Facts about minecraft 14 version. Facts about minecraft. The original article can be read at this link.

Recently, looking through the hashtag pictures on Instagram, I found an image familiar to everyone with a very emotional caption.

In general, from time to time on the Internet there are haters of Minecraft, but usually they are teenagers for whom such behavior and emotions are a form of self-affirmation. Here, as it seemed to me, the situation is somewhat different, and I tried to find out what was the reason.

In my opinion, such problems have always been and will always be. Once upon a time, entertainment books were evil, and moms and dads were worried that the child was reading Jack London or Fenimore Cooper, instead of chasing a ball through the streets. Then came VCRs, and action movies, horror movies, and even cartoons became evil. Later it was the turn of consoles and computers. Well, now it's time for tablets. And, of course, Minecraft. I told Alena about this and, of course, drew attention to the creative component of the game. After all, the game attracts not at all with 25 frames, which in fact is not found either in advertising or in Disney cartoons, but with its almost unlimited possibilities. You can build, you can design circuits, you can get carried away with creating textures, mods, plugins.

Of course, absolute immersion in the game and the inability to live outside of it is an extreme that should be avoided. Only whether it will be possible to solve this problem if the tablet is taken away from the child with a cry. I think not, but Alena was not familiar with such a view of things:

What world are you from? Obviously in a share with the creators, or the same dependent idiot.

In general, friends, just in case: I do not share with the creators of the game. Maybe an idiot, but not an addict. Or dependent, but immediately from a variety of different things, one of which is Minecraft.

By the way, other parents also took part in the conversation, who, with varying degrees of disapproval, spoke in the same vein: Minecraft is a zombie game that leads to the degradation of children.

And it turns out very ugly, in my opinion, the picture. There are a lot of kids who love Minecraft. And there are parents for whom the passion of their children is incomprehensible and they see total evil in it.

I would like these parents to try to understand what makes Minecraft so appealing and different from a lot of other games. And I can talk for a very long time and in detail about what attracts me in it: practically unlimited development player that goes far beyond the game itself.

The first experience in Minecraft is comparable to the feeling of reading adventure books. First it's "Robinson Crusoe" - you need to survive the first night, build a house and stock up on provisions, then it's the turn " Mysterious island"- the player, like young readers once, learns that ores lie in the ground, that metals can be smelted from them ... And then the time comes for those books that I simply did not read as a child: the basics of electronics - redstone, the basics of landscape and interior design - the construction of castles and fortresses. The next step is already the creation of works of art or the development of quite adult professions: modeling, programming, etc.

And these stages of player development can stretch for a long period, even for several years. And here parents appear who see only one thing: their child hangs in some pixel cubes for days and nights and diligently degrades!

A situation arises that is almost impossible to solve: parents cannot and do not even try to understand why playing redstone can be attractive and command blocks. In general, the classic conflict of fathers and children.

And what to do in such a situation ... I am not a psychologist, and I will not undertake to give advice. Therefore, I will simply ask the question posed in the title of this article.

1. The first version of Minecraft was created in just six days.

In 2009, Swedish programmer and designer Markus Persson (better known to fans by the affectionate nickname Notch) decided to create a sandbox game that would allow free and easy exploration virtual world and at the same time create your own new company, called Mojang AB.

Persson began work on Minecraft on May 10, 2009 and made the final changes to the game on May 16 of the same year. The alpha version of Minecraft was released the very next day.

2. The game was not considered complete for another two years.

After the release of Minecraft on PC, Mojang periodically released updates to the game, announcing full version games only November 18, 2011.

3. The first name of the toy was not Minecraft.

When Persson first started developing the game, he called the project Cave Game. And only after some time it grew into the name Minecraft: first, the project was renamed Order of the Stone (Stone mining), and then, finally, just Minecraft (Mining craft).

The Minecraft developer was inspired by other PC video games when creating his creation: Dwarf Fortress (Dwarf Castle), Dungeon Keeper (Dungeon Keeper), RollerCoaster Tycoon (Entertainment Tycoon), and Infiniminer (Infiniminer). Persson also paid special tribute to the game Infiniminer (Infiniminer), stating that he wanted his game to fully correspond to the aesthetic level of this charming RPG game.

5. Creating creepers is a code error.

One of Minecraft's strangest characters is the Creeper, an electrically charged hissing predator. Person actually did not think to create such a monster, he just wanted to create a pig, but accidentally mixed up the coordinates of height and length in the code. The result of this mistake was a monster that many players know and love.

6. Enderman's language is reverse English.

A very interesting character in Minecraft is Enderman. The speech of this creature is almost incomprehensible to the human ear, but in most of its exclamations, English words and phrases (including "hiya", "here", "this way", "forever", and "what's up?") are voiced in reverse okay.

