Minecraft
description: a sandbox video game developed by Mojang Studios, where players can build and explore their own virtual worlds
106 results
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro · 523pp · 154,042 words
how the “Mirai botnet,” a vast, distributed, hacking supercomputer a Rutgers undergraduate designed to get out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, almost destroyed the internet in the process. As I delve into these five epic hacks, I will also lay bare the technology that made them
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decades earlier had someone built a weapon powerful enough to destroy the internet. And on October 21, it struck and the unthinkable happened. 9. THE MINECRAFT WARS Every profession has its public faces—its doyens, deans, sages, gurus, old hands, éminences grises, international authorities, spokespeople for the field. These trusted professionals
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and switch to his firm, ProTraf. When Rutgers stuck with its choice, Paras Jha set out to teach his university a painful and expensive lesson. Minecraft Paras Jha was born and raised in Fanwood, a leafy suburb in Central New Jersey. The oldest son of Anand and Vijaya Jha, Paras was
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to success and affirmation. Anand even set up a website for his son to exhibit his work. Paras was particularly drawn to the online game Minecraft. Minecraft is a video game in which players explore a world made out of pixelated blocks. Players mine these blocks for raw materials to build tools
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is easily “modded”—that is, modifiable to generate new worlds with different rules and novel capabilities. Many players switch between Minecraft servers that host these modded games, usually for a fee. Although Minecraft is a “blocky” video game with a cartoonish look—the characters’ hands do not even have fingers—it is
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million copies since buying the game in 2014 (current price: $26.99); on any given day 55 million users play it. The market for popular Minecraft servers is also lucrative—some hosting services make as much as $100,000 a month. In ninth grade, Paras graduated from playing
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Minecraft to hosting servers. He wrote on his website about the satisfaction he felt “seeing others enjoy my work.” It was in hosting game servers, however,
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that he first encountered DDoS attacks. Because the competition between servers is so fierce, Minecraft administrators often hire DDoS services to knock rivals off-line. Others can buy DDoS tools on the web for as little as $15 or watch
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YouTube videos to learn how to launch these attacks themselves. By taking Minecraft servers off-line, attackers hope to poach their customers. “If you’re a player, and your favorite Minecraft server gets knocked off-line, you can switch to another server,” Robert Coelho, vice president of
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ProxyPipe, a San Francisco company specializing in defending Minecraft servers, explained. “But for the server operators, it’s all about maximizing the number of players and running a large, powerful server. The more players
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you can hold on the server, the more money you make. But if you go down, you start to lose Minecraft players very fast—maybe for good.” Paras’s servers were routinely targets of these attacks. Coehlo had been friends with Paras when he started out
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in 2014. Lelddos would taunt their victims before they took them off-line, usually posting their insults on Twitter. These hooligans specialized in attacks on Minecraft servers. As Paras learned more sophisticated DDoS attacks, he also studied DDoS defense. As he became proficient in mitigating attacks on
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Minecraft servers, he decided to create ProTraf Solutions. “My experience in dealing with DDoS attacks led me to start a server hosting company focused on providing
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been managing and administering game servers “ever since 2009.” In 2009, Paras was twelve, the year he learned how to code. Paras’s obsession with Minecraft attack and defense, compounded by his untreated ADHD, led to an even greater retreat from family and school. His poor academic performance in high school
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frustrated and depressed him. His only solace was Japanese anime and the admiration he gained from the online community of Minecraft DDoS experts. Paras’s struggles deteriorated into paralysis when he enrolled in Rutgers University studying for a BS in computer science. Without his mother’s
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$3 million they were spending on cybersecurity was not working. Still, Rutgers refused to budge. ProTraf Solutions was failing. The company had a few small Minecraft clients, but Paras was having trouble keeping the lights on. He needed cash. In May 2016, Paras reached out to Josiah White. Josiah lived in
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, almost four times higher than any previous botnet had achieved. They used their new weapon to attack banks in Brazil, U.S. government sites, and Minecraft servers. They achieved this firepower by hijacking 1,300 web-connected cameras. Because video is computationally intensive, tends to have good connectivity, and is rarely
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were willing to pay $5,000 for a whole week. On September 27, for example, a group leased Mirai to attack Hypixel, then the largest Minecraft server in the world. The attack lasted three days. Such a long assault was affordable because the botnet fired at Hypixel for only forty-five
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American company Viasat, which runs a network of internet satellites (and provides Wi-Fi internet services to airplane passengers). These attacks were not DDoS-ing Minecraft servers, but were attempting to degrade the communication system used by the Ukrainian military. Because weak states tend not to launch devastating attacks on strong
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DNC Emails Day Before Election,” The Hill, November 7, 2016, https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/304648-WikiLeaks-releases-new-dnc-emails-suffers-cyberattack/. 9. The Minecraft Wars only make us feel safer: Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003). from blowing
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://twitter.com/ericgeller/status/789501608904257536?s=21. first DDoS attack: See Garrett Graff, “How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet,” Wired, December 13, 2017, www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet; “Computer Hacker Who Launched Attacks on Rutgers University Ordered to Pay $8.6m
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, 15. exhibit his work: Krebs, “Who Is Anna-Senpai?” since buying the game in 2014: “Minecraft for Windows,” Minecraft, accessed February 27, 2022, https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/store/minecraft-windows10. 55 million users play it: Tom Warren, “Minecraft Still Incredibly Popular as Sales Top 200 Million and 126 Million Play Monthly,” Verge, May
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18, 2020, www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/5/18/21262045/minecraft-sales-monthly-players-statistics-youtube. This is
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up from the 100 million Warren reported in 2016: Tom Warren, “Minecraft Sales Top 100 Million,” Verge, June 2, 2016, www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11838036
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/minecraft-sales-100-million. $100,000 a month: Graff, “How a Dorm Room.” Note that Krebs claims $50,000
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these attacks themselves: Sentencing Memo, 17. “But for the server operators”: Krebs, “Who Is Anna-Senpai?” targets of these attacks: Sentencing Memo, 18. attacks on Minecraft servers: Krebs, “Who Is Anna-Senpai?” his personal website: Jha, “I Am Paras Jha.” Note that ProTraf’s early iteration was called Switchnet. “ever since
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2009”: “About Us|ProTraf Solutions,” ProTraf, Internet Archive, accessed June 13, 2021, web.archive.org/web/20160528163331/https://www. ProTrafsolutions.com/about. Minecraft DDoS experts: Sentencing Memo, 15, 18–19. put on academic probation: Sentencing Memo, 20. “States make war and vice versa”: Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 67. revenues
