A recent “Minecraft” sculpture contest showcased an intricate creation, which also held a profound interpretation.
Called “The Perfect Marionette”, the sculpture was created by Minecraft player Dr. Bond. According to his post on Planet Minecraft, his creation took four days to build. He created the sculpture to portray the theme of “human achievement.”
“I turned the theme into a question and I asked myself over and over, ‘What is it that humans desire to achieve?’ The answer that came to me was ‘perfection,’” wrote Dr. Bond.
At the center of Dr. Bond’s creation sits a girl holding a crystal ball. The glass ball represents whatever a person desires or considers an achievement. Above the girl hovers the puppeteer which represents all the “many conditions and emotions one is controlled by as they embark on their own odyssey.”
“The Perfect Marionette” ended up winning first place on the Apex Events 2017 Invitational builder contest.
Image: Builder’s Refuge/Apex Events Invitational build contest web site
Second and third place were no slouches either. “AWAKENING Null Bomb” by UDVIO depicted the duality of progress as a symbol of achievement and source of destruction.
Image: Builder’s Refuge/ Apex Events Invitational build contest web site
On the other hand, “A Dream of Future” by THOMASESC focused on the ancient past of humanity.
Image: Builder’s Refuge/Apex Events Invitational build contest web site
“Minecraft” debuted in 2011 as a sandbox video game for the PC, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. It featured a retro, blocky look but allowed players to build various 3D constructs using cubes. The game was like a big digital Lego set. Since then various creations have been uploaded to the internet. Other projects even involved creating a game within the “Minecraft” sandbox. JB
Everyone loves playing Minecraft. But what about a play in Minecraft?
In a mash-up of the mining game and the theatre, a new play will take to the stage this weekend in both the real world and within Minecraft itself.
With more than 120 million copies sold, Minecraft is the second-best-selling videogame of all time, behind Tetris. Fans love digging up the resources to create their own elaborate buildings and worlds, as well as following the game’s story. “Playcraft Live”, a multimedia theatre experience, combines this intricate world-building with a new story of its own.
It’s an original play written by Alex Scarrow, author of the popular “Time Riders” teen novels. The timey-wimey story slips between real and virtual worlds as the Time Riders skip from modern-day New York to Neolithic times, with the story unfolding both in the theatre and online as a single livestream. In the real world, actors take the stage at the Playhouse Theatre in Derry, Ireland. And online, puppeteers control the actors within Minecraft.
The in-game environments have been built by fans in live “buildathons” over recent weeks, with Minecraft-mad YouTubers including AmyLee33, SeaPeeKay, NettyPlays and Bigbst4tz also involved. The project was commissioned by the Space, a digital arts body funded by the BBC and Arts Council England.
“Playcraft Live” premieres on Saturday, 14 October at the Playhouse and online at www.playcraft.live. If you like Minecraft, you might just dig it.
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Three days a week, you can find children at Huntington Memorial Library in Oneonta playing Minecraft as part of the library’s efforts to develop so-called STEAM programming.
Educational focus on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — has recently begun to include an A for art into the acronym as educators recognize the importance of developing creativity alongside STEM.
“We really wanted to start bringing the library into the STEAM education age,” Huntington children’s coordinator Anne Van Deusen said Thursday. “Minecraft was incredibly popular and we decided to have a Minecraft club.”
It ended up being so popular that the club is always waitlisted, and during the summer the demand was so great the library held two separate club sessions.
Microsoft introduced Minecraft: Education Edition, which touts the educational benefits of its creative and collaborative potential. Many classrooms in the country incorporate it into the curriculum. This year, Minecraft released a revamped Oregon Trail.
Two of the three days the library offers free play, where the computers are open on a first-come, first-serve basis. A more structured club happens Friday, where Van Deusen said kids are given challenges.
On Friday, the third floor of the library was filled with kids ages seven to 12, clicking at keyboards with their left hands as they maneuvered a mouse with their right. Bridget Stith, who oversees the club, said the children were building mini-games in their shared world.
“In the past we had them recreate a library, a house, a maze or incorporate pieces of art or classic architecture into what they were constructing,” Van Deusen said.
Mal Seimeca, 9, who was protecting her character from a monster, said she loved the creative aspect of the game, which she has been playing for two years.