7. Jasts are voiced by a dormant cat.

Another monster from Minecraft owes its voice to a real creature. Perhaps, every player remembered Jast's piercing howl, but few people know the history of its creation. It all started when music producer Daniel Rosenfeld, known as C418, accidentally made an audio recording of a cat sleeping. It was previously planned that the voice of the ocelot would be the voice of Jast, but the purr mixed with the meow removed all questions.

8. The huge role of MINECRAFT in one of the Swedish schools ...

In 2013 Viktor Rudberg High School in Stockholm introduced Minecraft as a required part of their curriculum for all 13 year old students. Teachers explain what this game teaches students: “They learn about environmental issues, about creating objects, and even about how to plan for the future.”

9. Denmark and MINECRAFT

Sweden's southern neighbor has expressed an even greater affection for Minecraft. In 2014, Simon Kokkendor and Thorbjorn Nielsen, working at the Ministry environment created an exact scale copy of Denmark in Minecraft to increase interest in the geographical data of their native country.

10. The popularity of the game is the work of free marketing.

According to a study by Alex Levit of the Annenberg School of Communication, a third of Minecraft's first users first heard about the game from friends, and another third started the game after watching YouTube videos.

11. Endless world.

In 2011, Persson spoke about the limits of the supposedly previously limitless world of Minecraft on his personal blog:
Let me clear up a few things about "infinite" cards: they are not infinite, but there are no hard limits on anything in this world. This allows you to get more and more the farther you are. The landscape is generated, saved and loaded, and partly displayed (size 16 * 16 * 128 blocks). These pieces may move. If you go outside of this range (about 25% of the distance from where you are now), the old chunks start to get overwritten."

12. A few words about a devoted fan and an endless quest.

Players need to travel approximately 7,500 miles before they can witness a major coding crash. This virtual wasteland became known in-game as the "Far Lands."

After blogging about "Far Lands", gamer Kurt J. Mack decided to reach the end of the world called "Minecraft". He started his quest in March 2011. And it's not a waste of time at all; Mac has earned quite a bit of fame on YouTube, and has raised over $250,000 for a charitable foundation.

13. Minecraft avatar has unique features.

It is only natural that Persson reserved another trick as a personal avatar for Minecraft. It appears only in the game, when the character dies, then apples fall out of him.

14. Opening bidding on Minecraft started with a tweet.

Claiming to be fed up with corporate politics, the notorious video game developer sent out tweets in June 2014, hoping to boost demand for Mojang's stock. Three months later, he officially sold the company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.

15. Incorrect spelling of the name of your own game.

In one case out of 10,000, the spelling of the name of the game itself flashes in the game menu. The letters “E” and “C” are swapped creating a new name - Minceraft.

Computer game Minecraft in just a few days, she gained such fame that others cannot achieve for years. Game creator, Markus Persson, did not complicate the game with multifaceted graphics and complex modifications. On the contrary, everything that is in the game - textures, the player, added mods and maps - is made as simple as possible. The world of the game is made of elementary blocks, and the textures are used at a fairly low resolution. The principle of the game is building own world. Unfortunately (or fortunately, otherwise the game might seem boring), just building and enjoying it will not work. The client is conceived in such a way that the player does not forget that there are monsters and evil zombies in the world who simply dream of destroying everyone who is trying to build something and acquire a household.

Over the years, Minecraft has accumulated Interesting Facts about the game. It is unlikely that even the most advanced players know absolutely everything about the client, so going over the facts together can be very informative for fans.

Skeletons minecraft

Skeletons minecraft

Fact #1

First versions of the game were teeming with skeletons that shot arrows of purple hues. Other than the bright color, no other differences from regular arrows were noticed. The developers of the game claim that they did not create anything like this, so it turns out to be just a bug.

Fact #2

In the initial stages of testing, the skeletons lost their quiver, from which they could shoot without wasting arrows. Users expressed dissatisfaction when the quiver disappeared in the final version of the game. The creators went to meet the dissatisfied and returned a similar opportunity, however, only when using the spell "Infinity".

Fact #3

The test version allowed to generate the world by choosing its type. The indicators were resources in some quantity, as well as the surrounding landscape and the conditions under which it was possible to survive. The current Lower World was then called Hell.

Fact #4

The 2009 version of the game was adorned with the presence of the Giant Zombie, which had iron health and incredible attack abilities. It was only possible to defeat the Giant with kicks to the legs. He himself could attack only when he was near the player.

Fact #5

Rubies used to serve other functions. AT latest versions or ore, and in the initial ones they performed the role that is now assigned to emeralds - they were used for exchange with villagers.

Fact #6

In the early stages of the game's development, the creators wanted to introduce the "Skyworld" dimension. For reasons that are kept secret, the idea was never realized. To date, memories of this dimension are preserved only in some screenshots of that time.

Fact #7

In the initial versions of the game, there were four additional mobs that were drawn by Scott-Baron. He started drawing the first versions of the game. But two months later he was fired, and the mobs were removed.