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: Purdue CERIAS, “2020–04–08 CERIAS-Mirai-DDoS,” at 37:08. “That was worrisome”: Peterson’s quote comes from Garrett Graff, “How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet,” Wired, December 13, 2017. According to a team from UC Berkeley, the total cost of added bandwidth and energy consumption
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/2016/12/operation-tarpit-targets-customers-of-online-attack-for-hire-services/. The attack lasted three days: Luckykessie, “Network Issues 27th–30th September 2016,” Hypixel-Minecraft Server and Maps, October 10, 2016, hypixel.net/threads/network-issues-27th-30th-september-2016.876087. See also Krebs, “Who Is Anna-Senpai?” a digital
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) attacks; Akamai and; CFAA on; DNS records and; on Estonia by Russia; FBI investigations of; financial motivation in; Krebs as target of; MafiaBoy arrest for; Minecraft and Jha beginning with; Mirai versions and imitators of; Rutgers University; solutions for; 2016 increase of; VDoS gang and; see also botnets; Mirai botnet and
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Jacobsen, Nicholas Jha, Paras: background; click fraud of; cybercrime war and; DDoS attack beginnings; evasion techniques; false-flag operation; financial motivations of; Google attacks by; Minecraft obsession of; as Mirai botnet founder; Mirai code dump; on Peterson influence; Poodle Corp botnet of; ProTraf Solutions launch; Rutgers University DDoS attacks by Jobs
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Microsoft (company); antivirus protection; browsers; copyright suits and; cybersecurity; driver vulnerability approach of; early mission and growth of; internet product development at; legal action against; Minecraft success for; Sinofsky work for; Slivka role at; Winner Take All market and Microsoft Windows Microsoft Word military: cybersecurity; internet; Multics application for; WarGames movie
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and; see also GRU Milnet Minecraft: about; DDoS attacks and; Jha obsession with Mirai botnet and gang; code dump; DDoS attacks versions and imitators; FBI investigation of; Google attacks by; IoT
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Factory 4. The Father of Dragons 5. Winner Take All 6. Snoop Dogg Does His Laundry 7. How to Mudge 8. Kill Chain 9. The Minecraft Wars 10. Attack of the Killer Toasters Conclusion: The Death of Solutionism Epilogue Notes Acknowledgments Index Also by Scott J. Shapiro A Note About the
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball · 18 Jul 2022 · 412pp · 116,685 words
cashing out $55 million into real-world currency that year. For all the success of Second Life, it was the rise of virtual world platforms Minecraft and Roblox that brought its ideas to a mainstream audience in the 2010s. In addition to offering significant technical enhancements compared to their predecessors
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, Minecraft and Roblox also focused on children and teenage users, and were therefore far easier to use, rather than just offer greater capabilities. The results have
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been astounding. Throughout the 2010s, bands of users collaborated in Minecraft to build cities as large as Los Angeles—roughly 500 square miles. One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an
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estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.7 Scale is not the sole achievement of the platform. In 2015
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, Verizon built a cellphone inside Minecraft that could make and receive live video calls to the “real world.” As the COVID-19 virus spread across China in February 2020, a community
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of Chinese Minecraft players rapidly re-created the 1.2-million-square-foot hospitals built in Wuhan as a tribute to the “IRL” (“in real life”) workers, receiving
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global press coverage.8 One month later, Reporters Sans Frontières (also known as Reporters Without Borders) commissioned the construction of a museum within Minecraft that was composed of over 12.5 million blocks assembled by 24 virtual builders in 16 different countries over some 250 hours combined. The Uncensored
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leaders in Saudi Arabia. By the end of 2021, more than 150 million people were using Minecraft each month—more than six times as many as in 2014, when Microsoft bought the platform. Despite this, Minecraft was far from the size of the new market leader, Roblox, which had grown from fewer
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the most valuable gaming company outside of China, worth nearly 50% more than storied gaming giants Activision Blizzard and Nintendo. Despite the enormous growth in Minecraft’s and Roblox’s audiences and developer communities, many other platforms began to emerge and grow towards the tail end of the 2010s. In December
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2018, for example, the blockbuster video game Fortnite launched Fortnite Creative Mode, its own riff on Minecraft’s and Roblox’s world-building. Meanwhile, Fortnite was also transforming into a social platform for non-game experiences. In 2020, hip-hop star (and
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Windows, cloud computing offering Azure, communications platform Microsoft Teams, augmented reality headset HoloLens, gaming platform Xbox, professional network LinkedIn, and Microsoft’s own “Metaverses” including Minecraft, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and even the space-faring first-person shooter Halo.3 Mark Zuckerberg’s articulation focused on immersive virtual reality#x2021;‡ as well
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might also be changed, sold, or remixed with other goods. For example, if I buy an outfit in Minecraft I might then wear it in Roblox, or perhaps a hat I purchased in Minecraft would be paired with a sweater I won in Roblox while attending a virtual sporting match developed and
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company will need to operate their own virtual worlds, both as standalone planets and as part of leading virtual world platforms such as Fortnite and Minecraft. As Sweeney has put it, “just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage, and then at some point every company created a
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). We can already see precursors to the Metaverse. In platforms and operating systems, the most talked about contenders are virtual world platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, and real-time rendering engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal engine and Unity Technologies’ eponymous engine. These all run on an underlying operating system, such
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) games in the world were those focused on rich UGC and high numbers of concurrent users (Free Fire, PUBG, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, Roblox, Minecraft). In addition, these games quickly expanded into the sorts of media experiences that were previously “IRL Only” (the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite, or Lil
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services suites developed over the past two decades, other companies combined these approaches into a new one: integrated virtual world platforms (IVWPs) such as Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite Creative. IVWPs are based around their own general-purpose and cross-platform game engines, similar to Unity and Unreal (Fortnite Creative, or FNC
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in practice? The Roblox Corporation offers the best answer at the moment, given that Fortnite Creative is managed by Epic Games, which remains private, and Minecraft’s financials are not disclosed by its owner, Microsoft. Start with engagement. By January 2022, Roblox was averaging more than 4 billion hours of usage
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the world’s most used video site and reports that gaming content is its most watched content category, and Roblox its second most popular game (Minecraft, another IVWP, ranks first). As a point of contrast, Netflix is estimated at 12.5 billion to 15 billion hours of use per month. All
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Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2. GTA:V is the second-best-selling game in history, with over 150 million copies sold (Minecraft ranks first with nearly 250 million). RDR2 was the best-selling title made for the eighth generation of consoles (i.e., PlayStation 4, Xbox One
