This is a rather surprising development to me, I didn't imagine that this would inspire writers, but I quite applaud what Minecraft does for creativity at all ages!
My daughter loves telling Minecraft stories when we are going for walks or in the car. They're long quite complicated stories about her, me, and her friends having various made up adventures in the Minecraft world. More often than not they'll spin off to include elements not possible in the game, but they always start in the Minecraft world.
She's 6 and at least the Minecraft storytelling aspect came from watching people do so on Youtube. There are a bunch of people on Youtube (Stampycat being her favorite) who use Minecraft do semi-scripted lets-plays/machinima stories and for some reason she finds this to be the most fun and interesting thing ever created.
It's a fantasy world that is more tangible to them than most, because they can dip in and out at will and explore it more.
I know for my own part, I can still remember part of the geography of various CIV games I played 10-15 years ago, and often elements of what played out.
It's the same with Minecraft - once you get games like this, where the spatial aspects of the game world hangs sufficiently together, we're very good at remembering it.
And what we're good at remembering, we have a better shot at describing well.
That makes it a comfortable, safe, but still exciting starting point.
I wish more people felt uncomfortable with such a close marriage between commerce and lower education. Get em while they're kids and you have a customer for life...
Minecraft bears absolutely no interface similarity to any other Microsoft product. What you're saying happens and is already happening with the educational discounts on MS Office, but Minecraft doesn't contribute to that at all.
I can see that it might be creating familiarity with the company name (or is it? what fraction of people distinguish between OEM, OS and software vendor?), but unlike gas stations and hotels I don't see software as a place where that matters a lot.
I mean, sure, it's 5 to 7 years old depending on your count, and it has quite a lot of toys, but "lifetime" seems a bit of a stretch.
Star Wars has for sure stood the test of time, and I have no problem imagining Minecraft being Lego 2.0/Lego digital or something else entirely, but right now I see it merely as really great/pervasive product with some branding.
I could potentially see a conflict if we were talking about a subscription-based or microtransaction-based game, but Minecraft is a one-time purchase. And, I expect, most of the kids who are super-excited about Minecraft already have a license anyway.
Well, once per platform. Plus increasingly in-game purchases of texture packs etc..
Though Minecraft is still cheap and low on commercialisation compared to a lot of the "let's annoy them until they succumb and pay for more diamonds/gems/gold/tokens" games.
I could potentially see a conflict if we were talking about a subscription-based or microtransaction-based game, but Minecraft is a one-time purchase. And, I expect, most of the kids who are super-excited about Minecraft already have a license anyway.
What a dim view. More to the point, one that cuts both ways.
Children playing outside are in the early stages of a physically and financially devastating addiction perpetrated by those monsters in the sporting goods and sports medicine industries. Before you know it, they'll be loading up Subarus full of REI snowboarding gear and burning gasoline in the direction of Tahoe. Keep your kids away from the outdoors, everyone, there lies capitalism!
Children reading are merely a resource being ripened for exploitation by publishing companies, who have somehow duped the taxpayer into providing customers for them!
Communicating with each other? Oh God, the horror.
Even purely imaginative play in the backyard is how children come to desire backyards for their own children, and the suburban houses, mortgages, and cars that come with them. Public parks, well now you're just softening them up to support Big Government.
Everything about childhood has commercial implications if you squint hard enough.
On the other hand, if my daughter is anything to go by, they would play Minecraft no matter what. Might as well get some education in there while they are at it.
From the article: an 8 year old kid, Stroud, wrote a book about Minecraft.
okay.
Question is now: is it because of Minecraft that this kid "became a writer", or was it just the starting element? If the kid had been fond of frogs, rocks or knitting, would he gave wrote a book just as well?
If you take any random kid playing Minecraft, could you turn it into a writer like described in the article?
I think that the kid was a born writer, or is in the correct environment, but crediting Minecraft for this is not correct.
Maybe crediting Minecraft with it is "not correct", but I see with my own son too that a lot his creativity centers around open-ended games - including Minecraft - that helps provide structure when he wants to sit down and write.
It provides ample inspiration, and a setting that he can describe rather than have to invent from scratch, and that is very helpful "scaffolding" to be able to focus on the story in the beginning.
As he gets "caught up" in describing something, what he describes starts to morph away from the game world he started with.
Look at the vast amount of heavily scripted Youtube videos that use open-ended sandbox games as "set" and you see much of the same, where the games clearly affect the creative process by letting people act and react and describe rather than having to jump straight into inventing from scratch.
Relying on Minecraft for education is similar to pushing the use of Word, Excel, etc---encouraging the use of proprietary software that locks the user into the _software_ rather than the general concepts that they introduce. Yes, you do learn about those concepts, but why not teach them in an environment that is friendly toward education, and then apply those concepts to the proprietary software (like Office) should they need to be used in the future?
In this case, how about something like Minetest? Inspire them with a program that they can share freely with their friends and family. With a program that they can express their creativity as far as they desire, down to the source code, even.
Children want to play minecraft. All their friends play that, not Minetest. Who will they play with on their minetest server? You?
It's like when I was a young kid, I wanted a game boy, but I got those shitty tiger electronic games. My parents saw it as the same thing, but I couldn't trade pokemon with my friends or talk about Zelda. Proprietary software either way, but children don't care. Let children find their own way to FOSS, not force them into using some half-baked clone.
> Let children find their own way to FOSS, not force them into using some half-baked clone.