Markus Persso

Fact #8

Few people know that the creator of the game, Markus Persson, started programming at the age of seven, and a year later he developed his first adventure game. Until 2009, he worked under the banner of King.com and created Carnival Shootout, Luxor, Farm games for them. Then he took up the development of jAlbum and was among the founders of Wurm Online, although he has not been working on the project for a long time. Created Left 4K Dead and Mega 4K Man.

Fact #9

Creator's birthday popular game even Minecraft itself notes. The main menu throughout the day shows the splash "Happy birthday, Notch!"

Fact #10

Metals such as gold, iron, diamonds exist in all biomes. But emeralds can only be mined in the mountain biome.

Fact #11

In the event of an attack by dangerous slugs, one must hide in the water, because such creatures are not endowed with the ability to swim. The same should be done when meeting with an enderman, who also cannot swim. To get rid of a slug, you can simply drown it.

Fact #12

Infernal lava flows at a hellish speed, so you need to be extremely careful when encountering it. And trying to burn hellish mobs in lava is like wasting time. They don't burn or die in lava.

Fact #13

Ender pearls are valuable because they can teleport to any point, you need to choose the direction right click mice. But the cost of teleportation will be the loss of health. And you don’t have to look for enchantment books, you can just craft them. To make the idea work, the book is placed in the enchanter and the appropriate property is selected.

Fact #14

In hardcore mode, do not use wooden doors. Zombies deal with them with amazing ease.

Fact #15

If you need to quickly increase the number of heads in the herd (no matter who - cows, pigs or other animals), then just press an identical egg on an adult. In other words, if you press a chicken egg on a chicken, small khokhlushkas will appear.

Fact #16

If the "egg of summoning" is processed by spawning, then several slugs of different sizes will appear. Killing a large one will result in the appearance of several smaller ones (the nesting doll principle works). They are not dangerous at all and can only push. Slugs live in swamps and in the world of super-flat dimensions, where they spawn perfectly. The mouth of the slug should be looked for closer to the right eye.

Fact #17

The animation version of the hand that held the card was changed when Minecraft 1.4.7 was created. In the same version, the Creeper can be thrown into the web, and then he will not be able to explode.

Fact #18

Collapse of blocks on yourself in the game gives you the opportunity to see through the ground. And with the help of an ordinary fishing rod, the wooden pressure plate is perfectly activated.

Fact #19

Using ingenuity, you can improve your life. For example, the property of animals to go at the player if he has a bunch of wheat in his hands can be used in different ways. At least as a variant of pressing on the stove to ensure the reception of water procedures when the player is in the shower.

Fact #20

The beacon in snapshot 13w02b used to be called the Beacon.

Fact #21

If single rabbits are sitting on the edges of the rock, then on the last block they can be gathered into one big crowd. This is a feature of the Aether mod.

Fact #22

In creative mode in single player and multiplayer modes, if a player breaks five blocks in length, then he can bet four.

Fact #23

Minecraft 1.3 version is decorated with Herobrine character. That was the name of the brother of the creator of the game, Markus Persson, who died. Herobrine's character is very reminiscent of the player himself, only he has empty eye sockets. Herobrine can be found by specific signs: smooth pyramids, stone tunnels and huge excavations at the site of caves. Herobrine does not attack first, but he may well destroy buildings. Sometimes he steals items hidden in chests. Persson warned that he wanted to introduce Herobrine in advance. It is much easier to see it if the far visibility "Very Low" is enabled.

Fact #24

Slugs appeared in the initial versions of the game. They look like a greenish cube that shows through the air a little. Slug sizes are available in four sizes: large, large, medium, small. Slugs can spawn in both dark corners and bright areas. This opportunity was given to them first. They can climb to a depth even below level 16.

Fact #25

In order to spawn, slugs require a huge amount of space, which they find either in caves or mines. They get out of the caves along the stairs at the moment when the mob starts spying on the player. In version 1.7 slime is used to create sticky piston, and you can get it by killing slugs. For the smallest one they give 2 units of mucus.

Fact #26

Air is also a block that is invisible and has no solid outline, but is nevertheless used to fill spaces that are not filled with any blocks. This is the first block that was added to Minecraft. Technically, air is not a normal block, but map editors treat it that way. Air is completely transparent, but it can also be destroyed by simply putting something else in its place. Players and mobs calmly pass through this block, the air does not affect the movement in any way. As a block, it is still necessary, as it will save you from asphyxia if you have to stay somewhere in the sand for a long time.

Fact #27

In crafting, only one block of technical value is used. If a mob, player or arrow is on fire, then they cannot be a light source. But the burning block can. Neither the mob nor the players can become a source of fire. In the version " Pocket Edition » The fire is invisible, it can only be detected by noticing the smoke particles.

Fact #28

When the texture of the pig did not work out for Notch, it was decided to give her a replacement in the form of creepers. It was decided to give this name to the monsters, since in translation from English it means "goosebumps" that appear at their sight. Sometimes creepers are called thieves because they steal diamonds. Another translation of the word "creeper" is a reptile.