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as fast as these virtual giants are growing, the number of virtual experiences, innovators, technologies, opportunities, and developers are all growing faster. While Roblox and Minecraft are among the most popular games in the world, their reach is modest when considered in the broadest terms. These two supposed titans have 30
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of developers have yet to even try them. It’s easy to assume that Roblox or Minecraft will be the primary beneficiaries of this growth, yet history cautions us to be skeptical. When Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer Mojang in 2014, the title had sold more copies than any other game in history
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, and also had more monthly active users—25 million—than any AAA video game in history. Seven years later, Minecraft had grown nearly five times in monthly users, but also had ceded its crown to Roblox, which had grown from fewer than 5 million monthly
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users to over 200 million. Furthermore, the new king boasts nearly twice the daily users as Minecraft had monthly. What’s more, this period included the launch of many other IVWPs. Fortnite didn’t launch until 2017, with FNC coming a year
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the next few years, the title’s much-anticipated next sequel will release and will doubtlessly take advantage of the successes and learnings from Roblox, Minecraft, and FNC. As long as there are billions, or even tens of millions, of players left to adopt IVWPs, more will come to market. Krafton
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Games, which makes the most successful game in China, League of Legends, bought Hypixel Studios, which previously operated the largest private Minecraft server before shutting down to develop their own Minecraft-like platform. Many new IVWPs are being developed around different technical premises, too. At the end of 2021, even the largest
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of the blockchain-based IVWPs, which includes Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, Somnium Space, and Upland, had less than 1% of Roblox’s and Minecraft’s daily active users. However, these platforms believe that by allowing users more ownership over their in-world items, as well as a say in
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, they also represent a far smaller portion of the gaming industry than Facebook does in the social web. In 2021, the combined revenues of Roblox, Minecraft, and FNC represented less than 2.5% of gaming revenues in 2021, and reached fewer than 500 million of an estimated 2.5 billion–3
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Free Fire, both built on Unity. Most important may be the reach of Unreal and Unity’s developers. While millions of users have made a Minecraft mod or a Roblox game, the number of professional developers using these IVWPs is estimated in the tens of thousands. Epic and Unity count millions
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building a standalone virtual world, rather than one inside an IVWP. As such, we should assume that no matter how much more successful Roblox or Minecraft become, they will power only a minority share of all games. While games and game engines are central to the Metaverse, they don’t come
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, which is a philosophical, not technical, problem (cross-platform gaming reminds us this is the harder of the two challenges). As virtual platforms like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox grew into culture-driving social spaces, they’ve become an increasingly necessary part of consumer marketing, brand building, and multimedia franchise experiences. In
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a living New York Times universe. There is evidence of this transition today. The most popular virtual worlds, such as those of Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft, are designed to run on as many devices and operating systems as possible, and are only lightly optimized for any specific one. Of course, you
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have an overall gaming strategy, so it’s not as obvious as you might think.” The first multi-billion-dollar acquisition Nadella made was for Minecraft—and in a move that now seems obvious but was unconventional at the time, opted against making the title exclusive to its Xbox and Windows
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’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.”1 In many ways, Nadella’s approach to Minecraft embodied his overall transformation of Microsoft. No longer would the company’s products be designed for (or even optimized to work with) its own operating
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mobile era (such as Apple and Android), as well as those helping to found the era of the Metaverse (namely but not exclusively Roblox and Minecraft), should be forced to relinquish control over their ecosystems and let competitors profit from their success. After all, it is the rich integration between these
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.1145/2480741.2480751. 7. Josh Ye, “One Gamer Spent a Year Building This Cyberpunk City in Minecraft,” South China Morning Post, January 15, 2019, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.scmp.com/. 8. Josh Ye, “Minecraft Players Are Recreating China’s Rapidly Built Wuhan Hospitals,” South China Morning Post, February 20, 2020
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/blog/converging-the-physical-and-digital-with-digital-twins-mixed-reality-and-metaverse-apps/. 3. Andy Chalk, “Microsoft Says It Has Metaverse Plans for Halo, Minecraft, and Other Games,” PC Gamer, November 2, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-says-it-has-metaverse-plans-for-halo
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-minecraft-and-other-games/. 4. Gene Park, “Epic Games Believes the Internet Is Broken. This Is Their Blueprint to Fix It,” Washington Post, September 28, 2021,
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, 223 in smartphones, 131, 148–49, 159, 243, 245 Chaturbate, 261 China, xiii–xiv gaming in, xiii–xiv, 115 megacorporations of, xii–xiii, 19–20 Minecraft tribute during COVID-19, 10 regionalization of the internet, 62, 302–4 satellite capabilities of, 156n Tencent WeChat’s payment rails, 205–6 see also
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, Extend, Extinguish” strategy, 25 first mobile phone from, 25 Halo, 18, 139 HoloLens, 18, 141, 144–46, 147, 267–68, 279 market capitalization of, 166 Minecraft acquisition, 114, 279 PlayFab, 107, 108, 117 Sony’s partnership with, 281n see also Gates, Bill; Nadella, Satya; Windows; Xbox gaming platform Microsoft Azure, 18
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, 107, 144, 201, 279, 281n Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS), 17, 72–78, 92–93, 104, 279 Microsoft Teams, 18, 51, 271 Minecraft, 10–11, 111–12, 114–18, 278–79 “minimum viable product,” 268 “mirror worlds.” See digital twins misinformation/radicalization, 17, 290–91 mixed reality. See
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
by David Robertson and Bill Breen · 24 Jun 2013 · 282pp · 88,320 words
had created massive LEGO models of famous buildings and landmarks, worked with Paal Smith-Meyer at LEGO to develop the Architecture line of toys. LEGO, Minecraft, and 3D Printers Photos 18, 19, 20. LEGO fans can now design and replicate kits in their homes. Above is a re-creation of the
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LEGO Architecture Fallingwater kit in the online game Minecraft. Using a fancreated conversion program, that model was sent to a 3D printer to create a physical version, shown left next to the original LEGO
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a shelter to protect themselves, because at night monsters came out—zombies, skeletons, and (later) green “creepers.” Persson called his game Minecraft. Based on feedback from users, Persson steadily expanded Minecraft, adding new building materials, new monsters, a multiplayer capability, and the capacity for users to create “mods,” their own DIY versions
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the price as the game’s features expanded and its popularity exploded. As it worked its way upmarket, Minecraft began to take on all the hallmarks of a disruptive innovation. When it launched, Minecraft was decidedly a low-end product. Its crude, blocky look and feel had none of the LEGO brick
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’s precision and Universe’s attempt at perfection. Early on, Minecraft’s “building experience,” which involved hitting things with an axe, offered none of the brick’s limitless capacity for creative play. And the characters—zombies
