When your kid shows interest in a popular phenomenon, usually there’s not much to understand—you just help them turn on the videos, and put the toys on their birthday wish list. But it’s a little trickier when your kid comes home and insists that they need to play Minecraft. You have some learning to do.

If you’re nervous about letting your kid log on to a server with other people, it may help to know that they don’t have to. We’ll discuss below how to set up a multiplayer world, but there are plenty of ways to do that while keeping the world private. Minecraft is also tons of fun in single player mode. If you do end up introducing your child to public servers, you’ll probably want to have a talk with them about online safety, and it may be a good idea to play with them at first.

Pick a Platform and Install the Game

There’s a version of Minecraft for every platform. The cheapest, and easiest to install, is the Minecraft Pocket Edition app. It’s $6.99 on iOS and Android. Once it’s installed, you just hit Play, create a world, and you’re off.

Pocket edition has a limited set of inventory items and commands. You can still do a ton of fun things, but currently the game lacks large “boss” monsters to battle, and you don’t have access to some of the lesser used items. The mobile app will do almost anything you can think of, but if you want the most flexibility down the line and the physically largest worlds, go with the desktop version. We imagine though, that your child will probably have a preference as to the platform you buy and install on.

The traditional and most full-featured way to play is on a computer, with the version that runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux. The software is free to download, but you have to pay a one-time fee of $26.95 to create an account. The program won’t run unless you log in.

Minecraft is also available for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and 4, Wii U, and a handful of other console and mobile platforms,at varying price points in the $20-$30 range, with licenses available either through direct download or physical copies, whichever you prefer. Once you’ve installed the version Minecraft of your (or your child’s) choice, create a Single Player world for starters, and begin exploring.

Learn the Controls

Even if it’s your kid that will be doing the gameplay, you’ll want to have a sense of how to move around and use objects in the game. I can’t count how many times a kid asked me how to do something, I googled and confidently told them the answer, and then felt a little clueless when they handed me the device and said “Show me how.”

On a computer, the w, a, s, and d keys control which direction you walk, and your mouse position controls where you look. Left click destroys a block; right click places the block you are holding. Similarly, interact with objects with a click: left click to hit, right click to use an object. So, for example, hold a bone and right click on a dog to give the dog a bone. Left click to smack the dog with the bone.

The space bar lets you jump, and in creative mode (more about that below), you can fly. Double tap the space bar to start flying, and tap it again to move higher. Shift lowers you down, and another double space drops you to the ground.

On a touch screen device, you’ll have arrow buttons on the left side of the screen for walking, and a separate button for jumping or flying on the right. Swipe the screen to look around. Place blocks with a tap, and destroy them by tapping and holding. You can use some items by tapping, others by tapping and holding, and still others by looking for a special button to appear at the bottom of the screen. For example, if you hold an apple and approach a horse, there will be a “feed” button. You can read more about all the different controls for all the different platforms on the Official Minecraft Wiki.

To manage your inventory, press “e” on your keybord (on the desktop) or tap the “…” button next to the row of nine empty boxes at the bottom of the screen (on mobile.) Scroll through to see what you’ve picked up, if you’re playing in survival mode. In creative mode, you can also search and scroll through hundreds of items that are yours for the choosing. Those nine empty boxes, by the way? Those are your “hot bar” of readily accessible objects. You can drag items from your inventory into them to use them quickly, like with a single tap or keypress, which comes in handy later.

So, What Do You Do?

So what do you do in Minecraft, anyway? What is your kid trying to accomplish when they spend hours at the computer playing? You already know the answer, actually: you mine blocks from your surroundings, and you use them to craft new things. Imagine walking through a world made of lego blocks as far as the eye can see. You can break off a block from the ground, from a tree, anywhere you like, and then you can use the blocks you’ve gathered to make something new.

In survival mode, you arrive in Minecraft land with literally nothing. You can karate-chop the world with your hand to gather blocks of dirt and wood. You can make a pickaxe out of wood, and use it to mine for stone. Then you can make a better pickaxe out of stone. In the meantime, you’d better create a shelter before dark, because that’s when the monsters come out. If they get you, you die:

Survival minecraft can be challenging and fun, but young kids are often more interested in building things, spawning animals, and exploring all the different types of objects that exist in the universe. (Me too, honestly.) You can do all that without fear of being killed by Creepers if you play your game in creative mode. That means you don’t have any damage or hunger meters, you can fly, and you can have as many as you want of anything. Diamond armor? Golden apples? Potions that let you see in the dark? All yours!

Fun Things to Try with Your Kids

Here are some things you can do right away. They’re easy in creative, and possible (if you can gather the materials) in survival. Best of all, if you’re new to the game, you can do them yourself, or if you’re installing for your kids or playing along with them, they’re fun for everyone involved.

• Watch the Sunset: A new day dawns in Minecraft every 20 minutes. You get 10 minutes of daylight, 90 seconds of dusk, seven minutes of night, and another 90 seconds for sunrise. It’s kind of beautiful.
• See in the Dark: If a young child starts crying for seven out of every 20 minutes while playing, now you know why. After dark, just snag a Potion of Night Vision from your inventory. On the computer you can search for items by name; on mobile, scroll until you find it. It’s dark blue. Right click, or tap and hold, to drink the potion.
• Change Your Skin: Gameplay is typically in a first person point-of-view, but if other players are around, they’ll be able to see you. You can also switch views while playing and see yourself in the third-person. If you’d like to tweak your look, visit minecraftskins.net, where you can choose a new skin. Hit Edit to customize it to your liking, and if you play the desktop edition, hit Change to submit it to Minecraft’s account servers. (Your skin is considered part of your account profile.) If you play on the mobile editions, Download the skin and save it to your device’s photo library. Then you can change your skin from within the game.
• Tame a Wolf: No wolves? Look in your inventory for an egg called “spawn wolf.“ It does exactly what you’d think. Feed one of your new wolves a bone, and it will start following you and exuding hearts. Once the wolf has been tamed, it wears a red collar and is a dog. Do not hit your dog with a bone. They attack as a pack when one is hurt.
• Ride a Pig: Hold a carrot on a stick, and all the pigs around will follow you. Place a saddle on a pig, and then you can ride it. The pig will walk constantly, but you can steer with your mouse as usual. To stop the pig, take the carrot and stick out of your hand.
• Teleport: If you’re playing with your kid in multiplayer mode, they’re almost guaranteed to wander off. If you type a forward slash, you’ll find you can enter commands. A handy one is /teleport, or /tp for short, followed by your kid’s player name. You’ll teleport right to where they are.
• Build a Beacon: Especially in survival mode, you’ll want to find a way to get back to your home. Build dirt, or whatever you’ve got, into a tall tower that you can see from a distance. While there are other ways to find your way home when you get lost, this is the simplest.

I learned all of these tricks from my six-year-old son, who in turned learned them from watching YouTube. As an adult, you may not have noticed, but roughly half of YouTube is just videos of people playing Minecraft. You can find a guide to the best channels, with notes on their kid-friendliness, at Common Sense Media.

Be warned: these videos often show features that go far beyond what you can find in an ordinary Minecraft installation. There are mods (modifications to either clients or servers), resource packs (which change game features like the appearance of blocks), maps (pre-built worlds), and mini-games (maps set up for solo or competitive games).

Playing With Others

A Parent’s Guide to Playing Minecraft With Your Kids

It’s hard to say exactly why children with autism are some of the greatest devotees of Minecraft, the computer game in which you build endless worlds out of Lego-like blocks. Stuart Duncan, a father of two, believes it’s because it’s a perfect union of two opposites. On one hand, Minecraft offers structure—everything from the water to the doors to the falling lava behaves with a certain predictability that they need. On the other hand, it gives the player infinite freedom. There’s no story, no levels, no bosses presenting participants with quests to complete. Behind the shield of their computer screen, players can do whatever they want to do in a sensory-friendly space—recreate the Taj Mahal, light up a house with torches, or hide in a cave.

“Having the freedom to do anything you want while simultaneously feeling safe and secure within a structured set of rules and routines is liberating,” Duncan says.

Duncan has autism, as does his oldest son. About six years ago, the family started playing Minecraft, and loved it. But there were challenges. On social media, Duncan kept seeing parents reach out to other parents, asking if their children with autism could play the game together because they kept running into bullies and trolls whenever they played on public servers. Players would destroy everything they tried to make, steal their resources and kill them over and over again. It was then that Duncan, a web developer in Canada, decided to build a Minecraft world just for kids on the spectrum and their families. He bought a $2.50 starter server and called it Autcraft. Today, the game is so popular that Duncan manages it full-time and gave a TED Talk about it.

What makes Autcraft unique is that it’s whitelisted—you must apply to play. The server is intensely monitored by volunteers who understand autism. They know how to defuse arguments, solve problems and spot bullying. Before selecting admins, Duncan watches them play. “I can teach anyone how to play Minecraft and to learn the commands to manage the server, but what I can’t teach is how to handle someone else’s child when they’re furious, hurt, depressed and suicidal, all at the same time,” he says. Autcraft has its own ranking system. You earn titles by being helpful, kind and respectful to everyone on the server.

Within the game, Duncan has created “calm rooms,” modeled after Snoezelen Multi-Sensory Rooms to ease anxiety. Some are bright with flashing lights, while others are very dark with tiny star-like white dots. Players can choose what type of sensory input they need in that moment. “The in-game chat is disabled so there’s nothing to read and no one to bother you,” Duncan says. “You get to stay in the game but also take a break from the game at the same time.”

Some parents have told Duncan that Autcraft been able to do what years of therapy has not. It’s helped their children to express their needs, ask for help, and recognize that their actions affect others. Even those who are nonverbal can communicate through chat. The environment of Autcraft gives them an outlet to make friends, all without the pressure to track facial expressions or the distractions of an unfamiliar environment. Duncan hopes that children will learn and grow on Autcraft so that one day, they can go out and play on public servers—and out in the world—without fear.

Here are some tips from Duncan (aka AutismFather in the Autcraft community) on how to introduce a child with autism to Minecraft, and particularly Autcraft:

Play With Your Child

“It’s an incredible bonding experience,” Duncan says of playing Autcraft with your child. “I know video games or technology can feel foreign to parents but honestly, it’s not that bad. Being able to build an entire world with your child is an experience that you just can’t get anywhere else. You’ll laugh, be creative together, work as a team and dream together. There’s just nothing like it.”