Fact #29

The jack-o'-lantern cannot be moved like pistons, it immediately drops out as an item. And through the clouds it is impossible to see any blocks. If the player hides behind the vines, the mobs will not be able to see him.

Fact #30

The stairs in Beta 1.6.6 can be broken if you really need to get the very material that was spent on its manufacture.

Fact #31

In Minecraft 1.5, when eggs are renamed, mobs are given their own name appropriate to the situation. Also in this version, death messages began to be given out in more rich detail.

Fact #32

Pre-build 1.4.6 had a ski texture that was later removed. And behind the chest, the frame fits perfectly.

Fact #33

Notch, creating his the best game seemed to have a poor understanding of the hardness of certain materials. Or maybe he was specifically trying to confuse the players. For example, lava is so liquid that you can swim in it like ordinary water, although in fact it is extremely dense. Obsidian in Minecraft can only be broken with a diamond pickaxe, although it is just a fragile glass that breaks even with your hands. Bedrock bedrock is actually a regular stone. So do not try to replenish your knowledge base through the game and perceive as a constant everything that happens in it.

That's not all Facts to tell about Minecraft. This is just a small part of them. Each version of the game brings something new that you can talk about, discuss, or just remember with a smile. Not every development of Notch ended in success, sometimes the creators noticed their mistakes only when the version was already on sale and players began to test it, who actively discussed on the forums what they like and what they are dissatisfied with. As a result, each subsequent version turned out to be a correction of the errors of the previous one. And all these mistakes, which seemed so unpleasant at first, are remembered today with a nostalgic smile and fall into the category of interesting facts.

If the Minecraft hobby has passed you by, then we have made an adaptation of the large and thorough NY Times material about this game. Below you will find out why you need to drag these stupid dice at all, what is the point of the game, and why children playing Minecraft will grow up smarter than you and become great programmers.

Jordan wants to set up an inconspicuous trap.

The 11-year-old with black horn-rimmed glasses was inspired by the sci-fi thriller The Maze Runner and now wants to build the same maze for his Minecraft friends. Jordan has set up an obstacle course with a waterfall and shrinking walls in the style of Indiana Jones, but his goal is an unpredictable trap that will take his friends by surprise. Really, how do you do it? This problem haunts him.

And then a light bulb lights up in Jordan's head - animals! Minecraft has its own zoo of animals that the player is free to eat, tame or simply bypass. One of the animals is the mooshroom, a red and white cow-like creature that wanders aimlessly around the map. Jordan uses these erratic cow movements to hide a trap. It sets pressure plates, which activate the traps, and then brings a few cows there, which start to cut circles around the area and accidentally activate the traps. Jordan took advantage of the strange behavior of the cow to create, in fact, a generator random numbers inside minecraft. In the language of computer engineers, Jordan hacked the system, forcing it to do something new and tricky.

“It's like planet Earth, a whole world that you build yourself,” the guy explains, guiding us from the beginning of the maze to the exit. - My art teacher always said that games develop creative thinking only in the creators of these games. The only exception is Minecraft." Jordan leads us to the exit, with the slogan "The journey itself is more important than what awaits you at the end" imprinted above it.

Since its release 7 years ago, Minecraft has become a sensation, spawning a new generation of gamers. With 100 million registered players and being the third-best-selling game in history (after Tetris and Wii Sports), Microsoft shelled out a whopping $2.5 billion for Minecraft in 2014. There have been blockbuster games before, but as Jordan rightly points out, this is a different story. Mineraft is both a meeting place, a technical tool and a theater stage where kids build machines, design worlds and make YouTube videos. And it doesn't feel like a game in the usual sense - while Google, Apple and other giants are trying to simplify the interfaces of computers, Minecraft, on the contrary, encourages the player to explore the world, break it down and rebuild it. It makes you turn on your brains and work with your hands.

Minecraft takes us back to the 70s, to the era of early PCs like the Commodore 64 and kids learning to code in Basic to write software for themselves and their friends. And today, when the President of the United States encourages children to learn to code, Minecraft has become an opportunity for them to approach coding from the back door. Not because it is necessary, but because it is interesting. And if the children of the 70s were the ones who paint the canvas of the current digital world, then what will the children of the Minecraft generation bring to the world?

“Children,” writes social critic Walter Benjamin, “love to play where there is work that they understand. They are irresistibly attracted by the waste of construction, gardening, household, weaving and carpentry. According to Colin Fanning of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, European philosophers have long considered the game with blocks, which Friedrich Froebel perfected about three hundred years ago (he is called the creator of the concept kindergarten), useful game. Starting to build from blocks, children learn to synthesize complex objects from simple parts, which later allowed them to better see patterns in the world around them.