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and creepers—were barely recognizable. But Minecraft was inexpensive. An unlimited, lifetime license for Minecraft cost just $13, which was far cheaper than a typical themed LEGO set consisting of plastic bricks and just a little more
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like World of Warcraft through the global gaming community. In January 2011, Minecraft passed one million purchases. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made $33 million in revenue. By August 2012, Minecraft claimed more than thirty-six million users, nearly seven million of whom had purchased the game. That translated into
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a sales rate of about $100 million per year for the game’s PC-based version. At the time, Minecraft was the fastest-selling game on Microsoft Xbox, and it featured an extensive catalog of merchandise, including a partner product with LEGO. With the explosion
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of 3-D printing tools in 2012, Minecraft moved further into LEGO territory. The MakerBot Replicator, just one of more than a dozen new 3-D printers introduced in 2012, can make objects
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is 5 to 10 percent of what it would cost to buy that model in a store. With a program called Mineways, developed by a Minecraft fan named Eric Haines, Minecraft users can “print” their creations in plastic, stone, ceramic, silver, or gold-plated steel. The program starts with a
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Minecraft creation and automatically produces a file that can be sent directly to a 3-D printing company such as Shapeways or to a personal 3-
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D printer such as the MakerBot Replicator. To illustrate the Mineways/Minecraft threat to LEGO, Gordon Robertson (the author’s son) built the LEGO Fallingwater kit (part of the Architecture series we described in the previous chapter
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). He then used it as a model to create a version of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in Minecraft, a four-hour project on a rainy weekend afternoon. (Insert photos 17 and 18 show the LEGO Architecture kit and Gordon Robertson’s
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Minecraft version.) Using the Mineways tool, he then “printed” a physical reproduction of the virtual Minecraft version of Fallingwater, both using Shapeways (see insert photo 19) and the author’s MakerBot Replicator (see insert
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). The cost of the MakerBot model is about one-tenth of the LEGO kit, which retails for about $100.† So now, using a combination of Minecraft, Mineways, and a MakerBot Replicator, kids can create any model they want using as many blocks as they wish, and print out a half dozen
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(which sits above the main house) or create your own modifications to Fallingwater, it’s difficult and expensive to find the right LEGO bricks. With Minecraft, Mineways, and the MakerBot Replicator, you can build many different versions of the house and print the best four or five, all for less than
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the cost of a single LEGO kit. It’s easier and faster to redo a room in the Minecraft version of the house than it is with the LEGO version. With LEGO, you’d have to disassemble the model, find the bricks you need
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, rebuild the room, and then reassemble the floors above it. With Minecraft, you simply “walk” into the virtual house, make your changes, and print out the new version. Minecraft is a long way from posing a serious threat to LEGO. It lacks the sweeping variety of
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to disrupt their plastic brick business with a digital brick business, lest a competitor do it for them. Minecraft, however, got to the digital future first. In 2012, the year LEGO shuttered Universe, Mojang—Minecraft’s parent company—earned $90 million on sales of $235 million. As 3-D printing improves, LEGO
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might one day find that Minecraft (or something like it) has jumped the digital divide to become a more compelling, richer, and easier way to construct plastic buildings, characters, and vehicles.
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ultimately want it. LEGO might well have been wise to let its Universe team act like an independent start-up—in other words, like a Minecraft. Freed from excessive executive attention and the demands of other LEGO product groups, the team might have launched a far more modest, less costly version
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the play experience even as it “lived” in the market. As Universe improved, it likely would have attracted more customers and moved upmarket, just as Minecraft has done. Universe might even have become the transistor radio of its time, a product that ascended from the bottom of its market and eventually
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became ubiquitous. What’s certain is that Universe’s failure and Minecraft’s success demonstrate that to create a low-end disruptor, it’s far more effective to put a tight lid on resources, free the development
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, its creators got a 1 percent cut of the product’s total net sales. In 2011, a Cuusoo concept for a LEGO set based on Minecraft—the online game that may disrupt the LEGO Group’s brick business—racked up the requisite ten thousand votes in just forty-eight hours, an
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support that compelled LEGO to announce that it would produce the set. Six months later (one-third of the company’s average development time), LEGO Minecraft Micro World hit the market. With Cuusoo, LEGO moved from tapping the wisdom of a few elite cliques to sourcing the talents of massive crowds
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over its attempt at a disruptive innovation and missed an opportunity to create the kind of online multiplayer building experience that Markus Persson exploited with Minecraft. When LEGO succeeds, as it did with a Big Bang line such as Ninjago, it innovates from the inside out. That is, the development team
The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb · 15 Feb 2018 · 217pp · 63,287 words
arrived I found everyone totally immersed and uninterruptible. Lisa was at the front desk, and when I asked her if she knew anyone who played Minecraft, her face lit up. Lisa is a hip 31-year-old from Taiwan. Like a lot of young Asian women travelling in Australia, she is
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in a suspended state of adolescence, and either obsessed with dungeons and dragons or blowing things to pieces. But then calling Minecraft ”a game” doesn’t really do it justice. Minecraft is what in gaming terms is known as an “open world” or “sandbox”, a concept that couldn’t be more different
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kind of games. Open worlds are designed to let their participants wander, explore and create things, rather than search out and destroy. In simple terms, Minecraft is a game in which participants can design and build things with others. In old-school terms, it is more like a box of Lego
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than a game of war. One of the things that has made Minecraft so popular is its combination of simplicity and depth. It is really easy to start making things with its building blocks, but the sky’s
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stunningly complex undertaking. “I think Taiwan is like the Kingdom of the North,” she says with a smile. “And King’s Landing is like China.” Minecraft is one of the most successful mass participation games in the world. It has more than 100 million registered users, generating upwards of half a
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playing online at the same time. By the standards of not only the gaming industry, but of all entertainment industries, it is a blockbuster. But Minecraft wasn’t created by one of the huge gaming companies that dominate the market. It evolved very differently from large studio products, in a way
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virtually no funding. In 2009, Markus Persson, or “Notch” as he is known in the developer community, was working as a software developer in Stockholm. Minecraft started life as a side project he did in his spare time. Software development is pretty taxing on the brain, and Notch was also active
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on many online communities, so Minecraft had to be fitted in with a lot of other things. Its humble beginnings account for some of its simplicity. Notch was a software developer
