Minecraft Makes Collaborative Creation a Matter of Survival

I'm enjoying the journal entries Emilly Orr is writing from and about the Caledon Minecraft server, recently launched by steampunk land baron Desmond Shang, comprised of SLers now frontiering in this new world. The Caledonians are building a colony there, but because it's Minecraft, the world is not just a minimally interactive canvas, like SL -- it's full of creatures with their own AI behaviors, and a lot of them want to kill your ass. So building in Minecraft is not just about collaborative creation for its own sake -- it's also about survival:

I kept hearing of people dying on their way to the western spawner. One night, I decided to fix that, but... building the tunnel turned out to be the easy part. The fact that I was being nearly constantly watched while I built was more unnerving. Remember, monsters in Minecraft can't attack you through glass, but they do react to you. And to set up and maintain this project, I'd pretty much started blocking in either side with sand so I could build through the nights.

Latest entry here. It occurs to me you could probably create some similar mechanics in a standalone SL sim -- populate it with angry and hungry MOBs capable of seeking out avatars, disable teleportation so avatars can't easily escape, and enable damage, so any of them who get caught are killed and respawned on the far side of the sim, so there's a significant penalty to dying... now see what people build together, when they're not just making stuff pretty, but banding together to keep out the baddies. Basis for a fun SL-meets-Minecraft mini-game, I bet.

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

for pixelated blocky monsters they sure manage to scare the bejeezus out of you.

[Winter Seale]

There is surely no better way to unite people then a common threat! I bet it would substantially reduce drama too.

[Desmond Shang]

So far, it's been pretty fun.

Due to the success of it, the server was moved off one of my home machines and onto proper hosting and bandwidth... and yes, it's been boosting the popularity of Caledon in SL too, which helped retention. Win all around.

Right now I have hosting that handles 18 concurrent players for ten dollars a month. Other estate owners, take notice: it's a great way to make people happy, fairly inexpensively.

Also a great counterpoint to SL in terms of features: literally everyone can build instantly, and you can run for days (months? years?) in any direction without running into region borders.