Three days a week, you can find children at Huntington Memorial Library in Oneonta playing Minecraft as part of the library's efforts to develop so-called STEAM programming.
Educational focus on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — has recently begun to include an A for art into the acronym as educators recognize the importance of developing creativity alongside STEM.
“We really wanted to start bringing the library into the STEAM education age,” Huntington children's coordinator Anne Van Deusen said Thursday. “Minecraft was incredibly popular and we decided to have a Minecraft club.”
It ended up being so popular that the club is always waitlisted, and during the summer the demand was so great the library held two separate club sessions.
Microsoft introduced Minecraft: Education Edition, which touts the educational benefits of its creative and collaborative potential. Many classrooms in the country incorporate it into the curriculum. This year, Minecraft released a revamped Oregon Trail.
Two of the three days the library offers free play, where the computers are open on a first-come, first-serve basis. A more structured club happens Friday, where Van Deusen said kids are given challenges.
On Friday, the third floor of the library was filled with kids ages seven to 12, clicking at keyboards with their left hands as they maneuvered a mouse with their right. Bridget Stith, who oversees the club, said the children were building mini-games in their shared world.
“In the past we had them recreate a library, a house, a maze or incorporate pieces of art or classic architecture into what they were constructing,” Van Deusen said.
Mal Seimeca, 9, who was protecting her character from a monster, said she loved the creative aspect of the game, which she has been playing for two years.
“I've always loved building things and playing online makes it easy,” Seimeca said. The best thing she's built, she said, was a roller coaster and mansion with her friend.
Minecraft is a multi-platform game that offers up an endlessly customizable world. Its pixelated graphics make it look like a game from 20 years ago, but it is one of the most popular games available. Microsoft bought it in 2014 for $2.5 billion. Players postings videos of renderings on YouTube garner millions of views.
It's blend of creative engineering in implicit in the name: mine and craft. It begins with an empty world that a player fills or destroys with different tools, using only blocks to build with. This improvisational style of play is what attracts kids and educators alike to the game.
Van Deusen said there is a code of conduct for using the game in the library, and she finds that kids are very helpful each another, collaborating and problem-solving to create in the game.
Amelie Cej, 7, and her brother Rowan Parish, 9, were sitting next to one another, Rowan offering help when Amelie asked.
“I love making stuff,” said Cej.
Parish said his favorite part of Minecraft was the TnT.
Minecraft now has an official way to export 3D models, but there’s a catch: it’s only available with the Windows 10 version of the game. With that version you can now pull models out of the game and upload them to Microsoft’s Remix 3D platform where they can be viewed by anyone.
For more ways to customize your mining and crafting, check out the best Minecraft mods.
There’s now a special block you can lay down to start the export process, which involves setting the X and Y boundaries of your creation along with deciding a few other options, like whether players will appear there. Then give it a name, tag it, and upload. Voila! Your beautiful Minecraft castle – or some random tree you liked – is now on Remix 3D for all to see.
The fancy part is that these models can be interacted with directly in Paint 3D, letting you spray graffiti all over other people’s creations. (You monster.) Or add some storm clouds for a dapper dinosaur to run through, as the Mojang team have done here.
Exporting has been in beta for a bit, so the official board already has some neat stuff. Personally, I’m a fan of this treehouse, which has been helpfully edited to remind you of the name of the game it was built in.
Of course, Minecraft has unofficially supported these kinds of exports for ages, with third-party tools allowing pretty much the same sorts of things as we’ve got in this update. But in-game integration, easy sharing, and the weird shenanigans of Paint 3D still make this a neat addition. Sadly, exporting creations as models means you won’t see anything quite so wild as, say, a playable Pokémon Red on the board, but we’ll take what we can get.
A startup came out of three years in stealth Thursday with a simple goal: Make documents better.
Called Coda, the startup has the ambitious goal of making a “doc as powerful as an app,” reads the company's Medium post on the launch.
Coda starts with a blank canvas like a document from Google or Microsoft, but then allows users to build on top of it. One of the platform's beta testers described Coda as a “Minecraft for docs,” referring to the video game where people can build their own virtual worlds block by block.
Like many startups, Coda is entering a crowded market and taking on tech giants. Google and Microsoft both focus on document sharing and storage. Atlassian and Asana also offer enterprise software. Salesforce bought word processor Quip last year. There's also the tech darling turned billion-dollar goliath Slack.