He encourages parents to see what their kids see, and talk to the people they talk to.“Quite often, I find that the parents who aren’t actively involved in their child’s online life have no idea what their child is actually like online,” Duncan says. “Some children come to my server and behave very much the same way that bullies had treated them elsewhere. I’ll contact their parents and explain what they’re doing and the language they’re using—and the parents, almost every single time, will be totally shocked. Their child will always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in real life, never swear, and generally just be shy, but once on the internet, with no supervision, they become the trolls that they are usually trying to avoid.” He reminds parents often: If you are not teaching your child how to behave online, someone else will.

Let the Child Become the Teacher

For parents who are new to Minecraft, Duncan suggests letting your kid be your guide. “This allows the child to feel important, confident, in control and useful,” Duncan says. “The role reversal really allows both the child and the parent to see things from each other’s perspectives.”

Continue the Conversations Offline

On Autcraft, players learn to talk, plan and work things out with others, which can be difficult when you’re not used to having any sort of relationships.

Duncan advises parents to look out for new behaviors at home. “Most of the time these ‘small’ conversations that happen on the server can seem unimportant, but then later I’ll hear from parents who tell me that their children started sharing and even giving things away to other kids, or that they started making friends at school, or that someone broke something of theirs and they didn’t even get mad,” Duncan says. Reward those good behaviors, and talk about the bad ones. Encourage more of what you want to see.

Take Breaks

If your child is getting upset online, have them take a break or enter one of the calm rooms. Remind them that anything someone says online is never personal. “How can it be?” Duncan says. “They don’t even know you. It’s an important lesson to learn.”

Duncan’s biggest piece of advice for parents is to not shy away from the game because they don’t understand it. Sure, Autcraft is a fantasy world, where kids with autism play behind pixelated avatars, but it may just be the world where they can be the most real.

How to Introduce a Child With Autism to Minecraft

It’s the biggest event in the UK gaming calendar and has been around for more than two decades.

Now Insomnia62 is preparing to celebrate 21 years of working and playing hard with a blockbuster event at the Birmingham NEC from March 30 to April 2.

Over four glorious days, attendees will get to try out the latest games as well as state-of-the-art virtual reality technology.

Some of the biggest stars of YouTube will be there, whilst you’ll be able to watch the best players in the world go into battle against each other and take part in huge tournaments against the most talented gamers on the planet.

You can visit the festival’s What’s On page to hear about all the action. 

Here are a few reasons why Insomnia62 is an unmissable weekend and a brilliant way to spend your Bank Holiday.

You can bring your own computer

Insomnia62 will let you buy a special BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer / Console) ticket which allows you to bring your PC or console to the event for the weekend.

This means you’ll be able to connect to the local area network (LAN) and join in all the action.

Here what’s Insomnia62 says about this amazing network: ‘When Insomnia62 started back in 1999, the internet wasn’t as fast as it is today, so in order to get high-speed multiplayer gaming experiences players attended LAN events like ours.

‘Thanks to the Internet, we don’t need to do that anymore, but LAN means so much more to the people who are part of it. It’s a community of gamers that you won’t find anywhere else.’

There will also be special LAN tournaments on games like Overwatch, Footfall Manager, Battalion1944, League of Legends and Heartstone.

Visitors can learn all about the history of gaming

We all know the pleasure which comes from beholding the latest graphics on a hot new game.

But wait until you experience the warm and fuzzy feeling you’ll get while playing the classics in the Insomnia62 Retro Zone which lets you journey back in time to the dawn of gaming.

Past games on display have included F-Zero, Donkey Kong, Excitebike, Frogger, Bubble Bobble, Double Dragon, Out Run, CastleVania and many more.

The biggest YouTubers will be there along with the stars of Twitch

Caspar Lee is just the latest YouTuber to announce an appearance at Insomnia62.

He’ll be there on April 1 – and you’d be a fool to miss him.

Other superstars in attendance will include Syndicate, Mini Ladd, Terroriser, Yogscast, Yammy, B0aty and more.

Just keep an eye on the gaming festival’s website for all the latest info.

You’ll witness an epic Call of Duty battle.

Insomnia62 is an official partner of the 2018 Call of Duty World League Global Circuit.

This means some of the best players and team in the world will be battling it out for dominance, with a massive $80,000 first prize on offer and a total pool of $200,000.

It supports indie developers

Obviously, Insomnia62 will let you see the biggest gamers in action playing blockbuster titles.

But there’s still a lot of love for the smaller developers.

At the Indie Zone you’ll be able to play some of the biggest indie titles and talk to some of the developers making them.

Past indie games at Insomnia62 include Gangbeasts, Super Rude Bear: Resurrection, Perpetual Night and Blockships

You can try out the latest VR tech

The organisers of Insomnia62 says ‘it’s the most exciting development to hit the gaming world since Mario first dropped Bowser into a pit of lava’.

Now you’ll be able to try out the latest VR tech at the VR Zone.

You’ll travel to strange worlds, battle aliens and witness things which you’d never experience in boring old normal reality.

Will you want to go back to the real world?

The world’s top cosplayers will put on an amazing Cosplay Masquerade

This year, a huge Cosplay Masquerade will be held on the main stage.

It’s a chance to see all the incredible customers dreamed up by games fans.

And a chance to show off your own.

You can check out some classic and new games tabletop games

Once upon a time, you didn’t have to plug in to have fun.

At the TableTop zone you can play games including Magic the Gathering, Cardfight Vanguard, and Final Fantasy.

You can also get lessons from the experts and even buy some of the games to take home.

No batteries or plug sockets needed.

There are plenty of non-gaming activities

Insomnia62 features daily ticketed evening events including Fight Club Pro Wrestling and much more.

There are plenty of things for children to do and you can also get a family ticket.

You’ll be able to enjoy some retail therapy

Visit the Exhibition zone to pick up the latest gaming merchandise and games.

Whether it’s the hottest title or a t-shirt celebrating your favourite game, there will be lots to buy.

If you only go to one gaming event this year make it Insomnia62

It looks like Activision may be planning another remastered version of a classic Call Of Duty, and for a surprisingly reasonable price.

E3 isn’t going to have any secrets left at this point, if the latest video game leak is true.

It certainly sounds plausible: IGN Italia caught the Italian Amazon site listing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, a listing which was then quickly taken down once everyone noticed.

The release date was April 30, which is surprisingly close. It’s also just a couple of weeks before the main reveal event for Black Ops 4. Although whether that makes it more or less believable is hard to say.

The other key point is that it was down for just €19.99 (£17), which seems unusually reasonable given that the work put into the first remaster was actually quite substantial.

Although it can easily be found for not much more than £20 now, the first game is officially £34.99. It was also a PlayStation 4 exclusive on its initial release.

Of course, the controversy with the first remaster was that it was originally only sold as part of the expensive Legacy Edition that came with that year’s Infinite Warfare. But if this leak is true that’s not what’s happening with Modern Warfare 2.

So either Activision are completely changing their approach this time round or… the rumour isn’t true.

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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 remaster spotted in Amazon listing

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Games Inbox: Tomb Raider movie reaction, State Of Decay 2 impressions, and Skyrim VR on PC

Resident Evil 4 was released in the UK exactly 13 years ago today, and a celebrates the fact by looking back at one of the best games ever.

On the 18th March Resident Evil 4 is 13 years old in the UK! I’d never been into the previous games in the series much but this new style, which seemed more action-packed, just grabbed my attention and I bought it (and a GameCube to play it on!) on launch day. Quite simply it blew my mind and still does today, even after countless playthroughs on multiple consoles over the years.

Here are some of the things that I think make it so special:

Perfect pacing
I’d played a lot of games before it, and even more after it, but I can’t think of any other game that is so well paced. It’s constantly outdoing itself with new enemies and set pieces but considering it’s a pretty long, linear, single-player game (my first playthrough was well over the 10 hour mark) it never puts a foot wrong. Nothing ever gets repetitive or outstays it’s welcome, which I feel is a rarity in games.

Memorable encounters
Some of these are traditional boss fights, others not, but Resident Evil 4 is packed with so many memorable encounters. The first one for me is meeting Dr Salvador (the iconic dude with a sack over his head as he wields a chainsaw!) near the start of the game. Then over the course of your adventure you also get to fight Del Lago, a beast of a fish, while you’re stuck in a little rowboat (which thoughtfully has an endless supply of harpoons); El Gigante, who’s a huge, hulking giant so he earns his name well; Chief Mendez who transforms into a grotesque monster who’s a pain to finish off (seriously, stop swinging about in those rafters!).

Then there’s the Garrador, who’s blind but has huge deadly claws; Colmillos (wolves with tentacles sprouting out of their backs!) that leap out at you as you navigate your way through a garden maze; Novistors, disgusting giant insects that can go invisible, walk on the ceiling and puke acid over you; Verdigo, which becomes a deadly game of hide and seek in the sewers; and Salazar, first you get chased by a giant clockwork version of him, then after battling up a tower you confront the little creep personally.

The sinister Regenerators live up to their name as when you shoot their limbs off they grow back (you need a lot of firepower to take them down or the thermal scope to shoot the parasites in them). And there’s Krauser, who you first go up against via a very cool QTE knife fight and then confront properly later on in a game of cat and mouse. The monstrous U-3, who mutates halfway through the fight to have a giant set of pincers, and finally the guy behind it all Saddler, who transforms into a weird spider-like creature.

Gandos
Even the basic cannon fodder Ganados are brilliant, screaming and cursing at you in Spanish! I love how they react to your attacks: aim too long at their heads and they will cover their face with their hands or move themselves away from where you’re aiming, shoot them in a limb and they will react in pain and drop weapons. Then there’s the whole shoot their heads off and tentacles burst out – eek! Making these regular enemies so responsive really adds to the brilliant gameplay.

The Merchant
Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger!

Even after all these years The Merchant is still one of my favourite non-player characters. In a world where almost everyone else is trying to kill you, having a friendly guy (with an awesome voice!) willing to trade with you makes for a little oasis of calm.

Two interesting facts about my favourite purveyor of armed goods:

1. He’s voiced by the same guy (Paul Mercier) who voices Leon (talk about vocal range!).
2. At times in the game he is showing the same red eyes as the Ganados! Is he infected too? I’m just glad he doesn’t turn murderous with all the weapons he has!

