I’m writing you to tell you about what a great time we’re having together. Although you’re very quiet, or well… you’re basically completely silent, this is not a bad thing. I have a history of playing the games that let me decide precicely what will happen, I might even prefer it this way.
We plan out all these projects together, or well… I plan them and you listen. Then we build them.. or well, I build them and you watch. In fact when we’re together, I do all the talking.
This game is all about me – me me me.
Every block I break up to put down again, makes it mine – mine mine mine.
There’s one thing that concerns me though. There might come a time, where I run out of things to say, become exhausted and uninspired, and you will not be able to carry on the conversation on your own. I know this day will come eventually, and right now, I wish it never would. But I know that day will be the day you go from being the attentive and non-judgemental friend I adore, to just kind of boring.
Don’t worry, there’s a difference between boring and forgettable, you’re only the former. I promise the time we spent together will be framed in all the screenshots and videos I took:
Right now, I’ll close my eyes and play like our friendship will last forever.
I’ve jokingly called Minecraft the brag game, based on the fact I feel so proud of my creations within this game world that I really want to show it off. Contrary to especially GTA III, where I preferred watching someone else play at a safe distance, the role of the spectator was less appealing in this game – here I wanted an audience.
Forums and video sharing sites, such as Youtube are both a Mecca for spreading the creativity and ingenious installations and constructions of the Minecraft players. They range from massive architectural buildings to sculptures and cunning engineering installments, for me, cementing the fact that art can thrive in virtual worlds, contrived by people who perhaps wouldn’t even identify themselves as artists.
The creations of the players are also tales of labour, planning and often longevity that people not playing Minecraft probably wouldn’t derive from the videos and screenshots. However, some people use an editor and bypass being an embodied constructor when building some of the conceptions below, so the stories of labour embedded in the creations, are not always of the same endeavour.
I would roughly put the creations into six categories:
The number 1 winner of the Minecraft fan art contest on Worth 1000 featuring the Hungarian Parliament. It’s so big you can’t even see the individual blocks when fitting the whole building into the frame.
Perspective really becomes tangible with this sculpture called “The Hopper”.
“The ancient Golem” - winner of Abstract Art on Worth 1000.
I think this Escher piece is also worthy of notice.
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Pixel Art
The blocks can be used to create flat images using the principle of pixelation.
If the piece is big enough, the pixelation effect is barely detectable, as is the case with the image underneath. This image shows the winner of Worth 1000′s Minecraft Pixel Art Characters contest (They included 3D, which I would categorize under constructions as sculptures though).
It’s made from a total of 218,505 blocks … remember what I said about planning, longevity and labour?
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Landscaping
It’s a tricky one ’cause the game conjures beautiful landscapes on it’s own prior to the player even crafting a pick axe. However working with the landscape itself to mold it to ones wishes, is so integral to anything built in Minecraft, so I felt like it deserved its own category.
“Mountainous Desert”
I found this picture after I had begun working on my own project “The Mother Tree”. Slightly disheartnening as my tree is much smaller, but this is nonetheless also a great example of landscaping.
Underground landscaping here done by using explosives.
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Installations
Minecraft has an in-built electrical circuit system, which basically enables you to build a computer within the game out of a number of compounds.
For example you can build a music box, although you need to Dj it too.
Or hand out free cake of karma to random passerby’s.
And the video underneath… a skydive, which I didn’t even knew existed until just now, is just crazy. I think you need a sort of map generator to do this, as the default map size is only 128 blocks in vertical height, which is not long enough to sustain a fall of this scale (approx. 512).
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Events and Performance Acts
I’d put, for example, explosions in general under this category. Blowing up a creeper symbolically is probably something every Minecraft player can get a vindictive satisfaction from watching.
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I joined the crowds when I recorded and uploaded my own tree house to Youtube. I did this with pride, even though my work is just an ant when posing next to the giants above. This game gave me a real sense of accomplishment and I needed to share this with the world. This was one of the reasons I toyed with the notion of wanting visitors in the single player mode, when in the multiplayer mode, my fellow crafters were audience enough.
Ps: If you’ve found something that completely falls outside of the six categories, I’d love to hear about it!
As you know, there was something unmistakable about the sign on the wall in the mysterious house. Although it wasn’t written in caps, which would have been an immediate give away, a voice in the back of my head (I have a good portion of those now) told me this was one of the moon constructors.
So the next day I told this guy that I knew who had put the signs up. He listened with interest, as he had before whenever I shared with him news in the case but confronted with my suspicion, he didn’t flinch an inch.
Not until after the three week period of Minecraft play was officially over, did my hard pressure tactics (or the lack thereof) yield a result: It was the moon constructor after all who had sieged the opportunity to prompt some drama.
However, he had not built this house. Instead he enclosed that he knew who had and I urged him to let me know. It turned out the house belonged to “ALIEN”. I was never graced with the opportunity of meeting alien on our server myself, but apparently some of the others had actually encountered such a being and lived to tell the tale. Quoting our teacher (source):
“It was a lot of fun being in the world with the rest of the class today. The most interesting part of the day was seeing an ALIEN (someone from another class) in the underground warren me and Chris were doing up and felt this surge of territorial fervour rise up. The Alien got twacked over and over again. Sadly, our warren was located right by the spawn point so he just kept coming back to knock holes in our wonderful hole and steal our stuff. Much time was spent chasing after said alien (pointlessly).”
Well done for spotting an alien, they look so much like the rest of us, if they weren’t completely identical.
Later that week I attended a party, chatted with different people and since Minecraft at the time had had an impact on everyone in the entire year group, it was a natural point of conversation. One of the programmers, the guy that was nice to me regarding Portal, told me about being ganked over and over again on our server. He had been unable to speak to the gankers, as he was killed before he could type anything meaningful, eventually he had become pissed off and as a result effectively griefed back.
And a night of miniature havoc played out on our otherwise peaceful server:
“At some point alien got inside and started chopping down our One Tree (a tree chris planted inside the cave right by a little underground stream AND a pool of lava). Chris decided to divert the lava into the warren and have us abandon it.By the time the lava got anywhere close to the bottom floor alien had gotten fed up and logged off”
The alien was kicked off the server afterwards and had apparently, before running into the gankers, built this little house on the island in the lake. Poor alien, I could tell he had spent a good portion of time nestling, and now he was exiled from this world.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the reasoning behind the house being so hidden, was that alien knew he was an alien, and that aliens usually get killed, especially in video games.
The alien was kicked off the server afterwards and had apparently, before running into the gankers, built this little house on the island in the lake. Poor alien, I could tell he had spent a good portion of time nestling, and now he was exiled from this world.