But Coda does have quite the credible team. The company is led by Shishir Mehrotra, formerly VP of product at Google's YouTube. Previous reports said Mehrotra's project called “Krypton” was valued at $400 million.
So far, Coda has raised $60 million from some of Silicon Valley's most notable investors such as Greylock, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman is on the board, according to a report from The Verge.
A product team at ride-hailing giant Uber has been one of the beta testers, The Verge reported.
Mehrotra is dead set on creating the most supportive ecosystem for how we now use documents—collaboratively.
“We aren’t trying to digitize physical analogs any more; we’re using documents as tools to run our teams,” he wrote in the blog post.
“Why are we still clinging to metaphors long-forgotten?”
“Why are we still clinging to metaphors long-forgotten: the accountant’s grid, the typist’s paper, the professor’s slides? Why do these tools insist on creating boundaries where we don’t need them — forcing us to choose between a document or a spreadsheet?” he continued.
Some of the features of Coda include integrated commands. For example, type “GoogleDirections” and a Google Map with directions from an origin location to a destination will appear, according to The Verge.
Coda is not completely intuitive, however. As Casey Newton of The Verge wrote, “In Asana I click buttons and they do basically what I expect; in Coda I type an equal sign and cross my fingers.”
The project still has a long way to go. The complete tool is only available in desktop.
As of Thursday, anyone can request to join the beta at coda.io.
When Microsoft announced Minecraft's Better Together update, fans cheered. Minecraft feels built for cross-network play. It's the world's biggest family game, an experience designed with collaborative play in mind, and now truly open to everyone regardless of device (except PlayStation).
At least, that's how it seemed. Sadly, the edition which has arrived on console is not quite what fans had envisioned.
Microsoft never did a great job of communicating the fact its Better Together Update is not actually an update for console owners. It's a completely different game – one which is almost identical to Minecraft's previous Pocket Edition for mobiles.
This change has already occurred on Xbox One, with the old Minecraft: Xbox One Edition replaced in the console's store with a separate game client, just named “Minecraft”. Likewise, in the near future, Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition will also be left behind. Upgrading is free, but far from painless.
Minecraft's crafting and inventory interface, designed for touchscreen or mouse control, has not been well received by console players.
Minecraft is Minecraft, right? Well, not really. Minecraft console developer 4J Studios has, for more than half a decade, built a version of Minecraft which feels great when played with a console controller. (Microsoft's new version of Minecraft no longer lists 4J in the game's opening splash screens.)
The new version of Minecraft has ditched the console version's user interface completely. Your inventory and crafting are now organised using a different UI – shown above – from the mobile version of the game designed for a touchscreen, or for a mouse and keyboard.
Microsoft has a Minecraft feedback site set up to track user-requested fixes. Reinstating a console-style UI, at least as an option for Minecraft on console, is one of the highest requests out of more than 5800 ideas.
“This is the major reason that keeps me from moving away from Xbox One Edition,” one fan wrote. “I cannot stand the current BTU UI using a controller.”
“When playing on the Xbox, the Play Together UI is a large step backwards from what we have in the console edition, both in terms of layout and responsiveness,” another added.
“I'm honestly just gonna play regular Xbox One edition until they fix this, the new UI on Xbox is far, far worse and alienating to Xbox players,” a third fan agreed.
Other top requests include fixes for other casualties of Microsoft's decision to base the new Minecraft on the game's Pocket Edition: redstone and coordinates.
Minecraft's various console editions showed your coordinates on a map. The new Minecraft does not.
Redstone (Minecraft's equivalent of electrical wiring) has different systems on different platforms. The old console version was different to the Pocket Edition version – so imported worlds from Minecraft: Xbox One Edition now need redstone to be rewired to work.
Coordinates – being able to see your exact position on the game's map – also worked differently, depending on platform. Knowing your position is a vital part of meeting up with other players, and correctly constructing large building projects.
On console, players have always been able to see their position on an X/Y/Z axis by holding any map item. On Pocket Edition, you could not do this. So, since this new version of Minecraft is based on the Pocket Edition, console players have been left without this option. (Microsoft has recently relented to allow coordinate viewing as a cheat – but enabling cheats will disable achievements and other stat tracking).
