s 1.6.4 update was recently released exclusively on the Xbox One and Xbox 360.

This move did not surprise many as Microsoft now owns the game and will naturally look to provide updates to its own consoles first.

Earlier this year, the game debuted on next generation consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One. A subsequent update titled “Horses” was then reported on the way. Then last week it was announced that Mojang, the studio responsible for producing the game, had launched a collaboration with Telltale Games to create a whole new game titled “Minecraft: Story Mode.”

“Story Mode” will follow the formula of other games released by Telltale such as “Game of Thrones: Iron From Ice” and “Walking Dead.” The games concentrate more on solving puzzles and decision making, which will in turn influence how events in the game play out.

As for the 1.6.4 update, it comes with a new “Tutorial World” where players can learn more about the game’s existing and new features. As for the update’s main feature, it involves the addition of horses which players can tame and ride. Additionally the horses can use their own armor.

The update also brings new enemies for the players in the forms of Witches, Wither Skeletons and Bats. Fireworks also make an appearance in this update and they are programmed in such a way that they are launched at certain times during the day.

Cinemablend says Mojang plans to release the 1.6.4 update for Playstation consoles in the U.S. shortly and it could even happen within the next few weeks. Those who have Playstation consoles in Europe have already received the update.

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At long last, kids ruled in 2014. Books aimed at them have often figured in the top 10 of the all-year sales chart for printed books, but in the respective heydays of JK Rowling, Stephenie (Twilight) Meyer and Suzanne (The Hunger Games) Collins the rest of the elite group usually consisted of grown-up titles and there was always a chance that one such mega-seller – by Dan Brown, say, or EL James – would pip them to the top spot.

This year, in contrast, seven of the top tier books including the No 1 – by John Green, David Walliams and Jeff Kinney, plus four Minecraft manuals – are for children or young adults and an eighth, Guinness World Records, is predominantly aimed at them.

The Minecraft books (2, 5, 6, 7) are 80-page guides to a hugely successful video game in which players either build structures or battle enemies; launched in Sweden in 2009, it passed 100 million registered users in February this year. Published by Egmont (the UK arm of a Danish media group, the name possibly signalling Beethovenian ambitions), the four titles spearheading this new Viking invasion achieved combined sales of around 1,700,000.

What’s fascinating about this is that there should be a market for video game spin-off books at all, let alone such a stunning one. There’s no shortage of Minecraft tutorials on YouTube, in its own online domain, but rather reassuringly young gamers en masse evidently felt a need for a hardback handbook opened next to their PCs – a demand reflecting the relative robustness of manuals of all types and children’s books, compared to other genres whose print sales and revenue have been hit harder by readers’ inexorable (though possibly slowing) flight to ebooks.

Being a hit on screen first, or as well, is not a phenomenon confined to the Egmont quartet. Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid existed first in an online version before becoming a book. Walliams was a TV writer and actor long before taking up children’s fiction. Green has a sideline as a video blogger, or vlogger; whereas that’s Alfie Deyes’s (29) day job, with his jokey book as a spin-off.

If you took the Minecraft books away, 2014’s top 10 would look very similar to 2013’s: the latter also included Walliams’s and Kinney’s latest offerings, Guinness World Records and Dan Brown’s Inferno (then No 2, now No 8). The Fault in Our Stars, Green’s 2012 love story narrated by a teenager with cancer – widely seen as a YA book, though not officially classified as one – was at No 17 a year ago, and owes its spectacular subsequent ascent to the screen adaptation. Similarly, Gone Girl, also originally published in 2012, is at No 4 two and a half years later (it was No 3 in 2013) thanks to David Fincher’s film. Its author Gillian Flynn is the only woman to make the top 10.

Just like YouTube idols transformed into writers, reminiscing celebrities capitalise on their screen fame (usually on television) to win publishing deals; but the 2014 list confirms that the public long ago got out of the habit of seeing the resulting books as ideal Christmas presents. Besides the late Lynda Bellingham’s autobiography (12), two sports books, by Guy Martin (32) and Roy Keane (37), are the only hardback memoirs in the top 100. Yet publishers still seem in denial about the once-mighty subgenre’s slump, shelling out for much-hyped autumn offerings from John Cleese, Stephen Fry, John Lydon, Graham Norton and others that all flopped.