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have a creative department to fall back on. The characters and world he created were therefore unashamedly rudimentary and low-res. This not only marks Minecraft out from a lot of its competitors, it also allows participants to apply a lot of imagination to it – in a similar way that kids
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others like him might enjoy: “I designed the game for myself,” he says. “That is an audience I know.” Notch released the prototype version of Minecraft on to a gaming forum in May 2009. From day one, he made two important decisions: first, he charged people to use the game, and
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second, he invited others to participate in Minecraft’s development. Fans were encouraged to come up with “mods” – modifications to the game that add to it or improve it in some way. Notch
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started to blog about Minecraft and uploaded some videos on YouTube showing how it worked. Notch’s approach was the antithesis of the pushy visionary. He did not try to
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what he established was not dissimilar to the lab that George Merck set up for research scientists in New Jersey – except that it was online. Minecraft wasn’t designed top-down, it emerged from this group of developers and enthusiasts. By June 2010, it was robust enough to be released as
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hipsters and enthusiasts in a similar way to the Valley in Brisbane. It was an area that very much matched the ethos of Mojang and Minecraft. Minecraft was communally developed through a beta phase and was released as a full-blown product in June 2011. There was no big-bang launch; its
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and enthusiast magazines. By the end of the 2012, just three years after its conception and a little over a year after its “official” launch, Minecraft had 25 million registered participants and had generated $240 million in revenue. A year later, the participant base had increased by 50 percent and was
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,000 new users every day. That is pretty good for a small independent company with fewer than 30 developers. For those who participate in it, Minecraft is a deadly serious pursuit – something they engage in far more seriously than many people approach the jobs they are paid to do. It encourages
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from all ages and walks of life – from seven-year-old kids to groups of serious academics. When I ask Lisa what it is about Minecraft that particularly attracts her, she frowns for a moment, then gestures at the shop. “Because this is what I have on offer,” she says. “I
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Australians, I am just another Asian girl… And back home, I have to work for a big company, at my desk all day… But with Minecraft, I can be myself. I can use my creative skills. I can work on something I care about with others.” This juxtaposition of fellowship and
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to continually strive to discover new and better ways to alleviate human suffering. It is in this juxtaposition that we feel most supported and alive. Minecraft’s influence had gone way beyond the online world. MinecraftEdu, a partnership set up by enthusiasts in Spain, Finland, and New York City, helps teachers
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a virtual classroom for everything from maths to art and design. Schools in other countries are beginning to use Minecraft as a way to help students develop design and collaboration skills. Parents, realising the positive effect it has on their children, are beginning to rethink
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time. Universities and business schools are seeing their model challenged by online educational offerings like the Khan Academy and massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Minecraft shows how participatory innovation can be used not just to bring education online, but to engage people in a whole different way of learning – through
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announced the launch of “block by block”, an initiative designed to encourage people to re-imagine 300 run-down public spaces across the globe using Minecraft; its first area of focus being the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. This project is something that Lisa is particularly interested in. She was trained
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has suggested a means for her and her friends to start to use Minecraft to develop and pitch ideas for urban renewal back in Taiwan – something her network of Minecraft co-creators had started to explore. In October 2013, Minecraft received what might be the ultimate accolade. It was affectionately parodied in the
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American TV programme South Park. The show’s Corey Lanskin character summed it up thus: “Minecraft, it don’t got no winner. It don’t got no objective. You just fuckin’ build an’ shit.” Like many a good joke, this gets
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to the essence of what Minecraft is about far better than any wordy academic analysis. What Minecraft shows is that we are entering an era when the concept of “ownership” is shifting – from something that implies physical
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have a habit of wanting to design highly stylised products and experiences, giving our brains no place to participate. Instagram’s suggestively grainy images and Minecraft’s simple characters allow the mirror neurons to connect with the essence of the experience, and then the brain fills in the rest. Less is
Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman · 20 Nov 2012 · 307pp · 92,165 words
as a master’s student and has had a long career at Autodesk. Eric thought I might be interested in a new online world called Minecraft. “You could describe Minecraft as an 8-bit vision of the future of design for 3D printing,” Eric told me. “Millions of people play
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Minecraft. It’s adult LEGOs.” The reason Eric had contacted me was because he thought I might be interested in Mineways, a software tool he created.
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of charge) software tool that enables people to edit, then 3D print what they’ve designed in Minecraft. Eric developed Mineways when he realized the rich virtual worlds people were building online in Minecraft were begging to be materialized in physical form. Eric wrote Mineways in 45 days in his spare time
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been downloaded more than 50,000 times. Eager to learn more, I arranged to meet Eric so he could show me the online world of Minecraft. One of the first things I noticed in Eric’s living room were 3D printed tchotchkes scattered around. He showed me a 3D printed replica
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yellow thatch roof. The house, Eric explained, was a printed replica of a village in Minecraft. We sat down in front of a widescreen computer monitor, and Eric logged into his Minecraft account. Eric explained that Minecraft is a multiplayer game where players create an avatar and set up their own custom-designed
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. By clicking and dropping cube-shaped chunks of raw material into place, players create elaborate and rich fantasy worlds. At the time of this writing, Minecraft had an estimated 8 million active players, a population the size of a small European country. I peered over Eric’s shoulder at the screen
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walked me around his virtual world, Vokselia. “When you start, you get an account and then you get a world with nothing in it.” His Minecraft world, shared among a few friends, boasts houses, castles, a giant glass dome, even a few farm animals. Eric showed me one of his most
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a challenge to design the grasshopper’s spindly legs and antennae in such a way that they could survive the 3D printing process. In a Minecraft world, each cube-shaped building block represents the real-world equivalent volume of one cubic meter. Unlike contemporary video games that are so sleek and
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finely rendered they look like movies, the graphics on Minecraft, at first glance, appear crude, even primitive. Minecraft worlds are made of big, blocky chunks of raw material. Trees, houses, lakes, structures are coarsely pixelated. Each flat surface appears
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to be made of individual tiles. What makes Minecraft so addictive? Part of the appeal is that the visual effect is magical, the cube-shaped building blocks lend a mystical air to the cities