Pedagogy pioneers like Maria Montessori used blocks of wood to teach mathematics to children. During the cataclysms of the last century, like World War II, some architects like Carl Theodor Sorensen proposed turning the ruins into playgrounds where children could play and build at the same time. And Swedish teachers, who were afraid that children would lose touch with the physical world, introduced at school sloyd (in the original: sloyd) - carpentry lessons, which are still taught in Swedish schools.

In Minecraft, children start the game free to do anything: around a pristine environment on which the player is free to build whatever they want. And it all starts with wooden blocks, which the player makes from the trees that come to hand. In this respect, Minecraft is no longer like video games, but more like Lego bricks, which replaced traditional wooden construction sets in the post-war period. Although today Lego is more about brands than fantasy, store shelves are littered with themed sets like Hogwarts Castle from Harry Potter or the rebel base from Star Wars.

“You buy a kit, read the instructions, assemble the model, and put it on the shelf,” explains iconic game designer Peter Moline in the Minecraft movie. “Lego used to be a box of pieces that you took and scattered on the floor and made magic out of them. Now Minecraft does it."

As a Swede, Mojang founder and Minecraft creator Markus Persson took the Swedish layer into the digital realm. Persson, 36, was a kid of the computer age who learned to code on his father's Commodore 128 at the age of seven, and by the age of 20 was developing games and coding online photo vaults from his CD-decorated bedroom.

the first minecraft version he released in 2009. The game principle was as simple as the corner of a house - every time the player starts the game, it generates a new landscape for him with mountains, forests and lakes. Next, the player is free to dig the ground, mine stone ore or process wood to make the coveted block. From these blocks, he can erect buildings, or combine them to get new item. Combine a couple of stone blocks with wood and get a pickaxe. With it, you will get to the bottom of gold, silver and diamonds (just don't dig too deep, to the earth's core). Or use it to kill that spider over there, and make a bowstring for a bow or crossbow from its web.

At first, the game was fun for overgrown nerds, but in 2011, all the children of the world got hooked on Minecraft, and sales skyrocketed. And even after 5 years at a price of $ 27 per copy, Minecraft remains one of the best-selling games - about 10 thousand copies are shipped from the shelves every day! According to official Microsoft statistics, the main age of Minecraft players today is 28 years old. 40% of them are women.

Over time, Persson improved the game. First came the survival mode, in which the player had to build defensive structures to fend off the regular attacks of monsters. Then the inhabitants of the Minecraft country got the opportunity to share their maps with friends. Following this, Persson opened game code(players began to make mods) and screwed multiplayer. Today, for $5 a month, kids play in the same world with hundreds of thousands of other players, and the distinction between solo play and multiplayer has faded completely.

The game became a hit, but Persson felt like a squeezed lemon - both the popularity that fell on his head and the fans who constantly demanded to add / remove / change something, and then scolded the same changes, got it. In 2014, Marcus finally got sick of the game, and he handed Mojang into the hands of Microsoft for a modest reward of $2.5 billion. And as compensation, he bought himself a mansion for $ 70 million, in which he refuses to remember his brainchild.

Persson left, but the blocks remained. There was also complete freedom of action. Watching my kids play, I've seen replicas of the Taj Mahal, Star Trek's starship Enterprise, and Game of Thrones' iron throne castle built. But then it turned out that real freedom was hidden not in blocks, but in “redstone” - an element that is mined from red ore and is a game analogue of electrical wiring. My 8-year-old son Zev showed me the automatic doors he made with redstone, and 10-year-old Gabriel came up with a game within a game. He designed a giant catapult that, using redstones, threw anvils at other players, and they dodged projectiles flying at them, running merrily within the play area.

Persson designed "redstone" with an eye on conventional electronic circuits. By adding switches and switches to this block, you can make "logical gates," as computer designers call them. Place two switches next to each other, connect them with a "redstone" - and you already have an AND gate: if switch 1 and 2 are on, current will flow through the wire. It is also possible to build a logical element "OR", in which it is enough to use only one of the switches. If we look inside a conventional microchip, we see a similar architecture.

This winter I was visiting a 14-year-old guy named Sebastian. He showed off his machines to me, the largest of which was the marketplace, a giant wall where players could sell items by placing them in a special chute. This wall was full of AND gates, and it took Sebastian several days to design the wall and find a bunch of AND elements for it. “Move here,” Sebastian tells me as he dives down the shaft below the apparatus. Inside, like an architect at a construction site, he shows me the inside of his apparatus. “Levers are connected to these wires on opposite sides of the wall - one with this one, the other opposite. When both are turned on, they actuate a piston that attaches the redstone to this block at the top in the distribution tower.”

To work with the "red stone" you need logical thinking, perseverance and the ability to find holes in the system. For example, five-year-old Natalie installed an automatic door in her castle, but it did not open. Natalie frowned briefly, and then began to look for a bug in the system - it turned out that she had connected one of the red stones incorrectly, and it was sending current to the other side of the circuit.

