Like many a major media property, Minecraft is set to get its own movie. There have been plans for a Minecraft movie since 2014 — in fact, it was originally set to release next month — but now it seems some progress has been made with Mojang partnering with Warner Bros and a director attached to the project. That director is Peter Sollett, who has directed a variety of film and TV shows and is most known for 2008’s Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.
Aside from the director, it was revealed by Mojang that it will be a live-action film. Not only that, but they revealed a basic — they don’t want to spoil everything, after all — storyline for the film:
We’ll tell you the story of a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers. After the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, they must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.Now, given the infamous track record of video game film adaptations, you might want to avoid buying tickets right away. But who knows, I was personally extremely sceptical about what seemed like the equally nonsensical idea The Lego Movie, and that turned out to be pretty great. Whatever the case is, we should find out on March 4, 2022, and of course, we’ll bring you other details when we know more.
We’ve got the full list of Minecraft achievements – check the list for guides to unlocking them.
It shouldn’t be too much longer until the final Village and Pillage update is out to players. In the meantime, the Microsoft Marketplace is running a Spring Sale today, featuring “up to 75% off” in-game items such as world, skins, textures, and other content.View image on Twitter
Spring is here, and with it – the Minecraft Marketplace Spring sale! Between April 19-21, get up to 75% off worlds, skins, texture packs and more. One of our biggest sales ever has new discounts every day, so spring into action and check it out!
The sales will run this weekend between April 19 and the 21, and each of the three promotional days will see a different set of sales. So, if you (or a friend or child) have been looking to spice up the game with a new texture or map to explore, now is the perfect time to try something new.
At least for now you’ll have something to do while you patiently wait for the rest of the Village & Pillage update—which will add raiding, Illager patrols, and many additional blocks such as the Campfire, Carrel, Smoker, and Stonecutter (which are all available though expirimental gameplay.
If you don’t yet have Minecraft, you can download it using one of the links below. And if you do, you can check out the Minecraft Marketplace from here to see what peaks your interest.
While we still have plenty of questions about each strategy — except for the Switch, which is a relatively known quantity these days — it’s worth looking at the details that each company first chooses to share about their next-generation plans. Nintendo wanted you to play the Switch everywhere, Google doesn’t care about selling you hardware, and Microsoft is betting on a subscription model that can be used across multiple devices. Each of these approaches is a drastic shift from what came before.
Now we have Sony sharing details of the “PlayStation 5,” the as-yet-unnamed sequel to the PlayStation 4. And based on what the company has chosen as the first details to share, it sounds like the PlayStation 5 is going to be … a pretty traditional console with some speed and power upgrades.
This is a very smart strategy for a next-generation console.
THE POWER OF THE KNOWN
Nintendo hasn’t competed directly against Microsoft and Sony for years, although you could argue that each company’s consoles and games are fighting for your limited video gaming dollar. But Microsoft and Sony have long been in direct competition, both offering roughly analogous hardware that sits near your television and plays games.
So how did that play out during this current generation of consoles? Microsoft tried to sell a console that would let you wave your arms around and yell at it until you were watching cable TV — a console with an aggressive digital strategy that would have all but eliminated the market for used games. It was an ambitious, and expensive, mess.
The digital strategy was eliminated before the system launched. The Kinect hardware lasted a bit longer, but there is no longer any version of the Xbox One that includes the Kinect. The motion-sensing accessory is dead.
Sony dominated this generation by ignoring Microsoft’s strategy in order to create a traditional gaming console that played used games, allowed you to lend games to friends, and cost $100 less than the Xbox One. There were very few gimmicks: just a lower price, powerful hardware, and a great selection of exclusive games. It was a back-to-basics approach that players appreciated after trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas that Microsoft tried to sell.
“Our focus is on bringing console quality games that you see on TV or PC to any device,” Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told the Guardian last year. “I want to see the creators that I have relationships with reach all two billion people who play games, and not have to turn their studio into something that makes match-3 games rather than story-driven single-player games. Because that’s the only way to reach a bigger platform. That is our goal: to bring high-quality games to every device possible on the planet.”