And then there's the in-game store. Minecraft's store is front and center when you load the game, the option to buy a world the first you need to scroll past before being able to dismiss the game's latest patch notes.
The store already feels cluttered… and that's if it even loads.
It is intrusive – and for the first time, console players are being offered packs from third-party sources. This new version of Minecraft has only been available for a couple of weeks, and the shop already feels bloated.
I don't own these packs, but hitting the option to simply create a new world brings me a list full of them. The store feels like it has encroached way beyond the actual shop's limits.
Finally, there are the bugs. I've found it incredibly difficult to transfer my world over from the previous Xbox One version of the game. I've tried this a couple of times, with mixed success. It's a slow process, but that's fine – give your world 15 minutes or so and it should be downloaded and converted to play instantly from now on.
“Should be” is the key here, however. I had to try three times on my home console before it actually worked and didn't time out. I tried twice here in the office and both times failed, the last time hard crashing the whole console. Each time, I was waiting to play for more than half an hour in total. Not a great start. When my world did finally load, I couldn't eat.
This happened a lot.
To put it bluntly, this new version of Minecraft is not the one I'm used to playing. I asked Microsoft about the issues raised here and from the thousands of fans on the Minecraft feedback website, but have not yet received a response.
Microsoft ran a beta for the Better Together Update before it rolled the game to everyone. I played it during this time and quickly went back to the previous Xbox One Edition – which I'm still playing on now, even though I know it will no longer be updated. I assumed Microsoft wouldn't launch the Better Together Update until it had thought through Minecraft's issues and made it friendlier for console owners. Sadly, perhaps due to the headline-grabbing nature of its truly remarkable cross-network play, it has launched with these issues intact.
Playing with fans across platforms undoubtedly still feels like the future for Minecraft – but right now on console, the option feels like it does not outweigh the Better Together version's other issues.
More than 55 million men, women, and children play Minecraft in an average month. Many of those players enjoy using “mods,” third party tools that further customize the game, to tweak things to their liking.
Children play the Minecraft video game at a Microsoft Store. Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg
Different mods can change Minecraft in all kinds of ways. Often it's as simple as altering a player's in-game appearance (a process known as “skinning”). When you've got 55 million people playing a game where they can build a unique digital world, it's to be expected that they'll want to put a personal stamp on their avatars.
It's an opportunity that cybercriminals seized upon recently, according to security researchers with Symantec. Software quality assurance engineer Shaun Aimoto reported on the company blog that a handful of mods for Minecraft: Pocket Edition were hijacking player's smartphones and tablets and using them to power a ad fraud botnet.
According to Aimoto, the malicious apps were distributed via the Google Play store and advertised as character “skins.” Based on the numbers shown in the apps' descriptions, Symantec believes that somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million (primarily U.S.-based) Minecraft players installed the shady apps.
While the primary purpose of the mobile malware is to generate fraudulent ad revenue for its criminal creator, it could evolve into something even more dangerous. Because it's now running on a large number of devices and has access to network connections, the malware could potentially be used to launch crippling DDoS attacks.
Gamers are often targeted by cybercriminals because some of them engage in incredibly risky online behaviors. Some seek out tools for removing copy protection from games or generating free in-game currency. Hackers respond by leaving booby-trapped versions of games on filesharing sites and torrent trackers.
Other gamers — like the ones victimized by the malware Symantec found — find themselves in the crosshairs simply because cybercriminals know just how popular mods and skins are. And they also know that many of the gamers looking for such tools are young enough to not understand that someone lurking in the shadowy corners of the internet wants to prey on their fondness for a popular video game.
The answer, Symantec says: keep a good malware scanner installed on your devices, make sure it's up to date, and always check the permissions a new app requests before you install it. A simple Minecraft skinning app, for example, should never need to access your location data like this one did.
Keyboard Geniusesis our weekly glance at a few intriguing, witty, or otherwise notable posts from the Gameological discussion threads. Comments have been excerpted and edited here for grammar, length, and/or clarity. You can follow the links to see the full threads.