This is what programmers call computational thinking. And this is one of the most important learning effects of Minecraft. Unbeknownst to themselves, children learn the daily struggle with bugs, familiar to every programmer. After all, it is not the gods who burn the pots, but the gods find and correct errors in the code. From this point of view, Minecraft is the ideal educational game for today's children - it touches on the elements of science, mathematics and engineering, but teaches this through play. Unlike the government's "teach kids to code" initiative, which the US government has spent millions of dollars on. The funny thing is that Persson himself and his followers never considered Minecraft as a pedagogical tool. “We were just making a game we wanted to play,” says current Mojang lead developer Jens Bergsten.

The next useful skill that Minecraft players acquire is the ability to work on the command line. In a world where lines of code have replaced glossy interfaces, ordinary person breaks a sweat at the sight of a dozen simple lines of code. But without learning how to work with the command line, you will never tame the computer. In Minecraft, kids learn this, again, not because it's necessary, but because it's fun. call command line"/", type in "time set 0" in it and you will see the solar tail leaving the horizon. Learn the command chains and be able to conjure as well as Harry Potter.

The next hero of the article is seventh grader Gus from Brooklyn, whom we met this spring. As I watch Gus play with friends, I notice him typing "/give AdventureNerd bow 1 0 (Unbreakable:1,ench:[(id:51,lvl:1)],display:(Name:"Destiny") )". She gives his character an indestructible magic bow called Destiny. Gus's desktop is full of virtual stickers with the commands he uses most often. Several commands are combined into a block that leads to a chain of actions. Just like clicking on the icon of the desired program launches blocks of code in its bowels.

“Minecraft is one of those places where young people can connect with more experienced people much older than them,” says Mimi Ito, creator of the Connected Camps platform at the University of California, which studies the relationship between learning and computer games. “These connections become key: the guys get the opportunity to look at the professional side of things, and this is something that they won’t show at school.” And don't let the form of this interaction between unfamiliar adults and children scare you - according to Ito, when an interesting task is set for a group, age fades into the background.

Ito has found that Minecraft encourages children to develop other talents as well. For example, 15-year-old Eli just wanted to change some game textures, but eventually got to the point where he mastered Photoshop along with drawing and now uploads entire mods on the game forum, where both adults and children help him. “Criticism is always constructive there,” Eli says. “The gaming community is very helpful.”

You may laugh, but playing Minecraft also develops stress resistance. Mojang makes weekly tweaks to the game, and one morning you may wake up and find that after a fresh update, your giant Railway does not work any more. Ito sees this as a valuable experience - in a practical and philosophical sense, children become stronger.

“Minecraft is creaking and you are trying to fix it,” she says. “It's a different kind of thinking. If the application does not work on your iPhone, then you just sigh. If something doesn't work in Minecraft, you sigh and then start fixing the problem. Not because you have to, but because you want to. It's similar to the aesthetic of homebrewing - you can buy a pint of lager in the store, but it's more interesting to brew it yourself." Given that Minecraft is now 7 years old, Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech is looking forward to the first students who have grown up with the game in their classrooms.

Ava, a fifth grader I met on Long Island, started playing Minecraft 2 years ago. She launched "survival mode", not really understanding what to do next. “I thought this skeleton was kind and asked him how he was doing,” Ava says. “Then I died.” The fact is that Minecraft is a complex and incomprehensible game. Unlike blockbuster games, there are no pop-ups and hints, no one leads you by the hand, showing you how to turn your head, run or crouch. Nothing is explained in Minecraft, not that skeletons can kill you, not that you can get to lava (which will also kill you) if you dig too deep, not even that you can make a pickaxe.

During the development of the game, Persson did not have the money to write instructions. He hardly guessed how brilliant the decision to abandon the tips turned out to be: today players on the forums hourly share the secrets and strategies of the game (about 5 thousand articles about Minecraft hang on Gamepedia), book publishers release entire volumes with the secrets of the game, and they sell well. For example, one of the books about the red stone overtook such literary hits as The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. In his review, writer and critic Robert Sloan calls Minecraft "a game about secret knowledge."

The most important helper in learning Minecraft is YouTube. Having found death at the hands of a skeleton, Ava went there to look for answers, because the easiest way to learn new things is by looking at how the master does it. YouTube has become a second home for Minecraft players, with let's play, how-to guides, tutorials, and just plain fun videos. Today, the word "Minecraft" is the second most searched term on YouTube (after "music"), and the total number of themed videos has exceeded 70 million. For young players, these videos have become an opportunity to abandon the TV diet in favor of what you personally like. “I don't understand this,” Ava's mother complains during my second visit to them. Why are you watching someone else play? Why don't you play by yourself?"

