Go Build Your World
Exodus 20:11 tells us, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.” Boy, that was fast! Humans, like their Creator, also create worlds. When we were five we built worlds with Lego. Authors create whole worlds with words. Video game designers create worlds with incredibly lifelike computer graphics. Not all of us have the skills to create these amazing human generated worlds, but we can sure have fun trying or simply enjoying what others have made!
Sandbox redefined
Creating our own computer worlds online has become a popular pastime. “Sandbox”-type games–those with a great degree of freedom of movement and creative potential–are immensely popular. Boasting an active user population of more than 120 million people worldwide, Minecraft is the king of them all. Created by Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson and released in 2009, Minecraft was quickly enhanced with the additions of survival mode and other components by 2011. It picked up fans and kept them with constant updates and additions to the game so there was always something new. By 2017 Minecraft had been sold to Microsoft which pushed the game’s accessibility onto platforms other than the PC, including Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo. Writing for the Red Bull gaming community, Joakim Henningson states, “It’s safe to say that, nowadays, Minecraft is more than just a game. Its impact on our society and the popularity it holds, has seen it being transformed into movies, documentaries, novels, physical merchandise and music. It is applicated in education, planning of infrastructure and habitat studies. Almost wherever we look, Minecraft’s imprint is visible.”
Why is it so fun? Common Sense Media describes Minecraft in a nutshell: “The first thing you do in the game is create a world and name it. Then you set off exploring it and building it as you go. You might pick up some wood from a tree and hone it into a batch of sticks. You can add more wood to the sticks and make a pickax. With the pickax, you can mine some stone to build a house. And so goes the cycle of the game. While you’re exploring, you might encounter characters called hostile mobs, which could be spiders, zombies, and endermen (black creatures with glowing eyes). Depending on the difficulty level you set, you can track your character’s health stats and maintain them as you’re building your world. The story in Minecraft is whatever you want it to be, and you can play it by yourself or against others in multiplayer.” Zombies and making stuff? We’re all over that!
Creative Mode to the extreme
What kind of things can we build there? The only limit is our imagination. From a humble (zombie proof) cottage to an amazing fantasy landscape, we can build just about anything. Pocket-lint offers photos in their article 32 incredible Minecraft creations that will blow your mind. Contributing editor Maggie Tillman writes, “Finding the best Minecraft creations is a bit of a job, but Pocket-lint has rounded up some of the most incredible examples. Straight from the overactive imaginations of several Minecraft builders, many of these creations will blow your mind.” Presenting builds of a crashed airplane in a forest, a Game of Thrones inspired city, Star Trek’s USS Enterprise and more, these astonishing creations were made by users around the world.
As fun as it is to build cool stuff, Minecraft offers adventure as well. In the survival mode portion of the game building is still required, but survival is the reason for building! Writing for Coderkids.com, Jeff Ward explains, “Minecraft comes with five modes, but the two primary modes for kids to focus on at first are survival and creative. In Survival mode, you have to build up a place to stay the night until you have the weapons necessary to fend off the mobs (enemies), and you can die and respawn. So a focus of the game is building a mob-resistant shelter and building up your cache of weapons and tools to gain experience. In Creative mode, you can build whatever you want and not have to worry about mobs or dying.”
Survival mode beefed up
For those who like a bit more adventure, Minecraft also offers a way to spice things up a bit. “[V]anilla Minecraft Survival may not be exciting enough for everyone,” says Zackerie Fairfax of Screenrant. “That’s where new Survival maps and difficulty settings come into play. With the right maps, gameplay mechanics, and difficulty, defeating the Ender Dragon can feel like a completely different experience. Sure, players will still be mining, crafting, and placing blocks with the overall same objective as before, but there are some incredibly fun ways to spice up Minecraft’s Survival Mode.” For his complete list of action upgrade recommendations for Survival mode, read Fairfax’s full article.
Minecraft Education Edition
Minecraft style education is making its way into classrooms too. Matthew Farber of the education site Edutopia.org chronicles the creative use of Minecraft in writing programs. He describes a poetry activity high school teacher Joe Dillon presented in his classroom. “In the activity, students divide a sheet of paper into six parts or ‘rooms.’ They then follow prompts for writing descriptive text in each room. When Dillon…re-created the activity in Minecraft, students moved through a maze, visiting rooms with information on different aspects of poetry writing. As in the paper activity, the goal was to help students write or revise a poem.” When it comes to science, programmer Alfin Dani writing for his site alfintechcomputer.com says “Minecraft is now available to be applied in real life. With the thing called Minecraft Education Edition, you and your students can make an experience based on the Minecraft recipes.” Need an ice bomb for your Minecraft build? Sodium acetate x4 turns water blocks into ice blocks, perhaps for making for a zombie proof igloo or hitting a zombie on the head! Need to feed the people in the world you have created? Ammonia + phosphorus creates a super fertilizer for your crops. Visit his site for more Minecraft chemical recipes that can be made with fascinating results!
From Screen to Page
Creating an online world with digital blocks is pretty amazing, lots of fun and lots of work. Building a world with words is also an amazing and intensely creative endeavor. For the sake of this argument, let’s say that no one creates a more compelling world than a fantasy author. They invent lands (or planets) with people and places with detailed histories and relationships. They assign magics, powers and flaws to their characters in remarkably complex and entertaining ways. So … when you log off from Minecraft…pick up a book and step into a world created by someone else. Some of the best fantasy world builders are waiting for you in the library. Here are a few suggestions for some good summer reads:
The GrishaVerse created by Leigh Bardugo
The Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings series
The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin
The world of Dune created by Frank Herbert
The Modern World of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Golden Compass) series
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Nice blog post.😏 😐 2021-06-21 05h 46min