More surprising is the decline of cookery titles, which until recently gave crime and children’s fiction a good fight for the highest positions. The genre’s talisman Jamie Oliver, who up to 2012 routinely occupied a top 10 spot and for several years running was the Christmas-week No 1, now languishes at No 23. Mary Berry is ahead of him at No 13, but you’d expect her to be higher, given The Great British Bake Off’s vast audience.
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The Hairy Bikers (47) and Tom Kerridge (77) are well below their 2013 positions, while other TV cooks who once seemed set for annual hits – Lorraine Pascale, Nigel Slater, Paul Hollywood – are nowhere to be seen. It appears counterintuitively possible that, while Minecraft addicts are turning to print manuals, their parents are turning away from them, increasingly getting their recipes online rather than from food-stained Jamie or Nigella recipe books on the kitchen table.

With memoirs and cookbooks both ailing, this has been another annus horribilis for non-fiction: ever fewer “serious” factual titles do well enough to make the top 100 – in an especially feeble 2014 showing, only Bill Bryson’s One Summer (54) really qualifies besides Alan Johnson’s Orwell prize-winner, This Boy – while at the other end of the spectrum once-bankable genres are losing their commercial potency. Both less serious and less sellable, then: not a good combination.

Non-fiction’s woes have allowed fiction to surge into the positions vacated, notably the places just below the top 10 where celebrity cooks and comedians formerly roamed in packs. Here can be found, not just commercial crowd-pleasers, but literary titles feted by critics and award judges – though some are missing.

There is, for example, no sign of the winners of the Folio, Baileys Women’s fiction or Man Booker prizes (George Saunders, Eimear McBride and Richard Flanagan, respectively), or indeed the 2013 Booker winner (Eleanor Catton) in paperback; all were probably seen as too forbidding. Yet the Costa awards did much better, with Kate Atkinson’s novel prizewinner (11) and Nathan Filer’s first novel and overall winner (26) both well placed. Shoppers also picked out two attractive losing finalists, Donna Tartt (14) from the Baileys shortlist and Karen Joy Fowler (42) from the Booker last six.

Amid these garlanded titles can also be found Girl Online (28), by (or rather “by”, as it was ghost-written) Zoe Sugg, AKA Zoella, another YouTube vlogger. The book, and Penguin’s handling of its authorship, have been much criticised but it pulled off something remarkable in being the third highest placed 2014 novel; outselling the likes of John Grisham, James Patterson, Sophie Kinsella and Jodi Picoult, even though these authors’ efforts were paperbacks available for most of the year and hers was a pricier late-November hardback.

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The announcement this week that Telltale Games are turning to one of the most popular video games of all-time, the Mojang-developed Minecraft, for their latest series came completely out of left field.

With little details emerging other than a promise to make the game “an entirely new Minecraft experience” that still manages captures the spirit of the massive sandbox title, speculation has been rife as to what exactly gamers can expect from Minecraft: Story Mode’s 2015 premiere.

With several members of our staff here at Power Up Gaming classing ourselves as diehard fans of both Minecraft and Telltale, we’re discussing today whether or not we think the game has serious potential to become another masterpiece in interactive storytelling, or if it’s simply a shameless cash-in. Do we think The Walking Dead developer have bitten off more than they can chew, or has Minecraft’s freedom handed them a great opportunity?

Harry Bowers: Telltale’s announcement of their latest series, Minecraft: Story Mode, comes as pretty topical to me, because Minecraft PS4 is just about all I’ve been playing for the past few weeks. I’ve fallen deep into that block-sized hole all over again. For this reason, the announcement has filled me with equal parts dread and optimism. On one side I see a game completely unconducive with the Telltale treatment; but on the other, I’m looking at two studios responsible for some of gaming’s greatest adventures.

What is Minecraft without its trademark open-ended hijinks? The answer feels pretty uncertain right now. Minecraft is distinct from Telltale’s previous fancies – The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones – in that it deals, not in blood and back-stabbery, but learning and whimsy. Sure, there’s dark dungeons and the cold, hard necessities of survival, but everything is realised in a charming, kid-friendly dressage. Exploration is the driving force; heavyweight narrative punches need not apply. In fact, Mojang’s announcement infographic, the charming Info Quest II, hit the nail on the head:

“Telltale’s other games are awesome, but they’re usually set in universes packed with cool characters and narrative arcs. Minecraft doesn’t have those things.