Leon S. Kennedy
OK, so I know he’s got a ridiculous haircut, and he certainly isn’t the greatest or deepest video game character, but I like him! While Chris Redfield is so serious and brooding (probably the effect of having to put up with Sheva for a whole game!) Leon is far more laid back and has plenty of time for cheesy one liners, making his company far more enjoyable.

Salazar and Saddler
These two are amongst my favourite antagonists. Salazar is like a Looney Tunes character: not very bright, prone to temper tantrums when things don’t go his way, and ridiculously funny. Saddler on the other hand is more controlled but is also so sarcastic, constantly sneering at Leon. When the time came for both of them to meet the business end of my rocket launcher, I was very pleased indeed!

Guns
From basic pistols (including The Punisher you can win by shooting blue medallions that are hanging up around the place) to the crazy power of the rocket launcher and the Chicago Typewriter (a Tommy Gun with unlimited ammo), and not forgetting a wide assortment of shotguns, Magnums, sniper rifles, sub-machineguns, and even a mine thrower in between. Even after all this time every weapon is a joy to not only fire but reload (the reloading animation for the Broken Butterfly Magnum is so cool!) and you can also upgrade them as you go via the ever helpful Merchant.

The little touches
It’s the little things that add atmosphere. Freeing that dog from a trap in the woods (the dog later returns and helps distract El Gigante while you fight him); the chickens on the farm that get all agitated and flap around if you get too close to them (they also lay eggs, which are good for your health and throwing at people!); going fishing, which usually means lobbing a grenade in the water but you can pick up the fish afterwards and use them for health; shooting at bird nests, which usually have ammo or money in them; and last but not least the shooting galleries provided by The Merchant, which are a lot of fun and can earn you a lot of cash.

The controls
After playing games such as Uncharted, where you can run and gun, Resident Evil 4’s controls feel so incredibly rigid but that’s what makes it so special. If you could run around spraying bullets everywhere the game and its gunplay would lose so much of its brilliant tension.

The end is only the beginning
Once you’ve completed the main game there’s so much more. Firstly there’s New Game+ where you can carry over all your awesome weapons, Assignment Ada is a separate mission playing as Ada Wong on the PlayStation 2 (and later editions). You also got five new missions in Separate Ways where again you got to play as Ada, this includes new weapons (explosive crossbow!) and a new environment which sees you sinking a battleship! Then last but certainly not least is the brilliantly addictive Mercenaries mode where you have a limited amount of time to rack up kills.

So that’s my thoughts on what is one of my most favourite games of all time, 13 years old and just as awesome as ever! Happy birthday Resident Evil 4!

By reader LastYearsModel09 (PSN ID)

The reader’s feature does not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk and follow us on Twitter.

Celebrating 13 years of Resident Evil 4 – Reader’s Feature

GameCentral readers discuss their favourite female characters, from Lara Croft to Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn.

The subject for this week’s Hot Topic was suggested by reader Mesomex, following International Women’s Day earlier in the month. We wanted to know which female character you think is the most interesting and what you think of the representation of women in video games in recent years.

You can probably guess what some of the nominations were, although opinions were divided on the qualities of Lara Croft as a character. Bayonetta, Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, and the women of Uncharted were all popular though, with most readers feeling things are more positive now than they used to be.

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Weekend Hot Topic, part 2: The best female video game characters

Minecraft is a popular video game that’s sort of like virtual Lego. Players find and build stuff by themselves, or online with friends.

It’s a simple formula that’s attracted millions of fans — and Southern Methodist University professors.

Corey Clark, deputy director for research at SMU Guildhall, and John Wise, an associate professor of biological sciences, are part of a team hoping to take advantage of the game’s large user base in the search for better cancer-fighting drugs.

On their quest to disable a biological pump

Wise: These pumps are normally in our bodies, protecting us from exposures to toxins. They keep bad things out of our cells, and that’s a really good thing. But this good thing gets perverted in cancers. A cancer cell will over-express these pumps, and it will eliminate cancer chemotherapeutics from the cancer cells, which causes the cancer to become resistant. So the goal of our research at SMU is to — with high-performance computing facilities and biochemistry — discover compounds that will temporarily turn these pumps off during cancer chemotherapies.

On how Minecraft is helping the search for treatment

Clark: Video games themselves are all about learning — how to play a level, how to progress through a game — and so what we want to do is use that human intuition piece and take datasets from medical problems, like the chemotherapeutic problem, and then integrate that into the game, so it’s part of the natural game itself. Every time somebody does something in the game, it’s actually helping in the science. The idea that you’re making a positive impact is something the players really enjoy.

We visualize the data problems in exactly the same format as Minecraft. So there are colored blocks and you’re moving some blocks around to try to find specific properties of these compounds that John’s working with to see which of those properties are the most important in being effective in the treatments. When they’re playing the game, all of the data returns to the back-end of the platform for analysis.

On how hard it is to find new drugs

Wise: Discovering a molecule that has an effect in a biological system like this is the first step. In the last three years or so, we’ve probably found 20 different molecules that positively affect this problem. Getting those drug-like molecules — they’re not yet drugs — to the point where they could be entered in a clinic is difficult. The success rates of molecules that enter such a program and actually end up in people are maybe between 1 and 5 percent.

We’ve identified some really good compounds that we believe we can develop to be pharmaceutical-like compounds that we can put into animals and eventually, people. As I said before, maybe 1 percent of these molecules can make it to humans. That means at the beginning you need 100 of them. Finding those 100 starting molecules with what we’ve learned from Minecraft is going to be a really big deal to us.

Minecraft Players Are Helping SMU Researchers Find Better Cancer-Fighting Drugs

Sonic is getting a new racing game, but will it have more in common with Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing or the Saturn’s Sonic R?

A new Sonic-themed racing game by Sumo Digital has been rumoured multiple times, with the assumption that it would be a third entry in the Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing franchise – just with more Sonic and less Sega.

The new teaser trailer below certainly seems to suggest exactly like that, but there is an unexpected wrinkle: the logo tease at the end looks very much like Sonic R on the Sega Saturn console.

Sonic R was a race game by Traveller’s Tales (who now make the Lego games) that was released in 1997. It wasn’t very good, but it did feature Sonic and co. racing around on foot.

The teaser clearly implies there will be actual cars in the new game, so it’s hard to reconcile the two. Unless being on-foot is going to be an option of some kind?

Sega’s less mysterious Sonic the Hedgehog announcement (at the SXSW event in the US, where they previously announced Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces) also involves references to obscure old games, with an expanded version of Sonic Mania called… Sonic Mania Plus.

The new version of the excellent original will feature two new playable characters: Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel. Both are taken from the obscure SegaSonic the Hedgehog coin-op, although they did cameo in Sonic Generations as well.

Sonic Mania Plus will also introduce a new Encore Mode, which adds ‘new ways to play, and new ways to explore’ for the existing levels. Sonic Mania’s split-screen multiplayer mode will also be expanded to allow four-players instead of just two.

And… that seems to be it. There’s no sign of any new levels, which is very disappointing, and it’s not clear what Sega is going to charge people that already have the original version.

They do have a natty looking retail edition planned though, so we think it’s more just a re-release to appeal to those that never got it, or heard of it, the first time round.

There’s no date for the Sonic racing game, although we’re willing to bet it’ll be out sometime this autumn. Sonic Mania Plus will definitely be out this summer for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Sega’s final announcement at the weekend was confirmation that Yakuza Kiwami 2 will be getting a worldwide release on August 28, so fans in Europe will not have to wait any longer than anyone else.

Like the first Kiwami game (Kiwami means ‘extreme’ or ‘ultimate’) it’s a remake of one of the original PlayStation 2 releases, so if you’ve only got into the series recently it should be a good way to catch up on the story.

As usual though it’ll be a PlayStation 4 exclusive.

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter

Sega tease new Sonic racing game and Sonic Mania Plus (and Yakuza Kiwami 2)

As the mobile version goes live for selected players, other publishers are worrying the success of Fortnite could cut into their profits.

It didn’t seem as if Fortnite had any more records to break, after overtaking PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and becoming the most watched game on Twitch, but now it’s also the most searched for video game on Google – surpassing even Minecraft.

Fortnite also got more searches than the term ‘bitcoin’ and is now estimated to have been played by 45 million people worldwide.

This is of course great news for Epic Games, who confirmed today that invites to play the iOS version of Fortnite Battle Royale, have gone out to certain fans.

But analysts are worrying that the success of Fortnite means problems for other video game companies. 

‘We believe the strong growth of Fortnite creates tactical risk to the video game publishers’, said analyst Evan Wingren, as reported by CNBC.

‘The game is gaining momentum in Western markets, which is likely to impact engagement for all AAA games to some degree. We believe Fortnite is growing the overall gaming TAM [total addressable market], but some cannibalisation is likely.’

Rather than forcing EA and Activision execs to eat their rivals, what this means is that other publishers are likely to make about 10% less revenue from their own multiplayer games – because everyone’s spending their time and money on Fortnite.

Fortnite only seems destined to get more popular though, especially considering the mobile versions haven’t even launched properly yet.

Footage of the game on iPhone and iPad is starting to appear around the Web though, and if you want to try and sign-up yourself the link is here.

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter

Fortnite passes Minecraft as the world’s favourite video game

To explain where the idea for the Nintendo Switch came from, Yoshiaki Koizumi puts his hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a Nintendo-themed playing card, placing it on the coffee table in front of him. Look back 127 years, he continues, to Nintendo’s founding in September 1889. “Nintendo made playing cards,” says Koizumi, 48. As deputy general manager of the company’s entertainment planning and development division, he’s been one of the leading creative influences behind the Switch. “Playing cards are something that you enjoy eye-to-eye with another person,” he says. “Think about a deck of cards. It’s something that is small, many of the games have rules that are easy to learn and people of all ages can enjoy playing them together.” For a deck of playing cards, his thought experiment goes, substitute a games console. The secret to Nintendo’s innovation, he concludes, is simple: “It’s not necessarily about technology.”