Compare all this rhetoric to how Sony introduced the ideas behind its upcoming system on Tuesday: Sony said that it’s powerful — the system is capable of 8K graphics and ray tracing — and it will use a specifically engineered solid-state drive to keep data flowing between the hard drive and the rest of the system as quickly as possible. The console will include a drive for physical discs, and it will support current PlayStation VR hardware. Backward compatibility for PS4 games will also be included, a welcome addition for fans who like returning to the their favorite games — and something of an about-face from Sony on the topic.
These details make the PlayStation 5, or whatever it will ultimately be called, sound like a strong but expected update to the PlayStation 4. Sony may be holding back details of a possible cloud gaming service or other, bigger updates to the PlayStation formula, but so far there is nothing here that’s very surprising.
I’m not criticizing Sony, just to be clear. Making a console with new architecture that gets the most out of an SSD and a new CPU and GPU isn’t easy, especially when you know you’re going to have to sell it at a mass-market price. But Sony is playing it pretty safe with the news it’s releasing so far, and that sounds like a smarter plan than what Microsoft has been hinting at.SONY DOMINATED THIS GENERATION BY IGNORING MICROSOFT’S STRATEGY
Is there any evidence that players want to stream their console-style games on multiple devices? Are players begging for subscription services that replace the per-purchase cost of games? Does anyone want the basic console formula to change? Is the mass market ready for a console that can also be used as a portable device?
I’d argue that you can only definitively answer “yes” to one of those questions, and Nintendo already owns that market with the Nintendo Switch.
Based on what we know today, Sony is playing it very safe with its latest console, but that strategy has done wonders for Sony’s hardware. Sony is used to giving players what they want rather than selling them on something completely new, and we don’t have a lot of evidence that suggests players want to rethink the basic ideas behind game consoles.
So while the competition may have a hard time convincing players that device-agnostic streaming options or first-party subscriptions for major games is the way to go, Sony just has to remind them that they’ve always liked fast, capable boxes that plug into a television to play $60 video games.
In a world where everything is changing, maybe the best approach is to offer players what they already know they like. Sony, so far, doesn’t have to sell you on anything new or hard to explain: The next system in the PlayStation line will take discs, will make games look better, and will allow those games to load much faster. It will sit close to your TV and play video games.
And, at least for now, that might be all players want out of their next console purchase.
This week, after hearing Sony confirm, and then describe, the next PlayStation under development, you may be wondering what exactly “ray tracing” is and why it’s such a differentiator when it comes to high performance video game hardware. Here is a surprisingly watchable technical demonstration from Digital Foundry — using Minecraft of all things — to point out its applications — like your username casting a shadow.
Minecraft, using the mod Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shadows, makes for a surprisingly good test space. It’s not just because Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia and John Linneman can build rooms that call attention to concepts like “specularity,” and “bounce lighting” and “differentiated reflective surfaces.” Its because the voxelized world is optimal for the real-time demands of ray tracing.
“To have the entire world always be known [by the CPU] as being made of blocks is what mes this so performant,” Battaglia explains.
“Because these objects are non-moving and in a binary, present-or-deleted situation, that makes the calculations easier,” Linneman adds.
The rooms they’ve built show off not just those highly coveted godrays of sunshine, and indirect lighting, but also how a room can be indirectly lit off multiple reflections of a light source, and how colored surfaces’ reflections, will also mix and change when they bounce onto another colored surface. It is a highly technical discussion, of course, but the visuals are always there to fall back on, to illustrate what kind of a load the hardware has to carry to pull it off.
“It honestly just looks like an architectural rendering,” Battaglia says at one point.
“This is how light functions in the real world,” Linneman says simply. “Many games have a way of faking this effect, but this is generated in real time.”
