Minecraft – A First Person Builder

Two weeks ago my sixteen year old son, Reid, was playing with it. Earlier this week Cory Doctorow was writing about it at Boing Boing. What is this thing called “Minecraft”? If you know about it then you’re probably playing it. If not…then…so you don’t feel out of the loop tonight when the people who hang out in the kitchen talking at parties weigh in on this one: here’s a crash course.

Minecraft is an online game which uses the visual conventions of a first person shooter for constructive purposes, literally. You can bash your way through solid rock to carve tunnels or switch into construction mode and lay down bricks, wood,  or sod with the ease of a Counterstrike avatar changing up from shotgun to rocket launcher. People spend hours in solo and mutual construction projects of varying degrees of whimsy, beauty, and complexity. Build it and they’ll come an build with it. Further proof that the difference between an ant’s nest and the pyramids is largely a matter of direction.

The present version is nominally “Alpha”. The look is essentially Digital-Lego. When I first saw Reid playing with it I thought he’d somehow figured out how to get an old Mac copy of Wolfenstein to run on Windows 7. Allow the crudeness of the visuals to surprise you. Go ahead and enter “minecraft” in Google images and look at the first few pages of the 1 million and growing examples. Now you can, “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”. That’s always an option. Or you can join in and begin work on your very own dream bunker. Should you find yourself, jaded with  your powers after the tenth Escher inspired memory palace and roller rink; remember this, you aren’t restricted to static objects. This is where it gets interesting.

The following video shows you how to build “circuits” in Minecraft.

Building Circuits

Yes, its title is misspelled and the soundtrack is insipid and yes, the video’s poster says that the information is obsolete due to changes made to the circuitry protocol but still, something like it is at the heart of the project that caught everyone’s attention earlier this week. The following video shows a 16-bit Arithmetic Logic Unit built inside  Minecraft.

16-bit ALU Project:

John Von Neumann, one of the founding architects of the modern computer typified the power of the computer as being a machine that could emulate other machines. At first, they were calculators, then typewriters, printing presses, tape recorders, video editors, darkrooms and telephones. Now the computers emulate themselves. In Minecraft you can build  Citizen Kane’s Xanadu or Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole.

If none of the above moves you there are other forms of circuitry: Blowing up Sheep with Wires and TNT

Have fun and release the dwarf inside you.

P.S.  (re: The 16-bit ALU Tour Video)- Do you think, “Are you listening, pig?”  could become the next geek motto to stand beside, “All your bases are belong to us” or that immortal battlecry, “Leeee….Roy….Jen…Kins!!!!!”?