“I’ve always loved building things and playing online makes it easy,” Seimeca said. The best thing she’s built, she said, was a roller coaster and mansion with her friend.
Minecraft is a multi-platform game that offers up an endlessly customizable world. Its pixelated graphics make it look like a game from 20 years ago, but it is one of the most popular games available. Microsoft bought it in 2014 for $2.5 billion. Players postings videos of renderings on YouTube garner millions of views.
It’s blend of creative engineering in implicit in the name: mine and craft. It begins with an empty world that a player fills or destroys with different tools, using only blocks to build with. This improvisational style of play is what attracts kids and educators alike to the game.
Van Deusen said there is a code of conduct for using the game in the library, and she finds that kids are very helpful each another, collaborating and problem-solving to create in the game.
Amelie Cej, 7, and her brother Rowan Parish, 9, were sitting next to one another, Rowan offering help when Amelie asked.
“I love making stuff,” said Cej.
Parish said his favorite part of Minecraft was the TnT.
Minecraft now has an official way to export 3D models, but there’s a catch: it’s only available with the Windows 10 version of the game. With that version you can now pull models out of the game and upload them to Microsoft’s Remix 3D platform where they can be viewed by anyone.
For more ways to customize your mining and crafting, check out the best Minecraft mods.
There’s now a special block you can lay down to start the export process, which involves setting the X and Y boundaries of your creation along with deciding a few other options, like whether players will appear there. Then give it a name, tag it, and upload. Voila! Your beautiful Minecraft castle – or some random tree you liked – is now on Remix 3D for all to see.
The fancy part is that these models can be interacted with directly in Paint 3D, letting you spray graffiti all over other people’s creations. (You monster.) Or add some storm clouds for a dapper dinosaur to run through, as the Mojang team have done here.
Exporting has been in beta for a bit, so the official board already has some neat stuff. Personally, I’m a fan of this treehouse, which has been helpfully edited to remind you of the name of the game it was built in.
Of course, Minecraft has unofficially supported these kinds of exports for ages, with third-party tools allowing pretty much the same sorts of things as we’ve got in this update. But in-game integration, easy sharing, and the weird shenanigans of Paint 3D still make this a neat addition. Sadly, exporting creations as models means you won’t see anything quite so wild as, say, a playable Pokémon Red on the board, but we’ll take what we can get.
A startup came out of three years in stealth Thursday with a simple goal: Make documents better.
Called Coda, the startup has the ambitious goal of making a “doc as powerful as an app,” reads the company’s Medium post on the launch.
Coda starts with a blank canvas like a document from Google or Microsoft, but then allows users to build on top of it. One of the platform’s beta testers described Coda as a “Minecraft for docs,” referring to the video game where people can build their own virtual worlds block by block.
Like many startups, Coda is entering a crowded market and taking on tech giants. Google and Microsoft both focus on document sharing and storage. Atlassian and Asana also offer enterprise software. Salesforce bought word processor Quip last year. There’s also the tech darling turned billion-dollar goliath Slack.
But Coda does have quite the credible team. The company is led by Shishir Mehrotra, formerly VP of product at Google’s YouTube. Previous reports said Mehrotra’s project called “Krypton” was valued at $400 million.
So far, Coda has raised $60 million from some of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors such as Greylock, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman is on the board, according to a report from The Verge.
A product team at ride-hailing giant Uber has been one of the beta testers, The Verge reported.
Mehrotra is dead set on creating the most supportive ecosystem for how we now use documents—collaboratively.
“We aren’t trying to digitize physical analogs any more; we’re using documents as tools to run our teams,” he wrote in the blog post.
“Why are we still clinging to metaphors long-forgotten?”
“Why are we still clinging to metaphors long-forgotten: the accountant’s grid, the typist’s paper, the professor’s slides? Why do these tools insist on creating boundaries where we don’t need them — forcing us to choose between a document or a spreadsheet?” he continued.
Some of the features of Coda include integrated commands. For example, type “GoogleDirections” and a Google Map with directions from an origin location to a destination will appear, according to The Verge.
Coda is not completely intuitive, however. As Casey Newton of The Verge wrote, “In Asana I click buttons and they do basically what I expect; in Coda I type an equal sign and cross my fingers.”
The project still has a long way to go. The complete tool is only available in desktop.
As of Thursday, anyone can request to join the beta at coda.io.