A classroom setting is different than gameplay with peers.
I have a son. It's inevitable that he's going to want to play the games that his peers are playing, and my ideals are not more important than his social well-being.
But what a classroom uses and teaches is vastly different. It's _what_ is being taught that matters. For example, some teachers may choose to use online tools for teaching mathematics, whereas others will stick to textbooks and hands-on play. Both are viable methods.
I've already met with the school district on student privacy issues, and I plan to meet with them on other issues relating to software freedom, which they were receptive to.
In the context of this article and the application, most kids don't care about being able to "share freely with their friends and family." They care about playing a game they're familiar with, enjoy playing and that their friends play too.
The suggestion reminds me of when I was small and some classroom didn't have Legos but some knock-off that was nearly identical, functionally, but much less inspiring to play with.
I'd love to see if the writers of these books made any money off of the books. I understand that probably wasn't the goal of the article, but I'd like to instill entrepreneurial values in my kids. Imagine if you were a kid that had no income (except for birthdays/holidays). You could write a book about something that you love and obsess over and get money for doing it. That would be magical for them.
IIRC the rules regarding income get fuzzy when basing one's written work on the Intellectual Property of another entity. As in a "Minecraft story" revenue would likely default to the owner of the IP, not the unaffiliated writer. If the entity such as Minecraft reaches an agreement to give the writer of the derivative content compensation, I think that's their choice (e.g. they never hired the writer and are allowed control of their IP, which can include take-downs). There's a lot of good publicity to be earned by including fan-works into a global campaign, for sure! Also, money! See: "50 Shades of Grey" and its relationship to "Twilight" being a way where both parties became fiscal winners.
34 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] threadI know for my own part, I can still remember part of the geography of various CIV games I played 10-15 years ago, and often elements of what played out.
It's the same with Minecraft - once you get games like this, where the spatial aspects of the game world hangs sufficiently together, we're very good at remembering it.
And what we're good at remembering, we have a better shot at describing well.
That makes it a comfortable, safe, but still exciting starting point.
I can see that it might be creating familiarity with the company name (or is it? what fraction of people distinguish between OEM, OS and software vendor?), but unlike gas stations and hotels I don't see software as a place where that matters a lot.
Quite a few people learned programming in Visual Basic and went on to have rich, diverse careers.
I mean, sure, it's 5 to 7 years old depending on your count, and it has quite a lot of toys, but "lifetime" seems a bit of a stretch.
Star Wars has for sure stood the test of time, and I have no problem imagining Minecraft being Lego 2.0/Lego digital or something else entirely, but right now I see it merely as really great/pervasive product with some branding.
Though Minecraft is still cheap and low on commercialisation compared to a lot of the "let's annoy them until they succumb and pay for more diamonds/gems/gold/tokens" games.
Gotta wonder how much the merchandise (clothing, mugs, posters, toys, freaking lego sets) is earning them though.
Children playing outside are in the early stages of a physically and financially devastating addiction perpetrated by those monsters in the sporting goods and sports medicine industries. Before you know it, they'll be loading up Subarus full of REI snowboarding gear and burning gasoline in the direction of Tahoe. Keep your kids away from the outdoors, everyone, there lies capitalism!
Children reading are merely a resource being ripened for exploitation by publishing companies, who have somehow duped the taxpayer into providing customers for them!
Communicating with each other? Oh God, the horror.
Everything about childhood has commercial implications if you squint hard enough.
okay.
Question is now: is it because of Minecraft that this kid "became a writer", or was it just the starting element? If the kid had been fond of frogs, rocks or knitting, would he gave wrote a book just as well?
If you take any random kid playing Minecraft, could you turn it into a writer like described in the article?
I think that the kid was a born writer, or is in the correct environment, but crediting Minecraft for this is not correct.
It provides ample inspiration, and a setting that he can describe rather than have to invent from scratch, and that is very helpful "scaffolding" to be able to focus on the story in the beginning.
As he gets "caught up" in describing something, what he describes starts to morph away from the game world he started with.
Look at the vast amount of heavily scripted Youtube videos that use open-ended sandbox games as "set" and you see much of the same, where the games clearly affect the creative process by letting people act and react and describe rather than having to jump straight into inventing from scratch.
In this case, how about something like Minetest? Inspire them with a program that they can share freely with their friends and family. With a program that they can express their creativity as far as they desire, down to the source code, even.
I think this was posted on HN a while back: http://www.ocsmag.com/2016/04/04/mining-for-education/
https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.html
It's like when I was a young kid, I wanted a game boy, but I got those shitty tiger electronic games. My parents saw it as the same thing, but I couldn't trade pokemon with my friends or talk about Zelda. Proprietary software either way, but children don't care. Let children find their own way to FOSS, not force them into using some half-baked clone.
A classroom setting is different than gameplay with peers.
I have a son. It's inevitable that he's going to want to play the games that his peers are playing, and my ideals are not more important than his social well-being.
But what a classroom uses and teaches is vastly different. It's _what_ is being taught that matters. For example, some teachers may choose to use online tools for teaching mathematics, whereas others will stick to textbooks and hands-on play. Both are viable methods.
I've already met with the school district on student privacy issues, and I plan to meet with them on other issues relating to software freedom, which they were receptive to.
The suggestion reminds me of when I was small and some classroom didn't have Legos but some knock-off that was nearly identical, functionally, but much less inspiring to play with.