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-world complexity into the building process. Since an elaborate design project can take a lot of time, to speed the game along, a day in Minecraft lasts only 20 minutes. Eric showed me a train station’s floor tiling, a mosaic of browns, reds, and yellows. To make brown tile
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, Minecraft players can’t just choose “brown” and apply the color to a floor tile. Instead, there’s an organic and laborious process to make brown
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,” said Eric. “Pink is quite rare. Brown is quite rare. You have to find cocoa to make this brown color tile.” I suspect part of Minecraft’s appeal is that players can work together in teams on massive building projects, creating the sense of old-fashioned community. Somewhat like a barn
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of the station’s atrium—apparently the players hadn’t yet gotten around to taking it down after the holidays ended. Minecraft demonstrates a new design paradigm: Gamified CAD. For $27, Minecraft offers players easy, powerful design tools, plus an online community of fellow players and builders. Back when I was a
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bewilderingly complicated user interface, special vocabulary, and was way beyond the skill of the average user. It wasn’t fun to learn at any age. Minecraft is so easy an 8-year old can play. In fact, a few months ago, my 8-year-old son started playing
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Minecraft at home. After a few days of learning his way around, he designed and built me my own virtual home (near his tree house), complete
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with a shower stall and bed. Minecraft’s physical constraints seem to fascinate him. He set up several experiments to test the explosive power of TNT, blowing massive angular craters into dirt
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accidentally wandered near the explosion; yet somehow a passing cow survived the blast and shortly afterwards, was grazing peacefully near the gigantic crater. Deep inside Minecraft’s software (of little interest to anyone other than a few computer scientists) lies an interesting design architecture. Its software does not use industry standard
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design models. Minecraft’s blocky graphics are not generated by traditional solid modeling (the design tool of choice for engineers), nor surface mesh (the design tool of choice
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for animators and artists). The heart of Minecraft is a digital unit called a voxel. One digital voxel translates smoothly into a precise physical location in the volume of a three-dimensional object
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’t have training on how to use surface mesh, it’s hard to use, it’s not how people think.” Eric showed me a beautiful Minecraft creation, a majestic aerial depiction of a Spanish city created by Lee Griggs and Tomás Fernandez Serrano at a graphics design company called Solid Angle
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. In their Minecraft world, Lee and Tomas designed a domed building that presides over a circular intersection of six streets. A Minecraft scene created by designers Lee Griggs and Tomás Fernandez Serrano. If you look closely, you can
Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn · 12 Sep 2022 · 415pp · 102,982 words
through a similar business model, at the expense of children’s wellbeing. In the world of for-profit apps and video games, the sandbox game Minecraft epitomizes tech’s potential to offer children wonderfully fun, creative, and educational experiences even as its prevailing business model exploits and corrupts those same experiences
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. I first encountered Minecraft in March 2014, when I was preparing to participate in a panel about tech, which included a teacher who used the game in his classroom
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. I was charmed by it. Six months later, Microsoft bought Minecraft from its creator for $2.5 billion.63 What excited me most about Minecraft was that it was pretty much completely unstructured. At the time, all the game consisted of was dropping players
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had to rely entirely on their own creativity and problemsolving abilities to survive. You could play alone or collaborate with friends online. At that point, Minecraft was by no means commercial-free—there were ever-increasing numbers of licensed products,64 including T-shirts and even a Lego set.65 I
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seems rather quaint—but I was still intrigued by the game. Like Mark, ten-year-old Henry was thrilled to show me what Microsoft’s Minecraft is like today. He was even more thrilled when his dad said, “Let me show you what I don’t let Henry play on
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Minecraft,” and we were transported to a virtual multiplayer battlefield, which still looks like Minecraft—blocky landscape, blocky avatars, and all. But it’s now an awful lot like Fortnite
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. Minecraft replicates Fortnite’s class system of haves and have-nots by touting in-game virtual add-ons, including skins, pets, weapons, and more
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.66 While his dad and I chatted about Minecraft, Henry spent a happy fifteen minutes fighting his opponents and blowing things up. The excitement offered by this version of the game comes more from
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opportunities for destruction than construction—which is why he is normally not allowed to play it. Microsoft’s über-commercialization of Minecraft is distressing but not unexpected. Yet, even before that happened, I had a weird exchange with a
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Minecraft enthusiast. At that panel discussion in 2014, I found myself treading rather lightly on Minecraft when the teacher, my fellow panelist, extolled its virtues. But then, with great excitement, he described how his daughter had
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built a treehouse on Minecraft. “We live in New York City,” he enthused, “She never built a treehouse before.” That was too much for me. “She still hasn’t built
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of that future goes back to that 2014 panel and that teacher who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—distinguish between constructing a virtual treehouse in Minecraft and the experience of building one outside, perched way up in a tree, pounding nails into boards. Our interactions with tech may be compelling, exciting
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that was advertised!” A year earlier at another family gathering, I heard from a nephew whose son is a few years older. “First it was Minecraft, and now it’s Fortnite,” he says. “My eleven-year-old begs constantly to play games online. And once he starts, I can’t get
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eighth grade. Support children playing with friends in real life. Remember that digital “sandbox” games that allow kids to play remotely with their friends, like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite, are not a substitute for playing with friends in person. For one thing, they don’t satisfy our basic need for human
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tracks their every move in order to target them more effectively or to figure out how to keep them playing longer. Kids playing games like Minecraft and Fortnite are subject to ongoing pressure to purchase digital add-ons like decorations for their avatars or sticker packs to enhance their texts. Remember
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8, 2018, screentimenetwork.org /apa. 62. Freed, Medium, March 12, 2018. 63. Genxee, “7 Years Later: Minecraft $2.5B Deal Microsoft’s Most Successful Acquisition?,” Influencive, June 30, 2021, www.influencive.com/7-years-later-minecraft-2-5b-deal-microsofts-most-successful-acquisition. 64. Globe Newswire, “ThinkGeek and Mojang Build on Licensing
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Deal,” news release, Dow Jones Institutional News, June 15, 2011. 65. Alex Cox, “The History of Minecraft—the Best Selling PC Game Ever,” TechRadar, September 4
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, 2020, www.techradar.com/news/the-history-of-minecraft. 66. Sandra Fleming, “The Parents Guide to the Minecraft Marketplace,” Best Apps for Kids (blog). 67. Sherry Turkle, “Opinion: There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy,” New York Times, August 11, 2018.