Ava recently launched a YouTube gaming channel with her friends. Her father bought her a microphone, and her sister painted a sign saying "Recording in progress" (on the other hand "Recording not working, but please be quiet"). While I'm sitting in her room, Ava calls her friend Patrick on Skype and they start recording. It's pure improvisation - they joke about how Ava drowns in lava traps, like real radio hosts or sportscasters. If something goes wrong, they start over. Seeing this first hand, I better understand the words of the head of the gaming division of YouTube Ryan Veit about the blurred boundaries between the player and the viewer.

Some Minecraft broadcasters have become really famous and make good money on it. These stars are mostly not children, but young people. For example, 25-year-old Stumpy Cat from Brighton has 7 million subscribers on the channel. His colleague Mumbo Jumbo from Brighton has only a million. But this million was gained very quickly when the guy uploaded a video with 20 homemade mechanisms for opening doors. “Of course, this is not a new Gangam Style, but it still turned out well,” says Mumbo Jumbo, whose real name is Oliver Brotherhood. Now Oliver spends 50 hours a week on the game itself and recording themed videos. This is actually work.

“I told my mom I was quitting my postal job,” Mumbo Jumbo recalls. - When asked why, I showed her my channel and my first 40 thousand subscribers. That's more than the traffic of the corporate newspaper she consults." Oliver will be studying programming in college next year. In his opinion, programming is very similar to Minecraft - you experiment, learn, make mistakes and ask for advice on the forum. By the way, the guy was accepted to college even before the results of the final exams - his YouTube channel became a pass ticket to the university.

Last year, 12-year-old London launched a separate server for his friends and acquaintances. A couple of days later, he saw that some merry fellow broke into their holiday and blew the hell out of all their buildings. Then London did a little magic with the settings and opened individual access to the server for friends. Now try to imagine this in some World of Warcraft, where server settings are controlled exclusively by developers. Microsoft, on the other hand, allows you to play on a shared server, rent your own, or create individual game and play on Wi-Fi with a friend. And here the most interesting begins - how will children use this freedom? Will their world be equal for both creators and destroyers? And what to do with rule breakers?

Sociologist Seth Frey of Darmouth College studied the behavior of hundreds of children on Minecraft servers for three years and concluded that the game improves their social intelligence. “The kids run around with their blocks and you think it's just a game,” explains Seth. “But in fact, they solve one of the most difficult questions in the history of mankind - how to establish interaction between different social groups so that everyone is comfortable.” In Seth's experiment, most of the participants were teenage boys with all their insecurities and puberty issues. “These are the worst people on Earth,” Seth says, either joking or serious. “And in my opinion, this socialization experiment should have failed. It's all the more amazing that it all worked out."

Three years ago, the Darien, Connecticut Public Library launched public server Minecraft, which only season pass holders could play. According to John Blueberg, the library's director of development, they gained 900 new readers under the age of 20 in the first month. “And this is a real community,” says John. – As a rule, I get up to a dozen calls a day in the style of ‘Hello, this is Dasher 80, some horseradish blew up my house while I was not here, figure it out’ or ‘Hello, someone robbed me’. We used to deal with conflict resolution ourselves, but then we noticed that if the children were given a little freedom, then towards the end of the day, other messages appeared on your answering machine like ‘This is Dasher 80, we figured out the problem, ignore my previous message’.

Many parents and experts believe that Minecraft is an additional dimension, a digital sandbox in which children learn to socialize and respect other people's space (albeit virtual) without the supervision of elders. Previously, the role of this sandbox was played by the street, and in Minecraft, although children are at home, they communicate with friends using new technologies. In a sense, Minecraft is not so much a game as a social network.

Life on a Minecraft server constantly requires more complex technical skills from children. 11-year-old Leia was furious about griefers (as vandals are called in the game) and once asked the server administrators for moderation rights. For several months, Leia worked as a police officer. A program called "command spy" allowed her to watch the recordings of the players' actions: she moved all the villains to a virtual "time out" zone and soon she was promoted. “The implication is that I have to give punishments to anyone who breaks the rules,” she told me at the time. In fact, Leia performed the role of a system administrator on the server.

But not everyone is so easy to take root in the world of Minecraft. Timid 17-year-old Tori has been playing Minecraft for 2 years, but mostly in single player mode. When she decided to try to play online, other players, having learned that she was a girl, laid out “BITCH” blocks. Gamer friends comforted her and told her that this kind of thing happens everywhere. For example, a study of Halo players found that girls were bullied twice as often as boys. And from a regular survey where 874 people identified themselves as online gamers, 63% of girls said they had been bullied. Some parents get angry because of this and forbid their daughters to play online games, some daughters do not pay attention to this and simply hide the gender or put animals on their avatars. Like Leia.

How long will Minecraft's popularity last? It directly depends on management of Microsoft. The executive directors of the company have little control over the game. All major development issues are handled by Mojang in Sweden. They can improve the game, or they can, on the contrary, nullify all the magic by making a new interface or changing the combat system. Once Mojang tried to change the combat system, but this caused a storm of criticism - the children did not want their sandbox to be turned into an ordinary fight field.