“Our games has consistent physics, a bundle of mobs, and a distinctive look, but no real story to speak of. You make it yourself through playing!”

That, for me, is where the premise starts to get shaky. Will the cartoony antics of Steve and his whole block-headed entourage be able to recapture the emotional heft that Telltale have been acclaimed for? It’s pretty unlikely. What little information we currently have all seems to point towards a very different game to what we’re used to. For Telltale, this is uncharted territory. What’s going to keep die-hard Telltale addicts coming back for more? Telltale need to master a radically different form of entertainment, fast. To make things even harder, they have to do so in a way which will keep players compelled for upwards of a six-month release window.

Telltale have built themselves a huge mountain to climb; the methods unknown and results uncertain. But, in some weird way, it feels right exactly because of this. Telltale proffered acclaim back in 2012 with The Walking Dead: Season One because they did something no one else was really doing. Moreover, it was truly fantastic. The birth of Minecraft: Story mode strikes me as nothing less than a bold continuation of this rich legacy. Outside of the comics, outside of the show, The Walking Dead completely stood up by itself as an unforgettable narrative. Why can’t Minecraft: Story Mode do just that, too?

Of all the projects Telltale have undertaken in the past, Minecraft offers the most opportunity for creative license. Watching the proven minds behind Telltale get that little extra leg room to be even more brilliant is an exciting prospect. Even more importantly, Minecraft: Story Mode marks these guys taking one more timid step toward crafting their very own IP. So, no matter what the outcome, I can’t help but look eagerly at Minecraft’s latest iteration as one big golden promise of future brilliance.

I don’t for one second doubt that Minecraft: Story Mode will be a good game; but I worry that, thanks to the nature of the beast, it won’t quite reach the ‘great’ heights that we have come to expect from Telltale. I anxiously wait to be proven wrong.

Chris Mawson: Like so many others, Mojang and Telltale’s announcement of Minecraft: Story Mode took me completely aback earlier in the week. My first reaction was to check the calendar… nope, definitely not April 1. As a great lover of both Minecraft and Telltale’s narrative-rich adventure series, including The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, you’d think I’d be overcome with excitement at the news. And though while I am looking forward to seeing where the developers go with the concept, my position is more that of a cautious optimist.

With Telltale’s recent releases in Tales From the Borderlands and Game of Thrones, I was already beginning to question whether or not the time is nigh for the developer to try their hand at their own IP, rather than cashing in on (though admittedly treating successfully, and in many cases, reinvigorating) an existing franchise. Their announcement this week further provokes my skepticism.

On the other hand, while the developer could be accused of playing it safe by turning to yet another popular property for their latest effort, little else gives them as much freedom to put their own stamp firmly on the game as Minecraft is able to. Yes, it’s undoubtedly and transparently a cash-in that Telltale will hope will draw in Minecraft’s gargantuan audience. But with a proven track record and clear respect for the fans of Mojang’s title – collaborating closely with the developer and promising to take on board the ideas and wishes of game’s existing fan base – I’m looking forward to seeing what they’re able to do with the themes and ideations expressed in the hit sandbox game.

To create a game that adequately lives up to the Minecraft name is a massive undertaking. But if anyone can pull it off, Telltale can.

Scott Russell: Ever since playing Tales of Monkey Island, I’ve loved Telltale’s awesome brand of story-centric adventures; that one in particular had some hilarious moments of piracy. They may dabble around with clunky mechanics, but in no way does that diminish their expertise in producing games that grip, shock and amaze. The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us are just two instances that highlight Telltale’s ability to deliver wonderful experiences with varying themes and styles. This can only be a benefit for Minecraft: Story Mode, especially when you consider the blocky, and abstract, nature of the source material.

Invigorating different intellectual properties is definitely Telltale’s bag. The Walking Dead franchise is no lacklustre affair by any means, but the story of Lee and Clementine brings life to a world that is solely at its best in the static pages of a comic book; Fables (the series on which The Wolf Among Us is based) has been significantly improved upon through a deliciously smooth art style and a brilliant cast of fairytale denizens; and the already frantic suspense of Game of Thrones has increased thanks to Telltale’s pressing, and oppressively frenetic, systems of choice.