Nintendo’s philosophy for making games has often been counterintuitively low-tech. “A lot of the history of gameplay, up until this point, has been people looking at a screen, not necessarily seeing the facial expression and the body language of the person next to them,” says Koizumi. “So that became a very important, fundamental concept for us moving forwards on Switch: how to preserve that, how to bring people back to that kind of experience.” Whenever he attempts to explain Nintendo’s thinking with Switch, and its approach to game development in general, Koizumi comes back to playing cards: play anytime, anywhere, with anyone and always see how they react. “If I were to put it into incredibly simplified terms, we don’t necessarily view this as a gaming machine, we view this as a tool for play,” adds Shinya Takahashi, 53, director and general manager on the same team as Koizumi. The word “play” – and its distance from the word technology – crops up a lot at Nintendo. In an interview with Edge magazine for the GameCube’s launch in 2001, Nintendo’s late president Satoru Iwata said the company’s ambition with its software was to “satisfy people’s need to be happy.” The GameCube sold 21.74 million units to the PlayStation 2’s 155 million. The Wii, Nintendo’s next console, sold 101 million units to the PlayStation 3’s eighty-five million.

I meet Koizumi and Takahashi in a hotel room in South Kensington, London. Both sit on a sofa flanked by oversized, floral cushions, attentively listening to my questions in English before turning to an interpreter. Koizumi is the more smartly dressed of the two, the fringe of his hair swept carefully to one side, a Nintendo Switch lapel badge pinned proudly on his grey jacket. Takahashi, livelier and more excitable, fixes me with his gaze whenever I speak. “You’ve both worked for Nintendo for a couple of decades, is that right?” I ask. “Twenty-eight years,” says Takahashi, pausing to do some mental arithmetic. “Nineteen-eighty-nine!” he adds. “Nineteen-ninety-one,” chirps the ordinarily straight-faced Koizumi.

Takahashi and Koizumi’s curriculum vitaes read like a birthday wish list from my childhood. One of Takahashi’s first jobs was as a designer on Wave Race 64, he was also producer on Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and general producer on Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training. Koizumi was assistant director of Super Mario 64; director of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; Majora’s Mask; Super Mario Sunshine; Donkey Kong Jungle Beat; Super Mario Galaxy; Super Mario Galaxy 2; Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World. The pair, with their combined half-century of service, have played a key role in shaping the company’s next big hope.

The joyous idiosyncrasies in the Nintendo games I played, and still play, are what make them stand out. Accompanied by countless others, I am the intrepid explorer in the worlds it creates. In 1997 I glided through the serene landscapes of Pilotwings 64, watching the Space Shuttle take off from a virtual Cape Canaveral on Little States Island. My childhood friends and I raced around the upper deck of Block Fort in Mario Kart 64’s Battle Mode. Galloping across the fields of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it felt like I was venturing out alone against an insurmountable enemy. At their best, Nintendo’s games have always had an intangible, brilliant weirdness. That happy knack has a lot to do with heritage, which is more keenly felt at Nintendo than other games companies. For Takahashi, who has spent his entire adult life building on that heritage, the feeling of pride is clear. His favourite moment as a developer remains the time he saw someone playing a demo of the first game he had worked on, a little-known SNES title released only in Japan. “To see their reaction, to see the joy on their face,” he says. “That’s a memory that I’ll always keep.”

Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The launch of Switch comes at a tumultuous time for Nintendo. Its debut smartphone game, Super Mario Run, was released in December 2016, five years after Iwata warned that doing so would cause Nintendo to “cease to be Nintendo”. In March 2015, as the company announced plans to develop games for smartphones, Iwata admitted it would be “a waste” not to. “It is structurally the same as when Nintendo, which was founded 125 years ago when there were no TVs, started to aggressively take advantage of TV as a communication channel.”

In 2014, it was Iwata, in collaboration with The Pokémon Company’s Tsunekazu Ishihara, who conceived of the idea of Pokémon Go, inspired by a Pokémon-themed April Fools’ Day gag on Google Maps. Launched on July 6, 2016, the game now holds the record for most revenue grossed by a mobile game in its first month ($206.5 million), most downloaded mobile game in its first month (130 million), most mobile app store charts topped simultaneously (70) and the fastest mobile game to gross $100 million (20 days). Nintendo owns a thirty-two per cent stake in the Pokémon franchise and an undisclosed stake in developer Niantic. Something, somewhere, had changed Iwata’s mind.

Iwata passed away in July 2015 at the age of 55. He wasn’t around to admire the record-breaking success of his collaboration, but his way of thinking still dominates Nintendo. “On my business card,” he said during a speech at the Game Developers Conference in 2005, “I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But, in my heart, I am a gamer.” Iwata, like Mario-creator Shigeru Miyamoto, composer Koji Kondo, GameBoy-inventor Gunpei Yokoi, Takahashi, Koizumi and many others, all got what it meant, and still means, to work for Nintendo. “Typically, you go to a programmer and tell them what you, as a designer, want to do. They then tell you all the reasons why you can’t do that,” Shigeru Miyamoto told The New Yorker in December 2016. “Mr. Iwata was different. He felt it would be shameful for him to say something was impossible.” It’s a cliché that listlessly flops out the mouths of many company executives, but Iwata’s sentiment feels different – and it all rests on the word “shameful”.

For Nintendo’s rivals, achieving the impossible is oft-linked to rapid growth and big profits. Nintendo is, at times, confusingly different. In a speech delivered in 2011, Iwata drew a clear line between his company and its smartphone competitors. “Their goal is just to gather as much software as possible, because quantity is what makes the money flow.” Nintendo, he implied, was different. That same year, Iwata finished the point he had started: “I believe my responsibility is not to short-term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid-and-long-term competitive strength.” It’s an attitude that helps explain the company’s stoic response to its failures: Nintendo had expected to sell 100 million units of its Wii U console, in the end it shifted closer to thirteen million. The Switch must do better.

The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

When it launches on March 3, the Switch will cost £280. Nintendo is releasing the two major day-one titles – 1-2-Switch and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – with Konami’s Super Bomberman R, Activision’s Skylanders: Imaginators and Ubisoft’s Just Dance 2017 completing the line-up. Before the end of 2017, Nintendo will add Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Splatoon 2, Super Mario Odyssey and ARMS, a new, fast-paced fighting game that makes full-use of the innovative Joy-Con. Fire Emblem Warriors, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Sonic Mania and a clutch of other high-profile titles from third-parties will also be available before the year is out. As ever, Nintendo will be hoping a small selection of big names can help lift an otherwise lacklustre line-up.

In recent generations, Nintendo’s home console successes have tended to come in fits and starts: the Nintendo 64 sold relatively well, the GameCube poorly, the Wii was a runaway success, the Wii U a runaway failure. But, from Wii to Wii U to Switch, Nintendo’s thinking has become clearer. The Wii, with its intuitive motion controls, opened up play to everyone, while the Wii U’s tablet-like controller laid the groundwork for the Switch’s far more polished, portable design. Takahashi describes it as a “unified system”, a blend of handheld and home console, finally made possible by the technology available to Nintendo. “It just so happened that various technologies were coming together,” adds Koizumi “And we saw that we could combine them together to solve exactly that problem. And that, I think, was the real inception of the Switch.”

The careers of Koizumi and Takahashi, both arts graduates who have worked for Nintendo their entire adult lives, are typical for a company whose employees pride themselves on lifelong devotion. “We started just a few years before the N64 era,” says Takahashi. “When we were making that shift from 2D to 3D gaming with the N64, we were two of the main individuals within Nintendo who were really leading the designers and helping to draw them out of that 2D world and into 3D game design,” he adds, pausing thoughtfully. “To put it more simply, the two of us like doing new things.”

While much of the press attention, and Nintendo’s own marketing, has focussed on how the Switch is both a handheld and home console, Takahashi seems more enthused about the new Joy-Con controllers. The palm-sized red and blue batons, packed with accelerometers, gyro sensors, infrared cameras and no fewer than 22 buttons, promise both confusion and potential. Takahashi asks if I’ve played a 1-2-Switch minigame where you have to guess the number of balls inside the controller, an impressively realistic sensation created using HD rumble, another feature squeezed into the palm-sized Joy-Cons. It’s a seemingly inconsequential feature that, for Takahashi, could change the way people play games. For the first time, players are asked to play a game where they’re not meant to look at the screen. It’s a very ‘Nintendo’ idea.

Takahashi asks what other 1-2-Switch minigames I’ve played. I reply while miming milking a cow. He laughs enthusiastically. “You seem like you liked that,” he says, laughing again. Whether guessing the number of balls, milking a cow, having a Wild West shootout or unlocking a safe, all the minigames in 1-2-Switch have one thing in common: you look at the person you’re playing against, not the screen. “If you play 1-2-Switch you get a sense for what we were trying to achieve with the hardware,” Takahashi continues. “We didn’t start with the idea of trying to create an integrated device that combined a home console with a handheld. Instead, we started with the idea of wanting to create a device that had a versatility of play that could appeal to as broad of an audience as possible.”

Nintendo’s games have always had the ability to turn us all into children again. When someone gets nostalgic about their childhood, I tend to warp-pipe back to a time of leaping plumbers, drifting go-karts and Pikachu electrocuting Captain Falcon. And as with any great creative work, a great game needs a soul. “Those of us who are working on the software side are always worried about one thing: how to get players to empathise with what they’re seeing in the game,” says Koizumi when I ask about the role of emotion in Nintendo’s games. “We’re always looking for ways to make different elements of the game the exact balance of surprise and empathy, which kind of play opposite one another to create that experience.”

Nintendo

For Nintendo, nowhere does that balance play out more than in Zelda, a franchise Koizumi has worked on for nearly two decades. So what can people expect from the latest instalment? “I think you’re going to find a lot of elements that really bring it back to the very first Zelda game, in the sense that people will find puzzles as they explore and get to solve them,” he says, referring to Breath of the Wild. Previously, Link’s world was alive to a point, now it teems with weapons, secrets and foes. “It also brings in some new elements like this idea of a wild, natural world surrounding you and challenging you to survive,” explains Koizumi. That battle to survive is not just at the core of Zelda, but also a challenge Nintendo must face as it approaches the launch of its latest console. “In that sense this Zelda has a story to it, of course,” says Koizumi. “But the adventure is bigger than that, it’s about the entire world as well. And that world is very wild.”

Despite the commercial ups and downs, Nintendo continues to innovate and surprise. “The source of our creativity, really, for the past thirty-to-forty years has come from the fact that we don’t look at what other companies are doing and try to replicate their success,” says Takahashi. “The core of Nintendo culture is this feeling that if all we do is replicate somebody else’s success, we’ll never actually achieve the same level of success that they had.” That, continues Takahashi, is the reason for Nintendo’s reputation as a highly-secretive company. “We’re so busy thinking about things that other people aren’t doing,” he says, half-smiling. “We don’t want to tell people what we’re thinking about because then other people might do it.”

