“Tate Worlds are exciting Minecraft ‘maps’ that present virtual environments inspired by artworks from Tate’s collection. The maps allow players of Minecraft to explore a range of paintings and sculpture, undertaking various activities and challenges that relate to the themes of the artworks, or exploring how they were made. Tate has teamed up with some of Minecraft’s best known mapmakers to create these virtual artworks, offering a unique combination of art, history and adventure. — Tate.org
The first two maps were released by the museum on November 24th and were based on two famous paintings of urban settings: Andre Derain’s 1906 painting of London, The Pool of London, and Christopher Nevinson’s 1920 painting of New York, Soul of the Soulless City.
André Derain, the influential Fauvist painter, depicted the bustling port of the Thames at the turn of the century. In the new Minecraft version of the painting, the bright colors employed by the painter are reproduced on an immersive scale. Gamers can wander the imaginary city and explore such historic sites as the Tower of London.
Christopher Nevin's futurist-influenced painting Soul of the Soulless City depicts New York in the 1920s, as it began to emerge both economically and architecturally as a modern metropolis. Fittingly, the experience of the corresponding Minecraft maps begins on a train that hurtles you into the city, just as Nevin's painting utilizes train tracks to convey its convoluted sense of perspectival motion.
In 2015, Tate Worlds will release maps based of John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose from 1885-6, Peter Blake's The Toy Shop from 1962, John Martin's The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum from 1822, and Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View from 1991.
The BlockWorks studio proves, yet again, that architects can use Minecraft as a design tool to produce rather magical results with impressive detail. The team of architects, designers, and animators envision mystical cubic worlds in response to what they refer to as “Briefs”, which include commissions from YouTube personalities, gaming networks, museums, and film studios as well as original submissions to actual Minecraft design competitions.
Although the designs are largely fictional, BlockWorks draws inspiration from real-world buildings from throughout history and even structural details by today's starchitects. As expected, the team's growing portfolio is pretty spectacular, and surely retains one's attention for a good amount of time.
You can check out more of BlockWorks' projects in greater detail on their website. Also, sneak a peek at some their project trailers below or on their YouTube channel.
“In this extended short, City Beautiful takes on the old school classic SimCity from the perspective of a professional planner 20 years later. Along the way, City Beautiful provides pertinent observations of game play versus reality. — theurbanist.org
Urban Design Ph.D student Dave Amos circles back around to the game that sparked his passion as a kid playing computer games. An advocate for sustainable living and diverse cities, Amos plays through the old school SimCity game providing relevant insights learned over the years in his career.
While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing, media, and education; a competition in Australia a few years back invited students to design a national park using the block-building program; and Bjarke Ingels has proselytized at length that the architecture field should become more like the game as well.
Providing an online platform to build the world we want to inhabit, Minecraft's great distinction is its offer of complete freedom from real world constraints—there's no clients, no engineers, and no financial restrictions. Testing those limits, architect and designer Andrew McClure of Nomad Design set out to build something using Minecraft. Educated on the program by his young cousin, McClure picked a site in the desert, laid out a foundation, and built his contemporary dream home, cantilevers and all.
Minecraft – or, specifically, the Minecraft Bedrock Edition series of titles – has now received dedicated servers for players across the board. Unfortunately, this feature has arrived on every platform other than Nintendo Switch.
Dedicated servers allow players on Windows and Linux computers to set up their own server at home, or host their server using a cloud-based service. From here, other players owning a Bedrock edition of the game can join in, giving those in your specific server the power to configure your world however you like with your own unique settings, modes, server life cycle, and more.
An article on developer Mojang's support page has confirmed the fact that Switch owners cannot take part in this new feature.
Q: Who can play on my dedicated server? A: Anyone playing on the bedrock editions will be able to connect to the server, with the current exception of Nintendo Switch users. Also, players on Xbox One will only be able to connect through a LAN connection.
The “current exception” part of that statement provides hope that Switch players will be able to join in the fun at a later date, but the lack of explanation behind the move is a little frustrating. Hopefully, Mojang is busy working behind the scenes to implement the feature on Nintendo's console, too, but we'll just have to wait and hope for an official announcement on this in due course.
Do you play Minecraft on Switch? Would you like to jump into dedicated servers with your friends? Let us know below.
After architect Andrew McClure received a lesson from his cousin on how to use Minecraft, he went to work making a slick looking house in the sandbox game in just two hours.