But so far there is no reason to worry, and Minecraft goes to the masses. Teachers are starting to try to bring elements of Minecraft into the classroom, both math and history. Many libraries already install Minecraft on their computers. For example, the Bronx Library Center recently installed minecraft servers. The local librarian gave the task to the kids who did not have their own PCs and who came to play in the library to build the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 45 minutes. Three guys started working together, and the fourth, younger, developed his own design. The trio teased each other all the time, and after 45 minutes, when the arch was ready, they stuffed it with dynamite, admired the fireworks from the cubes and left to play another game.

In the corner, the fourth boy continued to work on his Arch. He told me that he often stays up late playing Minecraft with friends. They built the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, and even a replica of the library we were in. He flicked the cursor over the blocks, composing an inverted staircase to mimic the curved vault of the Arch. He leaned back in his chair to enjoy the work he had done. “I didn’t blink for I don’t know how many minutes,” he said. The model was finished and looked quite realistic.

"I'm actually proud of it," he said with a smile.

The original material can be read at the link.

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Minecraft is incredibly popular computer game which is liked by many children. However, at the same time, some parents cannot share the joy of their sons and daughters regarding this game. There are a huge number of reasons why children love Minecraft, and the same reasons make parents fall into a stupor and scratch their heads thoughtfully. These 5 things kids really love about Minecraft. But you don’t even suspect that most modern parents simply don’t understand them.

Minecraft language

How can you explain the language of Minecraft in general? Friends come to visit your child, they gather in the room and start talking about noobs and endermans, while laughing and giggling, while the parents listen and think that it would be better if they talked about sports. Many parents are not even into sports, but at least they can participate in such a conversation.
Parents want to be involved in the lives of their children, but as soon as they start talking about Minecraft, they immediately begin to think that this is Latin. And when parents ask their children to explain one concept, then immediately there is a need to explain another concept, and after it another one. And by the time you understand why your child needed to kill the Ender dragon, half of your day has already passed. As a result, everything ends up with the child talking, and the parents just nodding and hoping that they did not just agree to buy some kind of addon.

Youtubers

It’s not enough that Minecraft itself is strange for parents, there are also a million YouTube stars who talk about this game, demonstrate their achievements, share jokes that only those who play Minecraft understand. And this is not about any particular YouTuber. The problem will be understood by parents who have had to snatch the tablet from the hands of a child who has been listening to someone talking about the game for several hours in a row. Yes, many of these YouTubers make more in a month than their parents make in a whole year, and this may annoy the parents in the slightest, but it's not about the money. It's about about sanity, and hour-long videos of teenagers recording loud, annoying Minecraft movies in their rooms have grown-ups saying trite things like "Where is the world going?" and so on. And this is terrible, because it makes parents feel like their parents used to feel - old and out of date. And the circle is closed.

Addiction

Many parents do not understand one thing: is nicotine or some other drug added to Minecraft? Every parent whose child plays Minecraft understands how difficult it is to get him to turn off the game. It comes to tears, screams and even fists. Children even begin to swear at their parents. And so do both young children and adolescents. Sometimes one gets the feeling that if zombies break into the real house of children, they will not care, but if this happens to their house in Minecraft, then the end of the world will come. For many parents, this game looks like some kind of pixelated mess, but the children cannot agree with this.

Disorientation

If you are trying to connect with your child by playing Minecraft, then you need to remember the vomit bowl. No, the game is not disgusting or nasty, but it is disorienting. You start to feel dizzy from everything that is happening around you, you do not understand what to do, and you find yourself in some room with a pickaxe in your hands. And then your child starts laughing at you as if you are a complete idiot, and not an adult with a higher education and a prestigious job. And then the child himself sits down at the computer, his blue eyes start darting around the screen while he corrects the situation you created, and he starts saying: “You see? Do you see?" But you still don't see the difference between what you did and what he does.

Trying to understand makes things worse

Like any good parent, when your child starts playing Minecraft, you try to better understand the game by reading about it online. Here’s an excerpt from one such article called Minecraft Parent’s Guide: Minecraft is a sandbox game created by Swedish programmer and gamer Markus “Notch” Persson. The world of the game is procedurally generated, and its essence lies in the collection of resources, the creation of items, construction and (if the player wishes) battles. Many parents have encountered strange texts in their lives, but this is just crazy.

conclusions

The conclusion can be drawn as follows: most children like this game, while some parents simply cannot understand it. And the saddest thing is that many parents initially thought that they would not have problems understanding. Not only Minecraft, but everything that concerns their children. When people become parents, they don't think they'll ever have to say "here these days" or "why can't you play normal games?” as these are some of the most annoying things their parents have ever said to them when they were young. However, this is what parenting is all about. It's a reality where you're getting older and trying to understand your kids, wishing they could just do what you understand.