Nintendo Switch isn’t just a console, it’s a 127-year saga that began with a deck of cards

Parents – don’t worry about your children spending all their time online playing games. It may actually be improving their performance at school.

That’s according to new research from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The institution found that playing games could help students in sharpening skills learned at school, and then applying them elsewhere.

Research was conducted by Alberto Posso, associate professor at RMIT’s School of Economics, Finance and Marketing. Posso investigated data from the globally recognised Program for International Student Assessment, scraping the test results from more than 12,000 Australian 15-year olds.

Posso looked at tests covering maths, reading, and science, while also collecting data on students’ online activities. Those who played online regularly saw sharp improvements in academic performance over those who did not.

“Students who play online games almost every day score 15 points above the average in maths and 17 points above the average in science,” said Posso.

“When you play online games you’re solving puzzles to move to the next level and that involves using some of the general knowledge and skills in maths, reading, and science that you’ve been taught during the day,” Posso added. “Teachers should consider incorporating popular video games into teaching – so long as they’re not violent ones.”

The integration of gaming and education is nothing new – educational games have existed almost as long as personal computers. However, recent years have seen the growth of collaborative, online learning experiences using the medium, with the likes of Minecraft having its own Education Edition.

Mojang

However, while gaming can have beneficial results, social media may have the opposite effect. Posso’s research found that students who visit Facebook or other similar sites daily are actually more likely to fall behind in subjects such as maths, reading, and science – some as low as 20 points worse than those who never use social platforms.

“Students who are regularly on social media are, of course, losing time that could be spent on study – but it may also indicate they are struggling with maths, reading and science and are going online to socialise instead,” suggested Posso.

“Teachers might want to look at blending the use of Facebook into their classes as a way of helping those students engage.”

Posso does highlight that other factors could have major impacts on teenagers’ academic progress though, suggesting that repeating a school year or skipping classes has a far greater negative impact than a Facebook addiction.

Real-world community divisions could also influence development to a worse extent than social media. The study found that “indigenous students or those from minority ethnic or linguistic groups” were at “greater risk” of falling behind than teens that engaged in high use of social media.

Posso’s full research, Internet usage and educational outcomes among 15-year-old Australian students, has been published in the International Journal of Communication.

Playing online games can make children smarter (just don’t let them use social media)

The following is a republished account written by Kate Hedin, who recreated some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous projects on the popular video game platform, Minecraft. Her work is known as Wrightcraft. This was first published on the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

I started with one of my favorite Wright buildings: the Robie House, in Chicago. I had visited the house in person several times, and even took one of the multi-hour in-depth tours, leaving me with a whole album of photos from my trip and a memory of being in the space. Next, I did a bit of research online. I found blueprints and floorplans of the house, as well as additional photos from angles and locations I didn’t have access to on my trip.

Now came the task of recreating this structure in Minecraft.

One of the biggest challenges of building in Minecraft exists in the very premise of the game: every item occupies a one cube unit of space — there are no curves, no diagonals and no angles other than right ones. Furthermore, there is also a rather limited color/texture palette to work with. Though initially this set of fixed variables might seem restrictive, I found this type of problem-solving puzzle quite exciting.

I knew I wanted the build to be as close to scale as possible (rather than up-scaling it to gain a finer granularity of detail) — I wanted to actually be able to walk around inside the house. Reviewing the blueprints of the house and Minecraft’s set of fixed variables, I decided on two elements to help set my starting reference point: Minecraft’s “door” block and the height of your character in-game. From there, I was able to lay out an outline and get a sense of scale, and then I built up from there. The Prairie Style of the Robie House lent itself quite well to the block-palette of Minecraft, and I was quite pleased with how my first build turned out.

I enjoyed the process and the outcome so much that it sent me down the rabbit hole of wanting to recreate more and more Wright buildings. So, just as I’ve added Wright buildings to my collection by visiting them over the years, I’ve now begun literally adding Wright buildings to my collection — all inside this virtual space.

A Wrightcraft recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House | Kate Hedin

A Wrightcraft recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home & Studio | Kate Hedin

Each house provides its own set of challenges and puzzles, especially with the limited palette of Minecraft. For me, that’s part of the fun: puzzling out how I can use these resources to create the desired effect.

To date, I have done builds of the Robie House (Chicago), Oak Park Home & Studio (Chicago), Hollyhock House (L.A.), Pope-Leighey House (DC), Darwin D. Martin Complex (Buffalo), the Ravine Bluffs Development Bridge (Glencoe, IL), and the Rookery atrium (Chicago), with plans to do many more.

• 
  A side-by-side of the original and the Wrightcraft recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House showing the exterior and pool | Kate Hedin

To see more of these builds, including steps in the process, as well as side-by-side comparison photos (actual photos of the houses next to their Minecraft counterparts), follow Frank Lloyd Wrightcraft on its website, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Top Image: A Wrightcraft recreation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home & Studio | Kate Hedin 

Wrightcraft: Minecraft Meets Frank Lloyd Wright

Minecraft is fast approaching ten years of being one of the world’s most popular games, with hundreds of millions of active players across all platforms. It has revolutionized the industry and has turned some of its most talented players into multi-millionaires. It dominates YouTube, is on the shelves of every toy store, and it even has its own Lego range.

Some people play Minecraft because it offers a lot of creative freedom; Minecraft has been used by architects and in schools as an educational tool. For others, it’s the adventure; such a vast world can be explored endlessly and provides hours of entertainment.

If you’re late to the party and have only just bought the game, you might not know where to start. The game drops you into a very vast world, and it can be a very confusing game to get started with. Each world is randomly generated from a string of numbers (known as a seed), so no two worlds are the same. Fortunately, once you’re armed with a few basics and a pickaxe, you’ll learn the ropes in now time. So let’s dive into the basics.

The 2018 beginner’s guide to Minecraft

Crafting

Crafting is central to the game, and is used to make all kinds of different objects from the materials you have. Each item in the game – such as a sword – has its own individual crafting recipe. For example, to make a stone sword, you would craft it like this:

Placing a stick below two pieces of cobblestone would make a stone sword. Swap out the cobblestone for wood, iron, gold or diamond to create different variations, diamond being the strongest and most durable.

Before you start crafting anything, however, you will need to build a crafting table, which is made from four pieces of wood. This is a very simple process and can be done as soon as you step foot into your first world.

How to build a crafting table

1. Locate a tree and then punch out some wood by holding down left-click.
2. Press the e key to open your inventory and select the wood, placing it into the four boxes next to your avatar. Four oak wood planks will appear.
3. Click the oak wood planks and drag them to your inventory. The original piece of wood will disappear because you have turned it into planks.
4. Then, fill the four boxes where you placed your original piece of wood with the four wood planks. A crafting table will appear.
5. Drag the crafting table to your hotbar (the single line of boxes) and then exit your inventory. The crafting table will appear in your hotbar and you can select it by scrolling. When it’s selected (i.e. it is in your hand), place it on the floor by right-clicking.

You now have a crafting table, which is a 9×9 area that allows you to craft anything in the game; just right-click the crafting table to use it.

It is important to know how to utilize the crafting feature so you’re ahead of the game when it comes to surviving your first night in Minecraft, because you won’t have long until it’s dark and monsters spawn. Speaking of which…

The first night

Your first night in the game is the hardest because you start with nothing. When you spawn for the first time, the in-game time is noon. You only have a short amount of time (ten minutes) to get a basic shelter together in order to survive. If you don’t build a basic shelter, you’ll spend your first night repeatedly getting mauled by mobs – not fun!

To survive your first night, you’ll need to grab yourself some wood to build a basic shelter and create some wooden tools, then hunt down some coal to make a couple of torches. Mobs (monsters) spawn in the dark; you really don’t want to create a shelter and then have a monster spawn inside it!

What exactly are “mobs”?

“Mobs” is the term used to describe Minecraft’s animals and monsters. Mobs can either be passive (such as sheep or pigs) or aggressive, and there are many different adversaries in the game that have the potential to harm you or destroy your creations.

Over the years, mobs have been a huge focal point for the Minecraft development team, and the number of mobs has virtually doubled. However, the mobs you should pay special attention to while you’re still finding your feet are the aggressive ones that can spawn in the Overworld.

Zombies are quite easy to fight; you just need to keep hitting them. Zombies will come after you if you get within a certain radius of them, and they can beat down doors. They are very slow and aren’t a huge threat, but a group of them can be deadly.

Spiders only attack you at night. These pesky monsters have the ability to climb walls, jump and move fairly quickly, though, like Zombies, they are quite easy to kill… most of the time.

Skeleton Archers are a serious threat even for experienced players. This very irritating monster carries a bow and arrow and has the ability to shoot you with it. As a result, these monsters can do damage to you from a considerable distance, and they are very accurate.

Creepers are perhaps the most widely known and most destructive of mobs in the game, especially when you are just starting out. Creepers explode when you get within a certain radius of them and can decimate small bases. It takes them a couple of seconds to explode, but they will chase after you, so just stay well away!

Endermen are the final mobs you need to worry about in the early stages of your Minecraft life. These tall, dark, and slender mobs may look pretty scary… because they are. Endermen are passive… until you look at them… and then you’re going to die, probably, because they have the ability to teleport away from and then back to you, attacking from a different angle. Just keep as far away from them as possible; you don’t stand a chance as a new player!

Mining

As you have probably guessed by the name “Minecraft,” mining is pretty much the most important aspect of the game. When you’ve survived your first night, have a basic set of tools, and know which nasty monsters to look out for, you’re set to begin delving underground and exploring the world beneath you.

The world extends down below the grass by around 100-130 blocks; it is here where you will find all the best resources, treasures, and loot. You’ll find iron, diamonds, and gold, with which you can create more durable tools; and redstone, which is Minecraft’s answer to electricity and can be used to make circuits.

It is best to start mining below your shelter, because then you are safe from monsters and you don’t need to run through the wilderness to get home and risk being attacked by a monster. Don’t dig straight down, though, or you may fall into lava or a chasm.