Minecraft is a game that houses a universe; it’s infinite. But Story Mode could bring something that adds to its infinity: a truly fascinating and original narrative. Now, I have no idea what that could entail; it could lead me on a trail to make some tough decisions regarding sand, but don’t take that as gospel. Though there is one thing that I am certain of: it that will contain heart, excitement and a whole load of Minecraft charm. Oh, and that clunkiness I mentioned before? Perfect for shambling over blocks.

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LearnToMod, a software that allows users to learn programming inside of the popular computer game Minecraft, is now available to preorder for $30/year at http://www.learntomod.com. The software will be delivered Jan. 15.

LearnToMod seeks to inspire a new generation of young programmers by allowing students to explore their favorite video game, Minecraft, in a new way. The software allows students to learn the fundamental concepts of programming while they add new features (called “mods”) to Minecraft.

“Students have been coming into our classrooms for years raving about Minecraft. It dawned on us that the video game could be the perfect tool for teaching kids how to code,” explains Stephen Foster, CEO and lead software developer of ThoughtSTEM. ThoughtSTEM has been teaching kids across the greater San Diego area how to code for the last two years. More recently, ThoughtSTEM has put their energy into developing LearnToMod, a software for teaching kids how to mod (i.e. code) Minecraft.

With LearnToMod, students learn how to code through hundreds of video tutorials and puzzles that teach them everything from how to create houses at the click of a button to how to design games within the game, like Portal or Tetris. Students can even create custom blocks and items within Minecraft by importing new textures. Soon, the software will allow students to program the artificial intelligence of entire “bot” armies.

“Kids all over the world love Minecraft. Unlike most other video games, Minecraft is completely moddable, which gives it the potential to be a great educational tool. Now, LearnToMod is teaching kids around the world to code through Minecraft,” says Sarah Esper, CTO of ThoughtSTEM. “In the past two months, over 100,000 lines of code have been written by LearnToMod Beta users. We’ve never seen kids so motivated to learn coding.”

For the last three months, over 1,000 kids from 44 countries have been Beta testing the LearnToMod software. LearnToMod is also being tested by over 100 school teachers in classrooms across the United States. “We’re developing tools to make the software really easy for teachers to use. We want to empower teachers to be able to create classroom activities and custom lesson plans inside of Minecraft,” says Foster. ThoughtSTEM is currently offering the software for free to low-income schools, encouraging them to teach coding in the classroom.

The LearnToMod software implements the best practices learned by the Computer Science Education research community in its coding tutorials and puzzles. LearnToMod developers, Stephen Foster and Sarah Esper, are PhDs specializing in Computer Science Education, with over 15 years of experience developing curriculum and writing software and games for teaching coding. The software aims to make the act of learning how to code as active and engaging as possible.

More information about LearnToMod can be found at: http://www.learntomod.com.

About ThoughtSTEM:
Founded in 2012 by three PhD students with a dream, ThoughtSTEM had humble beginnings teaching after-school and summer camp coding programs for kids around San Diego. Today, ThoughtSTEM develops innovative educational software for teaching coding to K-12 students worldwide. In addition to LearnToMod, ThoughtSTEM was recently funded on Kickstarter to develop a 3-D immersive video game that teaches coding called CodeSpells.

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It looks like Microsoft has finally persuaded Mojang to port Minecraft to Windows Phone, following the $2.5 billion acquisition of the small studio.

Minecraft is available on almost every platform, including iOS and Android, but has not made its Windows Phone until today. The lack of users on Windows Phone has obviously put the port low on Mojang’s priority list, especially with updates to the PC version.

Xbox Chief Phil Spencer did confirm Windows Phone would see Minecraft Pocket Edition sometime in the near future. The game is available for $6.99 and is a fan favorite on iOS and Android—even with the lack of features compared to the PC version.

Mojang has not released solid numbers for mobile and has not shown the difference between PC, Xbox, PlayStation, iOS and Android sales. It is an interesting query, considering how popular Minecraft is on all platforms.

It is unclear how active the Mojang team will be, now it is a part of Microsoft. The game studio at Microsoft is rather large, working with several third party developers on ports and new features to make sure they work well before release.

Mojang also lost a few of its programmers when acquired. There is no confirmation on how many moved over to Microsoft and how many decided to drop out of the project. A few weeks before the acquisition, Mojang pushed out the 1.8 update to Minecraft.

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