For our first design, Saeed and I choose to create an elevated cornucopia with twelve towers. Participants would “spawn” in one of the twelve towers and would have the option of jumping onto the lower cornucopia platform, with chests and the possibility of death, or run down the spiraling staircase and into the ocean. From Read More
This week I plan to share my ideas for how to create a more authentic portrayal of the novel “Hunger Games” in Minecraft. What seems to be the crucial element in the realization of a “Hunger Games” server is the player-versus-player arena. Why do I say this is crucial? Every #Hungergames servers we have tried has revolved Read More
Hunger. Games. A game about survival for food. A game of high consequences. In 2008, Suzanne Collins released a book titled “Hunger Games” that followed a young adult female protagonist who volunteers to take her sister’s place in a mandatory death match enforced by “the capital”, the Elite society that controls the fictional world of Read More
This week, I tried playing on a different server from my usual – you know, keeping things fresh, and all. My normal server plays like a pretty typical Hunger Games server; there’s a cornucopia, limited items, and implied instructions that you’re just supposed to kill everyone else who’s there. This new server had all of Read More
Going into this new project, I’m excited about a number of things: having a chance to flex my creative and critical thinking skills, to dip my feet into the familiar worlds of ideological frameworks and implicit rules of play, and to undoubtedly have my mind blown by the most rudimentary of Minecraft mechanics that no Read More
I’m no stranger to The Hunger Games, let alone Hungercraft. I’ve been playing it on and off since I first started playing Minecraft last semester. It’s one of the things that interested me about Minecraft even before I started playing the game myself; I’m not sure if it’s my obsession with the Hunger Games or Read More
Note: A project post-mortem is a process through which a group (or in this case, an individual) reviews qualitative and quantitative data after the completion of a project. As the practical aspect of the Big Fried Chicken project is over, I would like to remark on its effects on the mLab server and note down Read More
Co-authored Abstract for DiGRA 2015: William Robinson, Dylan Lederle-Ensign and Michael Mateas Procedural Deformation and the Close Playing/Reading of Code: An Analysis of Jason Rohrer’s Code in Passage Despite Game Studies’ interest in digital games, the field has paid comparatively little attention to the algorithms underlying the medium. The following paper argues for the value Read More
Approaches to AI in virtual systems and Minecraft Yesterday, while wandering around the mLab and procrastinating between deciding to go to bed at a reasonable hour or stay up and work on midterms, I came across something I have seen many times in my Minecraft play. A small non-agressive mob was stuck between the ocean and a Read More
This week, instead of a weeknote focused on #BigFriedChickenCompany and the work my comrades Marie Christine, Sean and Saeed have been contributing to, I’d like to devote some thought to a greater picture with regards to Minecraft. Minecraft is somewhat singular. It’s a computer program which can be run individually by one person, or on a Read More