I’m cheating a little because I haven’t actually played Minecraft with teens on the brand new multiplayer server space I just rented. But I do play a lot of Minecraft with my friends, I have talked a lot about it with teens, and I am going to offer the game as a regular teen program starting next week. Here’s what I’m doing to bring Minecraft to the library, and links to some interesting ideas about things you might do with it.
But first, what is Minecraft?
Minecraft is a game where you roam a landscape full of different sorts of blocks that you can move around to build anything you want. You can dig deep to find different resources, and explore to find a variety of environments. At night, zombies and other monsters come out, so you need to protect yourself. The game was created by Swedish programmer Markus Persson, and is being developed by his company Mojang. It’s still in beta, so there are new updates all the time. Minecraft is getting prettier and more involved with each new permutation.
I love this game because it demands creativity. You have a world, and you can do anything. It’s even more fun with friends, where in building your world you find yourselves cooperating by sharing resources, planning building projects, helping each other and showing off for each other. I can’t wait to see what happens when I turn my group of teens loose in their new world.
Here’s a video for you to take a look at Minecraft.
Click through for more.
You can buy the game here for $21.95, a discounted price while it’s still in beta. There is an outdated free version that you might try to see if you want to buy the game. I also recommend watching YouTube videos or looking at screenshots to get a feel for the environment.
Once you decide to play, your first task is to survive your first night. You need to find a way to protect yourself from zombies, skeletons, spiders, and other monsters, which in Minecraft parlance we call mobs. Ideally, you want to build yourself a shelter, but in a pinch, just stack yourself up on a tall stack of blocks, dirt or sand will do, and wait for morning. When the sun comes up you can search for more resources to strengthen your fortifications.
After you’ve tried it out for yourself, or at least done a bit of research, ask your teens about it. Are they playing Minecraft? Would they like to? You may find that some of them are already familiar with the game.
To play single player, you can buy one copy of the game, download the launcher to any computer, and let teens sign in with their own accounts. If you want to play together, you’ll need to set up a multiplayer server. There are instructions for how to host your own server available, which may appeal to some of your technologically inclined teens. You can also to rent space from a number of services. I’m renting space from Minecraft Box.
You may want to purchase a few copies of the game for your library, so that teens who don’t own the game can play. This might be tricky if you are bound by institutional orders because at this point, Minecraft can only be purchased with a credit card. It took some repeated queries for me to get permission to buy the game myself and get reimbursed.
Once you have interested teens, access to the game and a multiplayer server, the possibilities are limited only by your collective imagination. Plan a city, spread out and work on your own projects, explore the intricacies of the game, or make
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Today we finish off our Ypulse Youth Advisory Board series on "Digital Identities" with YAB member Julia Tanenbaum who relates her own wired childhood to the growing number of virtual worlds and social networks hoping to hook kids and tweens... Read the rest of this post
Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from Lauren Bigelow, Chief Operating Officer for WeeWorld. We approached Lauren after she posted an interesting comment in response to Anastasia's post about the shakeout we've seen with teens in the space. Here's what... Read the rest of this post
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There’s a book out now that has a chapter I contributed. The book is Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds, and my chapter is called Kids and Digital Ownership.
Here’s an excerpt from my chapter:
Managing Youth Creativity
What is the value of a digital creation, and who owns it? Particularly among the young, the line between creator and consumer has blurred, as has the question of ownership.
Some companies claim full ownership of content created with their tools or stored on their servers, while others take a more hands-off approach. When it comes to kids, neither strategy is ultimately effective.
The hands-off approach, whereby the company denies responsibility for and ownership of user-generated content, is not compatible with laws and standards that are in place to protect young people. For example, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) makes it difficult for website operators to allow children to share freely, and when the website is monitored, the operator can’t deny knowledge of a problematic piece of content.
And using an online contract such as a Terms of Service or an End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) to claim ownership of user-generated content does not work with children, and such digital contracts end up being worth the paper they’re written on.
The solution, however, is not to shut the gates to children. Today’s youth are the ones who will build and manage tomorrow’s virtual worlds as well as enact policies that govern those virtual spaces. The manner in which we address their needs today will have a direct impact on tomorrow’s virtual cultures, laws, and best practices.
Go here to learn more about the project:
http://www.bettereula.com/wp/settlers/
This is our last YIR post and my attempt to look forward into 2009 and pretend that I know what will be "hot" or "not" in the tween/teen/twentysomething tech space. Since Ypulse tends to focus on the "now," please take these with a big grain of salt... Read the rest of this post
MTV loses their touch (and hopes original programming can get it back) (Wired)
-Rally is right! (At last count 1,508,004 had joined Facebook's Election Rally. Check out my earlier post on donated statuses. Plus youth who were 'text blasted' by... Read the rest of this post
Full disclosure: myYearbook is a sponsor of Ypulse.com and our Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup events.
Our friends at myYearbook gave us an early heads up on a new feature they just launched called Causes (the release is scheduled to hit the wires... Read the rest of this post
Last week we briefly touched on the latest Pew Study that shows that the current generation of gamers is a far cry from the anti-social stereotype many of us envision. eMarketer aggregated data from the Pew study, combined and a recent survey from... Read the rest of this post
We've mentioned the new Pew study on teens and gaming a couple of times on Ypulse this week — it is a must-read and is choc full of interesting stats. To me the biggest trend is how gaming has become much more social for teens, defying... Read the rest of this post
In hardcover, Elizabeth Gilbert's EAT, PRAY, LOVE sold 25,000 copies. The Wall Street Journal calls that mid-list. I'd call it pretty damn good. Anything over 10,000 is pretty good. The WSJ also looks at how "the book's transformation from respectable-selling hardcover to paperback sensation was no accident. It came about after a series of calculated moves from Viking's sister Penguin paperback line, where executives worked to interpret sales patterns and create a marketing blitz to attract individual readers as well as book clubs. Penguin's approach shows how publishers, which typically don't conduct market research, are becoming increasingly adept at hand-picking certain titles for stardom."
[Full disclosure: pick me! Pick me!]
And here's another sad truth from the article: "The vast majority of books face a tough reality. New releases that fail to take off in the first couple of weeks -- when publishers often pay to place copies on stores' front tables -- are relegated to the back shelves. 'The usual reflex is to give a book two weeks in the sun and then move on,' says Bob Miller, president of Walt Disney Co.'s Hyperion book division."
[Full disclosure number two: YA seems to have a longer window, which lasts until it wins some awards - or doesn't.]
Read more here.
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