The best way to mine is to dig in a stairway pattern; that way you avoid falling into deadly pits and have a clear pathway to get back home. No matter what method you use to mine, though, always make sure you have a plentiful supply of torches and food; it is dark underground, which makes it hard to see and is the perfect environment in which monsters can spawn and ruin your day!

It is easy to get lost in mining, and people often spend many hours doing it… it is quite therapeutic, and Minecraft’s ambient music only adds to this. Remain vigilant at all times, because monsters do spawn underground in pre-existing caves and dungeons… in fact, it can be just as dangerous below ground as it is above ground.

Now that you have the basics of Minecraft down, take your gaming to the next level with our guides to how to install Minecraft mods and how to change skins in Minecraft.

The 2018 beginner’s guide to Minecraft

How does this sound for some gaming fun … or not?

You spend hours of computer gaming time building spaceships and learning a complicated combat system that requires working a spreadsheet. Then you fly into space where there are no rules, where you can’t trust anyone, and where you are likely to get blown up and stolen from by online gangs of bullies, potentially losing all you had invested hours in building.

No thanks, just pass me the remote.

But for over half a million people the massive multiplayer online space game EVE Online is right up there with their idea of fun. It is a gaming phenomenon that is now attracting serious academic study as it pushes the boundaries of what constitutes ‘fun’ for people. Its longevity and success is posing deep questions about what we want from games, what they can tell us about ourselves, as well as suggesting new avenues for applying gaming concepts to the real world.

It is the real sense of meaning that can be generated in otherwise frivolous virtual worlds that is key to EVE’s success and perhaps the wider applicability of gaming, says University of Melbourne human computer interaction researcher Dr Marcus Carter.

Watch the video

Unlike most online games, EVE, launched in 2003, imposes serious consequences for failure, and creates a harsh and cold environment where there is no reset. Once a player takes an action it can’t be taken back or replayed, and the impact can affect every other player in the game.

“EVE can generate an enormous amount of meaning because as in the real world every decision can only ever be made once,” says Dr Carter, who has edited the first book to examine the EVE world, Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business, published earlier this year.

“It shows the enormous breadth of ways in which games can be attractive to people. The appeal of EVE Online is completely alien to most people, but that is why I’m interested in it. It is a contrasting case that challenges how we think about virtual worlds and online communities,” he says.

In EVE, when players fight their space wars they risk permanently losing hundreds and even thousands of hours of game time that some will even have spent real money to acquire. For the players it is more than enough to focus the mind.

It encourages wholesale deceit and espionage that extends well beyond the game, including infiltrating off-game forums to sabotage competing alliances. Once there was even a plot by some players to cut the power to an enemy’s house in London to take them out of an upcoming battle. Sometimes players are forced to set their alarms for the middle of the night so they can get up in time to defend themselves against co-ordinated attacks launched from different time zones.

To protect themselves players band into alliances, some of which boast tens of thousands of players. The largest has 40,000 members, is led by one player named The Mittani, and is known appropriately as The Imperium. The hundreds of thousands of players have in effect evolved their own Star Wars and made their own stories, some of which have been compiled into a book.

real world conflict

And just as the game intrudes on the real world, the real world intrudes on the game. When Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2014 a group of Ukrainians players who were allied with some Russian players suddenly betrayed their partners and defected.

“EVE Online shows that negative things can be part of the attraction of playing games – that ‘play’ can involve struggling to survive in a hard, ruthless and high stakes world. People will question how it can be fun to be stolen from, to be lied to, and to be victimised. But for EVE players it is fun, and that is really interesting,” says Dr Carter.

“By playing a game we are pursuing an emotional experience such as fun or excitement. But people don’t realise how often the experience we seek in games can be something other than frivolous, but something serious,” he says. “It suggests that gaming and virtual worlds can be highly effective in motivating people toward achieving goals whether they are personal or professional.”

The key to EVE Online is that the game takes place on a single computer server, distinguishing it from other massive multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft that take place on multiple servers, putting the virtual world into compartments. But in EVE there is only one world with all 500,000 players in it. And the game designers have taken a back seat, leaving it to the players to create their own play and providing little protection for players from each other.

In such a world it is no surprise that players band together and that alliances are perhaps dispiritingly based on real world ethnicities and cultures. EVE players are overwhelmingly male, white and work in IT. But Russians band with Russians and Reddit users band with Reddit users.

It shows that social prejudice transcends the real world.

“In a game that forces you to trust people when you can’t actually trust anyone, it is no coincidence that players band together with people that seem to be like you,” Dr Carter says.

“It is depressing, but it is also comforting that perhaps this is simply what people are like and that the more we realise that the more we can think about what we can do to stop that affecting our societies in negative ways.”

The game also puts a premium on building social skills, says Dr Carter. He describes EVE Online as a form of “social combat” in which players learn to deceive and spot deception. Some players even report becoming more socially confident through playing the game.

At the same time, the absolute dependence of EVE Online players on each other in a bleakly unforgiving environment means learning to trust someone is crucial to survival.

“It raises the stakes of in-game friendships because people have to be better friends in order to trust one another,” Dr Carter says.

How EVE Online encourages players to interact could have important implications for how we use virtual worlds and gaming ideas for other purposes such as teaching, learning and promoting social interaction for isolated people such as the elderly, Dr Carter says.

“By studying games like EVE that are on the boundary of what games can be, we can appreciate that the space for games is wider than what we may initially have anticipated.”

The tagline for the 1979 movie Alien was “in space no one can hear you scream.” But when it comes to EVE Online the screaming is audible … and worth listening to.

Banner image: Wake Up Freeman/Flickr

Gaming more than a Space Oddity

The Nintendo Switch has finally been revealed, and Nintendo looks set to come out swinging when the new console is launched on March 3. As well as splitting the difference between home and handheld gaming, the Switch is bucking recent Nintendo tradition by having a stellar line-up of Nintendo Switch games announced already. Here are all the highlights revealed, to date.

Super Mario Odyssey

In Mario series lore Mario and Luigi are from Brooklyn, New York (well, sometimes) but it’s never been a world the colourful, mushroom-gobbling plumber has adventured in – until now. Super Mario Odyssey sees the cartoonish hero running around both the familiar Mushroom Kingdom and new, realistic city environments, interacting with full-size humans and wall-jumping up skyscrapers. Throw in new abilities thanks to his now-sentient hat – which can be thrown like Wonder Woman’s tiara to attack enemies or create a temporary platform to jump across – and this is easily the Nintendo Switch‘s first ‘killer app’.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The title of ‘killer app’ might go to the latest Zelda, and the only reason it doesn’t is that it’s a split release, also coming to Wii U. The prospect of console quality Zelda on the go is tantalising though, and with more than 100 dungeons, a vast open world, and deep crafting mechanics to mix up the usual gameplay formula, this coule redefine ‘epic’.

1-2-Switch

The Nintendo Switch’s answer to Wii Sports, 1-2-Switch is a mini-game collection designed to showcase the hardware’s features. In total, there are 28 of these mini-games to get to grips with, nearly all of which are played by looking at your opponent, not the screen.

Nintendo

This may sound odd but it takes gaming into real space, with players psyching each other out face to face before quick-draw shoot-outs, or waving the Joy-Con controllers around like swords. A contender for best party game.

– Read WIRED’s 1-2-Switch review

Super Bomberman R

Possibly the biggest surprise of the Nintendo Switch’s reveal – Bomberman is back! Konami, having been almost dormant on console games since Metal Gear Solid V, seems to have realised the wealth of its gaming IP, and is bringing one of its most beloved franchises to potentially the best platform for it. The social and portable aspects of the Nintendo Switch combined with Bomberman’s simple but addictive mechanics could be the perfect pairing.

Lego City Undercover

History repeating itself? Lego City Undercover was originally released on the Wii U, where it became the best Lego game that barely anyone played. Loosely inspired by Grand Theft Auto, with cop Chase McCain returning to Lego City to track down his criminal arch-nemesis, it remains one of the best Lego games ever made. This remastered version – which is also coming to PS4 and Xbox One – makes its bow on Nintendo Switch though, now with extra features. Hopefully, it’ll finally reach the audience it deserves.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

The original Xenoblade Chronicles never got a fair turn at bat – initially a late, niche release for the Wii, and later ported to the 3DS where it suffered from the tiny screen. Xenoblade Chronicles X for Wii U didn’t fare much better, with most players missing out on the game. Third time lucky, then, for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Monolith Soft’s epic new space fantasy. The trailer doesn’t reveal much, beyond it being an action-RPG, but it looks beautiful.

Splatoon 2

The first Splatoon was arguably the best game on the Wii U, so it’s incredibly good news to see Nintendo moving forwards on a full sequel for the Nintendo Switch – especially since the social nature of the portable console meshes perfectly with Splatoon’s multiplayer nature. It looks set to offer brand new ways to splat too, including more powerful weapons, new abilities, and arena-drenching inkstorms.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Conversely, the Wii U’s other masterpiece is only upgraded for Nintendo Switch – but it seems to correct the original’s only grievous error. Battle Mode was a mess on the Wii U, and it thankfully looks to have been heavily refined here, bringing back more of an arena tournament rather than the track-based race combat of the base game. At the Nintendo Direct event on April 12, Nintendo added that the game will have more unlocked tracks, characters and carts than any previous version of the game. Deluxe arrives on April 28.

– Read WIRED’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe review

Fire Emblem Warriors

Publisher Koei Tecmo doesn’t even need to show any gameplay in its reveal for Fire Emblem Warriors – the name alone reveals it’s yet another horde-based hack and slash effort, in the vein of Dynasty Warriors. However, the earlier Hyrule Warriors did an exceptional job of making the button mashing action blend seamlessly with Zelda lore, so hopefully this can do the same for the mythology of the Fire Emblem universe.

Arms

Nintendo isn’t much known for fighting games, but Arms looks like the Nintendo-est take on the genre you could imagine. Two fighters enter an arena and battle it out with extendable spring arms. Mechanically, it looks suited to showing off the functions of the dual Joy-Con controllers, with players holding one in each hand and using motion controls to attack and defend. During the recent Nintendo Direct event, the firm revealed more about Arms‘ gameplay, including a new character called MinMin, and said it will launch on June 16.