Battaglia’s hardware for this technical demonstration is more powerful than an Xbox One X, and yet with this path-tracing* mod installed, it’s running at 720p locked to 30 frames per second — if that gives you a sense of how much this kind of rendering asks. Or as one joker put it in the YouTube comments: “2007: But can it run Crysis? 2019: But can it run Minecraft? Oh how the times have changed.”
A video game like Minecraft in schools might trouble some parents. As a Canada research chair in technologies and education, my hope is both parents and educators take the time to learn about how using Minecraft at school could be beneficial.
Firstly, parents and teachers are right to ask questions about video gaming, particularly given sometimes conflicting messages about its impact. Some researchers caution about the possible impacts of child and youth exposure to violence or problems of gaming addiction or screen saturation, while others say fears may be exaggeratedand it’s a matter of balance.
But I’ve learned through my research that many are largely unaware of the enormous educational potential of Minecraft. Many people also don’t know Minecraft Education Edition was released in the fall of 2016 and this version has been rapidly catching on at schools.
Since 2013, American and Swedish schools have been systematically integrating Minecraft into their schools, and it is being used around the world to teach science, urban planningand foreign languages. Masses of educational applications and experiences using Minecraft are available on online sites and forums.
In Montréal, a number of schools joined a contest in which students use Minecraft to reproduce historic sites and events in celebration of the city’s 375th anniversary, called Mission 375. With my team at the University of Montréal, we felt it important to investigate the educational potential of Minecraft in order to provide a deeper understanding of the impacts on young learners.
When players are fully engaged in a gaming task, they enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow state,” also known as “the zone,” a state highly conducive to learning.
While becoming deeply engrossed in gaming is sometimes depicited in a negative light or only associated with addiction, in fact this state can be harnessed to support or advance learning goals. For example, in this task-focused state, players are highly receptive to learning embedded in the game scenario. Creativity, student engagement and collaboration between users are just some of the aptitudes that are known to be developed through gameplay.
In addition, video games can help today’s youngsters cope with a future world requiring more and more digital literacy. In other words, they will need 21st century skills.
Minecraft to teach curriculum
My team and I adopted an exploratory research design to highlight the main uses of Minecraft in a school setting and to identify any benefits of using Minecraft at school. We developed a program called Minecraft Master where students had to complete more than 40 different tasks. Tasks were closely linked to the school curriculum; for example, students have to create a navigable map, making use of language, mathematics and spatial design, something we asked them to do with Minecraft.
We formed a partnership with one Montréal school. Participation was open to 118 Grade 3 to 6 students in an after-school program based on computers available. Registration took place during recess, on a first-come-first-served basis and parental consent was compulsory. Most of the students took four blocks of six weeks of Minecraft during the school year (an equivalent of about six months).
With the support of a program facilitator, students worked individually and in teams to digitally build structures such as impressive houses, a soccer stadium, a space ship, a railroad track to the Titanic and the Titanic itself.
Researchers also attended some sessions. We studied the main impacts on learning to investigate how gamified learning interventions may increase student engagement and enhance learning. We used a combination of data collected from surveys, interviews,”think aloud” protocols (where students speak their problem-solving strategies out loud), journals, tracking of studentprogress and digital footprints. Using these various methods allowed substantial data triangulation and validation.
The educational impacts we found were encouraging. The students showed a heightened motivation towards school, stronger computer skills, greater problem-solving skills, expanded reading and writing skills, a development in creativity and autonomy and increased collaboration with classmates.
However, it is important to understand that the use of Minecraft in our context was planned, supported and purposeful. This structure is crucial for a successful educational use of the game. Without such boundaries, students might not want to stop playing and learning advantages could be wasted.
Technologies, games and other “screen-related” activities can be a fun experience for students. But it is important to balance screen time with other activities that are essential for students’ development such as physically active play, reading, etc. Both parents and teachers can help students find this balance by working together on some rules about technology use.
Therefore, it is incumbent on both parents and teachers to structure the use of video games such as Minecraft to ensure that they provide students with appropriate support for the use of educational technologies. Such supervision would allow them to fully benefit from the incredible potential of this game.