Fear of the unknown is a powerful thing, and I’m surprised at the amount of anxiety this game’s sound design is able to conjure up when I’m venturing below ground. Hearing the growls in my headphones without being able to see where they’re coming from puts me on edge, and being surprised by a monster I didn’t know was there consistently makes me panic and fight sub-optimally. There’s a sense of dread from getting lost in the winding passageways of a cave while running low on rations, or climbing up from the underground only to realize that you were down there too long, and now you’ll have to sprint for shelter in the middle of the night. I find it remarkable how the emergent play provides such a vivid horror experience, especially with Minecraft’s complete lack of violence and how lo-fi and abstracted the designs for the monsters are.
Speaking of abstraction, the environments of the game strike me as having a natural beauty despite the deliberate unreality of it all. I try to alter the landscape as little as possible, feeling that the results of the world-generating algorithm have an aesthetic that would be difficult to reproduce if I were to reshape the terrain myself. I’m hesitant to flatten areas and construct cobblestone roads; content to place a trail of torches to mark my path through a forest instead of simply chopping it down. Even my structures, the safehouses whose beacons dot the horizon, are based around this aesthetic: My castles are always built atop a stone surface whenever I find one poking up through the dirt and the foundation sets the shape for the whole building. By making each project unique—as I assess the site and figure out what it wants to be—making progress never feels like work.
Punch-Out Love
Screenshot: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
This week, I celebrated the 30th anniversary of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! by talking about why I think the game holds up better than pretty much any of its contemporaries. It comes down to the simplicity and purity of its puzzle-like boxing matches, something Unexpected Davebroke down in the comments:
It’s often been said that Punch Out!! looks like a fighting game but is actually a rhythm or puzzle game in disguise. If you approach the game like a straight-up arcade brawler, you can probably get through Piston Honda, but you’ll get slaughtered in the second tier. That’s when you really have to learn how to respond to your opponents’ tells and know exactly when and how to counterattack.
But the brilliance of the game is that it never loses the “illusion” of being a fighting game. It seldom feels like a purely mechanical exercise, like a game of Simon, and that’s all down to the character and personality of the opponents. It’s a shame that Nintendo relied on racial stereotypes to imbue that personality, though. (And the Wii version really doubles down on them.)
Elsewhere, M_squaredremembered how the game turned into a playground sensation:
I love this game. As a kid, it was always one that we talked about on the playground, sharing methods and things that worked on the opponents. This was a game that really brought people together. You could sit with people watching you and yelling “He’s charging! Punch now! Now! You did it too late!” or you could talk about it away from the game, “How do you beat King Hippo??” and things like that. It always brought out the liars, though. “I beat Mike Tyson with one punch!”, “I swear King Hippo got up, and I had to knock him down again!”
But overall it’s timeless because of the precise controls and the easy beginning. If it was really tough at the outset, it wouldn’t have caught on as much. But getting past Glass Joe is simple enough for just about anyone to do it but also gets you just hooked that you want to continue. Then as the difficulty ramps up, it doesn’t feel like cheating but like you’re earning your victories (and defeats).
“Maddeness Indeed”
Screenshot: Madden NFL ‘18
Also this week, William Hughes wrapped up his four-part attempt to learn a thing or two about Madden and football. Unfortunately, he ultimately fell into despair and sought to destroy the game from the inside. Thundawgdid some commiserating down in the comments and poetically summed up the whole endeavor:
This is a perfect encapsulation of Madden. Few games come close to the all-consuming rage that burns deep within after a loss. Madden might be the worst, as William noted, since you can do everything right and still ultimately lose. This game is not a quest for the virtual Super Bowl to win an oddly polygonal Lombardi Trophy. No, that is merely a byproduct. Madden is a journey into one’s own mind. It is the video game equivalent of Heart Of Darkness masquerading behind Tom Brady’s steely stare. The game will test the limits of your mental fortitude, push you to the edge of sanity. It will, inevitably, break you, leaving you to pick up the pieces of your shattered mind and shattered controller.
But through that, I believe William got closer to sports fan nirvana than he thinks. Will Madden teach you to be a ra-ra sports fan? No. But the discipline, patience, and resolve that playing sports requires and teaches? Certainly. The utter destruction you wreaked upon the Seahawks organization is a manifestation of what every fan felt when Pete Carroll opted to pass, not run, the ball in Super Bowl XLIX. It is not just the helpless roller coaster but viscerally feeling the depths of defeat and the supreme elation of victory. That collective emotion lies at the core of fandom.
That’ll do it for this week, Gameologerinos. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you all next week!