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Project Octopath Traveller

It’s hard to parse much information from the 45-second reveal trailer, but despite surface appearances, this looks to be more than your standard retro-style JRPG. With deceptively attractive visuals – pixel-based characters inhabit a layered, 2.5D world filled with beautiful environments and impressive lighting effects – this seems set to dive into the minutiae of role-playing, teasing vastly different experiences based on your choices. Almost certainly not a final title either, but this an interesting-looking prospect from Square Enix.

Shin Megami Tensei: Brand New Title

The best thing about Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei games is how mind-bendingly, gut-twistingly weird they all are. This cinematic trailer tells us nothing, other than the final game (probably) featuring some of the series’ more familiar demons, and a new hero – maybe? – who looks like a tokusatsu superhero, hanging out in a run-down building. What the game is actually about, we have no idea – but we can’t wait.

Sonic Mania

Sonic Mania is a loving flashback to the 2D superspeed side-scrollers of the ’90s. A celebration of Sonic’s origins and finest moments, the Nintendo Switch release doesn’t appear to be any different to the already-announced version for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but it is nice to have confirmation it’ll be available – even if it is still a bit strange to see Sega mascot Sonic headlining a game on a console made by former rivals Nintendo.

Puyo Puyo Tetris

Sega dives deep into its catalogue for this puzzle game mash up. Tetris is an internationally renowned classic, while Puyo Puyo – beloved in Japan – is best known in the west as the source for Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. This crossover was originally released for PS Vita and PS3 in 2014, but the Nintendo Switch release will be its western debut. The mechanics of both games are combined in various modes, to create an addictive new twist on fast-paced puzzle gaming. A slightly later release for the Nintendo Switch, this arrives on April 25.

Minecraft

Minecraft is set to join the Nintendo Switch ranks on May 11. The crafting game on Nintendo Switch will look similar to the Wii U version, complete with exclusive Super Mario Bros-themed content.

Ultra Street Fighter II

The game that dominated the fighting genre in the 1990s is making a return on Nintendo Switch with all the original fighters and bosses, the characters added in Super Street Fighter II, plus new additions Evil Ryu and Violent Ken. Players will be able to use Joy-Cons to challenge friends and strangers and, in addition to versus action, you can now team up with a friend to take on the CPU in Buddy Battle mode. The game is released on May 26.

And there’s more…

Following the Nintendo Switch’s reveal, other publishers started revealing their upcoming titles for Nintendo’s new machine.

Bandai Namco has confirmed Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 will be coming to the console, while an entry in the Tales of RPG series is also in development. Most excitingly, the publisher is working on a new Taiko Drum Master release, bringing the brilliant rhythm action title out of Japan for the first time in years.

Activision has confirmed the enduringly popular Skylanders will be coming to Nintendo Switch, with the latest entry Imaginators arriving in March. The Nintendo Switch version will introduce a digital library, allowing players to store characters from the physical toys, making it easier to play on the go.

Ubisoft’s slate includes recent winter sports title Steep, taking players on a tour of the Alps; Just Dance 2017, now playable with up to six dancers at a time if you have multiple Joy-Con controllers (or use a smartphone app to double as one); and Rayman Legends: Definitive Edition, which the publisher calls the “ultimate version” of the beautifully animated platformer.

Tomorrow Corporation

Indie publisher Tomorrow Corporation has revealed it’s bolstering the day one line up with three games from its back catalogue. 2008’s phsyics puzzler World of Goo, 2012’s flammable mini-sandbox Little Inferno, and 2015’s programming puzzler-cum-corporate satire Human Resource Machine will all be available on the Nintendo Switch on March 3.

Interestingly, these will be digital-only releases, indicating Nintendo’s eShop – or the Nintendo Switch’s equivalent – will be active on launch day. Details on the online store have yet to be revealed by Nintendo though, and Tomorrow Corporation has not revealed prices for the trio of games.

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas, a Zelda-esque adventure has also been confirmed for release on the Nintendo Switch. Set in a water-logged world dotted with islands, players guide a young boy on a quest to find his missing father while uncovering the secrets of the ancient kingdom of Arcadia and a legendary sea monster – the Oceanhorn of the title.

Oceanhorn was first released on iOS in 2013 before receiving upgraded and expanded ports on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, so perhaps won’t be the most demanding of the Nintendo Switch’s power. However, the game’s publisher says it “will run beautifully on the powerful Nintendo Switch.”

No exact release date has been confirmed, but the game will launch in 2017. Perhaps more interestingly, the first game coming to the Nintendo Switch, albeit late, could be prelude to the in-development sequel Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm arriving on Nintendo’s hardware when development is finished.

Expect more games to be revealed for Nintendo Switch in the days ahead.

Nintendo Goes Indie

If the above slate of titles weren’t enough, Nintendo recently held one of its trademark Nintendo Direct broadcast exclusively focused on indie games.

The showcase unveiled a staggering 60 titles coming to Switch, showing a major push on Nintendo’s part to get more independent developers involved with the new console. It’s a great plan – indie devs are increasingly able to produce so-called ‘triple-A’ quality games, with an extraordinary amount of variety and imagination on offer. The independent sector is also showing tremendous growth – in volume of games and popularity with players – making it exactly the right creative community to court.

While some of the games announced are beloved classics – the likes of Towerfall: Ascension, The Escapists and Overcooked are perennial favourites that have already proven themselves – many will have enhanced features making use of the Switch’s unique hardware. Others, such as Yooka-Laylee and Gonner are brand new, and Nintendo has even managed to snag a few exclusives, as with Runner 3.

Release dates are still to be confirmed for many titles, but the full list of 60 indie games coming to Nintendo Switch is as follows:

• 1001 Spikes
• Away: Journey to the Unexpected
• Battle Chef Brigade
• Blaster MasterZero
• Cave Story
• Celeste
• Dandara
• Duck Game
• Fast RMX
• Flipping Death
• Gonner
• Graceful Explosion Machine
• Has-Been Heroes
• Hollow Knight
• Hover
• Human Resource Machine
• Ittle Dew 2
• Kingdom: Two Crowns
• Little Inferno
• Monster Boy And The Cursed Kingdom
• Mr. Shifty
• Mutant Mudds
• NBA Playgrounds
• NeuroVoider
• Oceanhorn: Monster of the Uncharted Seas
• Overcooked: Special Edition
• Pankapu
• Perception
• Portal Knights
• Redout
• Rime
• Rive
• Rocket Rumble
• Rogue Trooper Redux
• Runner3
• Shakedown Hawaii
• Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment
• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
• Snake Pass
• Space Dave!
• Splasher
• Stardew Valley
• State of Mind
• SteamWorld Dig 2
• sU and the Quest for Meaning
• Terraria
• The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth †
• The Escapists 2
• The Fall Part 2: Unbound
• The Jackbox Party Pack 3
• The Next Penelope
• Thumper
• Toejam and Earl: Back in the Groove
• Towerfall Ascension
• Treasurenauts
• Tumbleseed
• Ultimate Chicken Horse
• Unbox: Newbies Adventure
• WarGroove
• WonderBoy: The Dragon’s Trap
• Yooka-Laylee
• Zombie Viking

The best Nintendo Switch games

Nintendo

Milk a cow, make a baby go to sleep, strut, shoot, feel some balls, eat a giant sandwich… 1-2-Switch has got it all. While Zelda: Breath of the Wild is stealing the headlines, Nintendo’s curious mini-game collection is, arguably, a better demonstration of the Nintendo Switch hardware. And it’s great fun. For a bit. If you’re drunk.

There are 28 mini-games to get to grips with, nearly all of which are played by looking at your opponent, not the screen. The games have a feeling of WarioWare: Smooth Moves about them, but the cartoon characters have been replaced with human actors gyrating in brightly-coloured rooms. Nearly all the games require little explanation: in Shave you have to shave your face using the Joy-Con; in Ball Count you have to count the number of balls in the Joy-Con, a sensation ingeniously created using the controller’s HD rumble feature; in Wizard you have to battle your opponent by casting spells; in Dance Off, you dance.

Nintendo

As with WarioWare, the genius of 1-2-Switch is in the glorious incongruity of its mini-games. Staring into the eyes of a friend while miming milking a cow will always make you laugh. Then there’s Baby, where you’re tasked with putting a baby, apparently trapped in the Nintendo Switch’s portable screen, to sleep. Rock it in your arms and set it down on a flat surface just right to win. It’s odd. But it’s also very good. Table tennis, where you stand facing your opponent and thwack a virtual ball back and forth based on sound alone, is exceptionally fun. As is baseball, where pitcher and batter duke it out in a ninth-innings showdown.

Nintendo

Nearly all the games make use of the Nintendo Switch’s innovative hardware in one way or another. Eating Contest, where you have to chomp your way through as many virtual sandwiches as possible before the time runs out, uses the right Joy-Con’s infrared sensor to work out when your mouth opens and closes. The quicker you chomp, the faster you get through the pile of sandwiches. But where Nintendo takes this kind of innovation next will be the real test of the hardware.

Most people will get a couple of hours of fun out of 1-2-Switch, but that’s it. Then, like so many party games, it will sit gathering dust until you’ve next got a house full of people, a bottle full of gin and a fridge full of tonic. This is an excellent party game and one quite unlike any that has come before.

Yet the game’s biggest fault is more to do with how it’s sold. For all Nintendo’s protestations, 1-2-Switch absolutely should have been bundled with the Nintendo Switch. It’s an excellent demonstration of the hardware and the sort of game that could be chucked on when you’ve got friends over and want to show them what the console is all about. Instead, you’ll have to fork out £35 for a limited, albeit fun, tech demo.

1-2-Switch is Nintendo’s most innovative game in years, but there’s a catch

AI has a new task: helping to keep the bugs out of video games.

At the recent Ubisoft Developer Conference in Montreal, the French gaming company unveiled a new AI assistant for its developers. Dubbed Commit Assistant, the goal of the AI system is to catch bugs before they’re ever committed into code, saving developers time and reducing the number of flaws that make it into a game before release.

“I think like many good ideas, it’s like ‘how come we didn’t think about that before?’,” says Yves Jacquier, who heads up La Forge, Ubisoft’s R&D division in Montreal. His department partners with local universities including McGill and Concordia to collaborate on research intended to advance the field of artificial intelligence as a whole, not just within the industry.

La Forge fed Commit Assistant with roughly ten years’ worth of code from across Ubisoft’s software library, allowing it to learn where mistakes have historically been made, reference any corrections that were applied, and predict when a coder may be about to write a similar bug. “It’s all about comparing the lines of code we’ve created in the past, the bugs that were created in them, and the bugs that were corrected, and finding a way to make links [between them] to provide us with a super-AI for programmers,” explains Jacquier.

