What if Minecraft could be played for less energy cost than it is today? Could we imagine net-zero Minecraft? And even if we could, why should we care? We don’t NEED to play Minecraft. Will this project be a kind of green-washing distracting us from more pressing concerns in the climate crisis?
A major theme of the Gaia’s Riddle SMP is energy transition and sustainability. We are running the SMP on our custom solar powered server after all. Vanilla Minecraft has no energy system as such. Yes, redstone has always figured as a kind of energy source… perhaps like electricity or magnetism. In vanilla we use redstone…
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Week 1-2: Eco Ego & Early Childhood Education The initial angle I considered with video games and their intersection with eco consciousness was early childhood exposure to both. Using my own experience growing up between the 00s and 10s, the elementary school eco curriculum placed a heavy focus on “reduce, reuse, recycle”, energy conservation, introducing…
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Originally published April 20, 2014 The summer is coming and I am drinking in the sweet success of having finished my undergraduate. After four years of attending lecture after lecture, it was a refreshing change to attend ENGL 398E: Video Games and/as Theory in my last semester and do something a bit different. Our Professor…
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What is the Smithed Summit? Last week from November 2nd to November 9th, I attended the Smithed Summit with very little knowledge of what it was about, and I was blown away by what I saw. Imagine Comiccon, the gathering for all things superhero: comics, movies, books, art, games, cosplay, etc…but for Minecraft Datapacking and…
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Sunblock One is a prototype solar powered Minecraft server. There is nothing exceptional about this technologically; we can manage this with inexpensive consumer grade DIY components. We have a 100watt solar panel, a MPPT solar controller, a 12V50ah Lithium battery connected to a miniPC with a 10th gen i7, integrated graphics and 32GB of RAM…
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One of our main goals was to get the Funsters engaged in the allegorical build of the Fun Palace. This meant that YouTube 60s movies and music sharing, or merely playing Minecraft beside the Fun Palace was no longer enough. After all, building Fun is different to building a Palace. And so, we resorted to…
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This was it. After half a year of creative sculpting, the scene of the urban sprawl was set, the hidden lore pinched away in surprising corners of the map, and the system was up and running – ready to open its gates to millions of incoming Funsters. Shaky Grounds Immediately, people died. That’s what happens…
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Join our experimental SMP server and spend 60 days in java modded Minecraft exploring the world and completing the Fun Palace. You will play in survival, and will collect and make the materials to construct any number of activities originally envisioned in the 1960s by the design team.
Skyfall. Mobs everywhere. Aaaaand it’s Tuesday Night. Prelude: 7 days ago in the Mill Meads Clock Mill. Dr. Bart Simon discovers the block of modernity. By carefully studying the Create Mod, and through insistent trial and error, we are introduced to Cement. It is grayish and runny, as if it was cupped from a Minecraft-version…
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