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Alexa, 133–34, 137–41, 151 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 134–41, 151 digital “sandbox” games, 49–50, 53–55, 218–19. See also Fortnite; Minecraft digital toolbox and Digital Tools Criteria Checklist, 245–48 Digital Wellbeing Bill (Minnesota), 236–37 Digital Wellness Institute, 256 Discover, 172–73, 177 Disney, 3
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in 2016 election, 176 See also Facebook; Instagram; Instagram for Kids MGA Entertainment, 25n, 85–86 Microsoft, 53–54 millennial parents and families, 120–23 Minecraft, 53–55, 110, 218–19 minimalism, 88 mining (data mining), 47–48, 81 Minnesota State Legislature, 204–5, 236 Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, 3 MIT Technology
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words
Rutgers computer science student named Paras Jha. Jha and his fellow bot farmers were avid players of Minecraft; they created Mirai by infecting thousands of Internet of Things devices, then used them to knock various Minecraft servers offline, sometimes to try and extort the owners in a sort of mafia-like protection
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unpacking of last night’s episode of Jane the Virgin. For example, in the last decade, one unexpectedly powerful vector for coding was the game Minecraft. Superficially, the game is like a digital form of Legos: The players “mine” blocks of material—chopping trees for wood, digging into the ground for
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enjoy it merely at that level. But a subset of players discover the game is more or less an introduction to programming. That’s because Minecraft includes a sort of electrical wiring, “redstone,” which lets you craft logic circuits that resemble the language of software. If you click this switch and
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turns on; turn that lever or that lever, and a door opens. (These are AND gates and OR gates, and in fact you can use Minecraft to build many of the main forms of logic you see in coding and microchips.) So these kids start building mechanisms of ridiculous complexity—complex
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doors, little traps that get triggered when you walk by—then showing them off to friends and posting videos of them online. Minecraft, these kids found, was a world where being able to build cool things out of logic was fun and made them impressive to the outside
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world. For these kids, Minecraft wasn’t just a game. It was this generation’s “personal computer,” their Commodore 64, as my friend the philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost
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never seen any data on how many kids made the transition from redstone to actual programming. It’s likely only a small chunk of all Minecraft players, much as only a small chunk of kids who touched a Commodore 64—or “viewed source” on a website in 1999—went on to
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it. But he also got interested in coding and discovered that after having spent so much time devising and untangling the logic gates of his Minecraft contraptions, he got it pretty quickly. He applied to study computer science at a college and was accepted. “In the redstone community,” he says, “a
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merely because that activity itself is fun but because they’re trying—as Papert realized—to create something other people will find awesome. So while Minecraft may be a surprisingly powerful on-ramp for coding, it only has that power because the game is fun and cool. (The creators of
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Minecraft itself never intended for it to be remotely educational, nor did they intend to make it a way to learn logic. “We have never done
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things with that sort of intent,” as Jens Bergensten, the lead Minecraft developer, told me. “We always made the game for ourselves.”) The same is likely true of Neopets: Its creators didn’t think, Hey, we’re
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Horror (blog), May 15, 2012, accessed August 21, 2018, https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/. Ian Bogost once noted: Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the
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-minecraft-generation.html. “around me are programmers”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “made the game for ourselves”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “in front of a bull’s face”: Smiley, “Can You Teach.” Index Aaron Swartz hackathon, ref1
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coders and, ref1, ref2, ref3 women and minorities, lack of, ref1 Zuckerberg on, ref1 Metasploit, ref1 Microsoft, ref1, ref2, ref3 microtargeting, ref1 Miller, Robyn, ref1 Minecraft, ref1 minority coders bifurcation in pay and prestige of coding jobs available to, ref1 computer science degree drop-out rates, in 1980s onward, ref1 hostile
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols · 25 Sep 2017 · 391pp · 71,600 words
computer, I thought about how it might be used by large enterprises for design and in schools and hospitals, not just how much fun playing Minecraft will be. It’s not that we had lost our soul, but we needed renewal, a renaissance. In the 1970s, Bill and Paul Allen started
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, would join as head of business development, striking deals to acquire and partner with exciting new products and services. Within a few weeks we bought Minecraft, the popular online game, which we knew would boost engagement with our cloud and our devices. A few weeks after that I announced that Kathleen
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, though, we learned a lot about what it means to design, build, and manufacture hardware. Our acquisition of Sweden-based Mojang and its video game Minecraft also represented a growth mindset because it created new energy and engagement for people on our mobile and cloud technologies, and it would open new
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opportunities in the education software space. The story of how the Minecraft acquisition happened illustrates some of the key qualities of a growth mindset, including the readiness to empower and learn from individuals who possess insights and
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was Phil Spencer, who heads Xbox. Phil understood that we needed to be the most attractive platform in the world for gamers, and he knew Minecraft had a dedicated and gigantic community of players who invented and built new worlds in this virtual Lego-like video game. It’s the rare
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video game that is invited into the classroom, and Minecraft is not just invited but desired. Teachers love the way it encourages building, collaboration, and exploration. It’s a 3D sandbox of sorts. If the
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classroom curriculum calls for building a river ecosystem with marshes, Minecraft can do that. If the river needs to flow, the Minecraft logic function can make that happen. It teaches digital citizenship because it’s multiplayer. Twelve students in a classroom can
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model of the workplace of the future. Phil and his team built a great relationship with the Swedish game studio and managed to expand the Minecraft franchise to multiple devices including mobile and console. Early in Microsoft’s relationship with Mojang, before I was CEO, Phil presented an opportunity to purchase
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Minecraft, but Phil’s boss at the time chose not to move forward. For some, such a visible, high-level rejection could have been withering, but
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knew that this beloved game belonged in a place where it could continue to scale up and prosper. He also knew that for Microsoft, bringing Minecraft into our ecosystem could lead to deeper engagement with the next generation of gamers. He knew our cloud could help it scale to reach every
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while preserving the integrity and creativity of the small indie group that invented it. We pulled the trigger on a $2.5 billion acquisition. Today Minecraft is one of the bestselling games of all time on the PC, Xbox, and mobile. It has tremendous and lasting gamer engagement. Bill Gates and
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their Android platform. We partner with Facebook to make all of their applications work universally across Windows products and, likewise, to help them make our Minecraft gaming applications work on their Oculus Rift, a virtual reality device that competes for attention with our own HoloLens. Similarly, we’re working with Apple
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10, 2014. Wingfield, Nick. “Satya Nadella Says Changes Are Coming to Microsoft.” New York Times, July 10, 2014. Chapter 4 — A Cultural Renaissance Peckham, Matt. “‘Minecraft’ Is Now the Second Best-Selling Game of All Time.” Time, June 2, 2016. Chapter 5 — Friends or Frenemies? http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk
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, 196 mindfulness, 4–6 mindset, 241 fixed, 92–94, 105, 110 growth, 92–94, 99–103, 105–8, 111, 118, 120, 133 Mindset (Dweck), 92 Minecraft, 69, 80, 106–8, 125 minorities, 114–17 mirror worlds, 183–84 Mirror Worlds (Gelernter), 143 mixed reality (MR), 11, 13, 110, 140–48, 164
Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen · 5 Sep 2022 · 642pp · 141,888 words
“Gangnam Style,” Charlie biting a finger, “Baby Shark,” It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Yoga with Adriene, lunch doodles with Mo, professional Minecraft players. A diverse sea of enormous talent old media had ignored or overlooked. Thousands of microcelebrities you might not know, but millions of young fans