Ubisoft hopes that Commit Assistant will cut down on one of the most expensive and labour-intensive aspects of game design. The company says that eliminating bugs during the development phase requires massive teams and can absorb as much as 70 per cent of costs. But offloading the bug-killing process to AI, even partially, isn’t without its own challenges. “You need a tremendous amount of data, but also a tremendous amount of power to crunch the data and all the mathematical methods,” he says. “That [allows] the AI to make that prediction with enough accuracy so that the developer trusts the recommendation.”

It’s still early days – Ubisoft is “only starting to pollinate” Commit Assistant to its development teams and, so far, there’s no usage data on how much it’s impacting game creation. There’s also the human factor to account for: Will developers want an AI poking through their code and effectively saying “you’re doing it wrong”?

“The most important part, in terms of change management, is just to make sure that you take people on board to show them that you’re totally transparent with what you’re doing with AI – what it can do, the way you get the data,” says Jacquier. “The fact that when you show a programmer statistics that say ‘hey, apparently you’re making a bug!’, you want him or her [to realise] that it’s a tool to help and go faster. The way we envisage AI for such systems is really an enabler. If you don’t want to use that, fine, don’t use it. It’s just another tool.”

Ubisoft is working on other AI applications beyond Commit Assistant, though Jacquier emphasises that it is only currently useful in dealing with very specific individual tasks – like getting virtual agents to avoid walking into each other. “AI so far is very good at making decisions on very narrow topics, like Alpha Go,” he says. (AlphaGo is the AI system from DeepMind that beat top Go player Ke Jie at the notoriously complex board game in May 2017.)

“We’ll see in the future more and more examples where this works, but in reality, [something like] a self-driving car, you won’t see in our streets probably until 20 years from now,” he says. “Simply because all those self-driving cars would have to avoid other automated vehicles, pedestrians, old-school cars driven by real humans, and rogue factors like wildlife wandering onto roads.”

But improving AI in gaming could help solve some of these real-world problems. Olivier Delalleau, an AI programmer at Ubisoft, spoke at UDC about autonomous driving in Watch Dogs 2. Using an example of a non-player-controlled car driving around the game’s virtual San Francisco, Delalleau showed how, initially, it would more often careen out of control when taking corners. The car was programmed with the goal of reaching a destination or looping the streets, providing visual flavour to the game world.

“[We found] cars never braked, because they didn’t find it was a good solution,” Delalleau says. As a result, it didn’t learn to brake. “It’s pretty difficult [for an AI] to learn to brake, because it [doesn’t see it as] a good solution most of the time. You need to help it find that it is a good solution.”

Delalleau used reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning, to help the AI learn this skill. Ubisoft provided thousands of examples of braking when driving, and the system learned that it could achieve its goals more efficiently by following the rules of the digital road. The outcome was that the AI cars began taking corners more slowly. This made Watch Dogs 2’s representation of San Francisco more realistic and reduced random crashes.

Jacquier believes that similar work could help inform AI systems with real-world applications, such as driverless cars. “In terms of ethics, I think that actually the games industry can help,” Jacquier says. “When you’re wondering how an autonomous car will behave in a situation that involves pedestrians or other cars, it’s like the Trolley Problem. That’s something you wouldn’t be able to test in real life, either for moral reasons or cost in some situations. But maybe you can have some fair answers by simulating that in a video game environment, and see how your AI would behave.”

Other areas in which Ubisoft is using AI include non-player characters (NPCs). In the upcoming Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has implemented a virtualised version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – the psychological theory of motivating factors for human behaviour – for NPC characters. This gives in-game agents motivations for their actions, and is modeled largely on the self-preservation strata of Maslow’s pyramid.

When a player encounters a non-player character in Far Cry 5, two systems are at work: trust and morale. If you raise your weapon at someone you’ve never met before, they will react with distrust or fear, warning you to lower your gun. If the NPC recognises a lingering threat from you, it will launch an attack of its own, fearing for its own ‘life’. When facing a group of enemies, as you pick off members of a gang, individual foes may realise they’re outclassed and lose their thirst for combat, and attempt to flee as they sees their ‘friends’ taken out. Elsewhere, animal companions will respond to player activity, cowing close to the ground unprompted when you crouch into stealth, for instance. It’s the sort of work that adds depth and realism to the world.

In future, tools such as Commit Assistant could spread beyond the confines of Ubisoft. La Forge developed the AI in conjunction with the University of Concordia and published academic papers on how it works. “If someone else wants to implement this kind of method, it’s totally possible to do that by getting those articles, which are public,” says Jacquier.

The system wouldn’t be of use to all developers though. It very much thrives in a ‘big data’ environment with near countless examples of what not to do to feed it as a guide. That restriction, for now, renders it uniquely beneficial to big-budget studios.

But if Ubisoft’s artificial baby matures as is expected, the pay-off for players could be significant – it could mean fewer release dates are pushed back for bug fixes and fewer bugs end up in the finished product. Meanwhile, it could free developers to focus their attentions on improving other aspects of the game. Perhaps best of all, if everything goes according to plan, you’ll never even notice.

Ubisoft is using AI to catch bugs in games before devs make them

I’d grown to be a young woman, the last in my tribe, tasked with running to the ponds for water to keep our crops alive. I’d just returned from one of these long errands when my ageing mother took me aside to tell me that only by raising my children could we ensure the tribe’s future.

Just then, I spawned my first child. Unfortunately, I was carrying no food, and the hunger that had gnawed at me as we spoke was to be my undoing: as I picked up my child to nurse them for the first time, the extra energy expenditure tipped me over the edge of starvation. Within seconds, I was dead. I only hope that my mother was somehow able to save my daughter.

Developer Jason Rohrer, known for experimental and art games including Passage, The Castle Doctrine and Chain World, calls One Hour One Life his “love letter to human civilization”. Aptly described as “a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building”, it may be his least abstract and most approachable game to date.

In the game, you start life as the helpless infant of another player, entirely dependent on them to nurse and care for you. Over the next few minutes, you’ll grow into a weak but independent child, able to help your community. With luck and cooperation, you’ll survive to have children of your own, becoming one link in a generational chain.

The game world on the server is persistent, but your character and their life are unique. Every time you die and respawn, you do so as an entirely new, randomly-generated person. You can communicate with other players via a text box, which allows you to type just one or two characters when you’re a baby, before expanding to allow full, if brusque, sentences as you grow to adulthood.

Jason Rohrer

One Hour One Life‘s difficulty curve can be punishing on an emotional level as well as a technical one. But it’s also rewarding – I felt genuine pride when I learned where to find fertile soil to plant our fields or how to crush a gooseberry with a flint chip to produce a seed that would, in time, give us a bush to provide dozens of berries.

The importance of cooperation and mutual aid in the game rapidly becomes apparent. Although there are built-in tips on what you can do with any given object, it is other players who provide the hands-on lessons in survival. It’s only because of my fellow players that I learned that sitting by a fire would dramatically reduce my energy expenditure; that dying brown fruit bushes could be restored with water, and that leaving one row of carrots to flower produces seed for the next planting.

Solo foraging can keep you alive for a while, but to establish a safe home and food supply for yourself and your descendants, you’ll need to farm, build and hunt, and that requires more than one pair of hands.

Women are uniquely important in One Hour One Life, as only women – without the involvement of any men – can have children. This design choice is a reflection of the Rohrer’s own views. “Every woman in the world is at the end of a chain of women who had at least one daughter, going back for 400 million years like endlessly nesting matryoshka dolls,” he says. “Women are the branches of the human family tree, where men are just the leaves.”

In One Hour One Life, the disproportionate importance of women, and thus female children, in sustaining your tribe through multiple generations leads to its own emergent gameplay. When times are hard, it’s not uncommon for male babies in particular to be rejected and left to starve by a mother who has only enough food resources to sustain one, while more sentimental players may struggle and die in a vain attempt to keep multiple offspring alive against all odds.

If you live past infancy, the game can be easier to play if you spawn as a male child. Once weaned, you can survive on your own and try to learn and help your community as best you can, but your mistakes are less likely to result in someone else’s death than if you were a woman. But, as Rohrer points out: “As a male character in this game, you feel your lack of importance acutely. If you wander off into the woods, you can live out the rest of your life, but you will do it absolutely alone, with no means of bringing other players into the game to join you.”

If the game’s design and mechanics lend themselves to matriarchies, they are also arguably rather bioessentialist (although not heteronormative – the most common family structure I’ve seen while playing the game has been centred around two or more women). Although the ability to spawn new players is unique to female-coded characters, Rohrer says that gender-coded behaviours, clothing and performance aren’t linked to sexual attributes. “There are two biological sexes in the game, but there are as many genders as people want to play,” he says. “After all, in this game, you are often tasked with playing a character who does not match the gender you identify with in real life.”

Not all women will be fertile, either: “It all depends on the flow of players into the game, and the way the child placement algorithms shake out.” However, he emphasises, “this is not a game about player customization. It’s about playing a character in a unique situation in each and every life.”

One Hour One Life is free and open source, but the game is primarily played on Rohrer’s own game server, for which you’ll have to pay $20 to get lifetime server access and support. When you sign up, you’re sent a unique login key, along with a download link to clients for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus the full source code and Linux server source code that you’ll need if you want to run your own private game server.

The game and its community are at times reminiscent of the early days of Minecraft, sharing tips, support and discussion on the official forums, a crafting recipe wiki and a review board, where players have taken to telling their characters’ stories.

The game can be tough, particularly while you’re learning your way around, and especially if earlier players have pillaged the resources of the area you spawn in. Childhood is difficult to survive and, if you’re an Eve – a reproductively mature woman spawned ex nihilo to balance user numbers – you’re at the mercy of both the environment and the needs of your potential brood of offspring.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its challenges, One Hour One Life‘s gameplay keeps dragging you back, while characters’ limited lifespans lend themselves to casual play.

All survival games are ultimately about forging your own story, but the interdependent community aspect of One Hour One Life means that the stories you create are intimate, complex and multidimensional in ways that few other games approach. Here, the pain of losing a family member and the joy of raising a child to adulthood are recreated in a moving microcosm of the human condition.

Spawn as another player’s baby in survival game One Hour One Life

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