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was the name given to footage of video gamers filming themselves playing popular or deeply bizarre titles, and inviting fans to watch. Novel games like Minecraft were exploding, with endless variations made for computers, not pricey consoles. Video games had narratives baked in, designed for devotee binge-watching. And “Let’s
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bit of a loner, and a bit bored at school. In 2010, when he was thirteen, Sherratt fell into the absorbing world of YouTube gaming—Minecraft, Call of Duty, that sort of stuff. Most gamer streamers made idle chatter, though one he watched started talking about philosophy in a few videos
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what kind of videos were made. Also, when the company wanted to, it went in and turned the dials. Consider Minecraft. After the watch-time transition, YouTube’s audience clearly loved Minecraft, heaving the niche game into the mainstream. At one point, in May 2015, fourteen slots on YouTube’s logged-out
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version of its site for people not signed in with Google accounts—were devoted to Minecraft game play, according to a meticulous video from the YouTuber MatPat. By June, MatPat counted seven slots for Minecraft. By September, Minecraft disappeared. This sparked a theory in YouTubeland that some company suit, outraged by the abundance
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of Minecraft, ordered up the change. Cristos Goodrow, YouTube’s senior engineer, denied this, explaining that YouTube had
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appealing welcome mat, so it tilted the algorithm to show videos that “everybody from my daughter to my mom might like.” Either way, traffic on Minecraft channels crashed. Had the audience tired of these? Maybe. Maybe not. “Humans watch what’s presented to them,” MatPat observed in his video. “What’s
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progress. In the months that followed, Kjellberg would stay out of headlines. He started bleeping out profanities in his videos and even posted footage playing Minecraft, a return to his earliest form. He participated in another budding YouTube genre: filming his reaction while he watched his old videos, a nostalgia reel
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/2017/06/04/london-terrorist-had-twice-referred-police-extremist-views/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT abundance of Minecraft: Another data point in this theory: Microsoft, Google’s rival, bought the Minecraft studio in 2014 for $2.5 billion. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT researcher described Reinforce: Kevin Roose, “The
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Steve” (October 9, 2006), 55 Metacafe, 21 #MeToo movement, 339–40, 349 Meyer, Mickey, 113 Microsoft, 21, 35, 96 “mike m,” 326 Miller, Rich, 315 Minecraft, 5, 297–98, 373 Mischel, Walter, 197 misinformation, combating, 386–88, 396–97, 399, 400. See also conspiracy theories misogyny, 223 Missglamorazzi. See Nilsen, Ingrid
You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon · 14 Sep 2022 · 371pp · 107,141 words
of board games much cheaper than before. Locke might have admired educational board games, but he’d have loved educational video games like SimCity and Minecraft that can teach urban planning and architecture and programming. Only by learning the history of how games have been used for purposes beyond entertainment can
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a game all about competence (Dark Souls), and at other times those same players might want the autonomy to shape their own world (Animal Crossing, Minecraft). That’s why the number of game designers I know who consult psychology textbooks is approximately zero. That’s not how they make games. Instead
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2019, were second only to TV and video in their command of children and teens’ attention.17 Every month brings a new gaming sensation, from Minecraft to Fortnite to Among Us to Roblox; every year brings a brand-new gaming technology, like Twitch streaming, Discord chatting, location-based gaming, and virtual
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way around. Likewise, most educational games are either fun or educational, but rarely both—and often neither. We hear about the few exceptions, like how Minecraft can teach children about programming and chemistry and ecology, but even then, proponents are silent about the proportion of time children spend in the game
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-identified gamers would feel no need to defend a casual game like FarmVille, which is as dissimilar to “core” games like Call of Duty and Minecraft as reality TV shows are to prestige shows like The Wire, and yet they do. This is thanks to the exceedingly broad umbrella of what
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levers of the political process in a safe environment.5 Teenagers are also gaining civic literacy from a very different game: Minecraft. Technology writer Clive Thompson suggested to me that Minecraft is less interesting as a way to teach maths or programming than it is as a simulation for kids to invent
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miniconstitutions that stop each other from blowing up their creations on shared servers.6 Seth Frey, assistant professor at UC Davis, watched Minecraft players learning how to negotiate the joint use and care of natural resources: “You’ve got these kids, and they’re creating these worlds, and
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imitations of video games isn’t an improvement. To achieve true transformation, designers should study the long history of online games which, from MUDs to Minecraft, have fostered millions of friendships between players who’ve never met in person. That’s how Roguelike Celebration went beyond traditional gamification, by using playful
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promote their shows. Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, EVE Online, Neurocracy, and Elite Dangerous: they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries are eventually processed
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Asia as “The Great Game.”6 More recently, The Hunger Games, centred around a dystopian arena-based fight to the death, directly inspired a popular Minecraft mod (short for modification), which led to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, one of the first “battle royale” style video games (named after the 2000 Japanese film
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.com/2020/8/17/21372227/the-movie-of-the-year-is-here-boys-state. 6. Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times, April 14, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html. 7. “Gather | A better way to meet online,” Gather, Gather Presence, accessed November 28, 2021
People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams
by Jono Bacon · 12 Nov 2019 · 302pp · 73,946 words
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson · 7 Feb 2017 · 416pp · 108,370 words
SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully
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The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
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Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
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New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
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The Capitalist Manifesto
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Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
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Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
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The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
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Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
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The Simulation Hypothesis
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Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
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Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
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The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
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Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier · 3 Sep 2018 · 448pp · 117,325 words
Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff · 15 Oct 2018 · 568pp · 164,014 words
Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter · 18 Jun 2018 · 276pp · 81,153 words
Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
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The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball · 19 Aug 2020 · 268pp · 76,702 words
Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World
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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
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Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
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Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
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Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
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We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
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Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening
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Ansible for DevOps: Server and Configuration Management for Humans
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Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
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