New World Notes

Guild Wars 2 Does April Fools Day Right: No Lies, No BS, Just Awesome New Content With a Sense of Humor

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

April Fools Day is the worst day of the entire year to be on the internet, period. Everyone confuses lies for pranks, and even big media outlets fall for them. I honestly wish most bloggers and journalists could take today off. April Fools Day on the internet is a lie-off, where anyone can say or do anything they want for attention as long as they follow it with a little snigger and a shrug tomorrow. Can you tell I'm not a fan?

Thankfully the folks at ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars 2, seem to have the right idea about what April Fools should be like in an MMO. They've used it to launch a special event for players for the month of April, styled after Minecraft as well as the 8-bit age of gaming, complete with a fake commercial just as ridiculous as game commercials from the 80s and 90s. Here's what they've done:

Here's How Moody the Bright and Blocky World of Minecraft Can Get, Thanks to a Blade Runner-Inspired Cyberpunk Mod

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Whether or not you appreciate the voxel aesthetic of Minecraft, Mojang's wildly popular gathering/building game, it's undeniable that there is a tremendous amount of amazing work being produced by its community. Between builds, mods, and texture packs, there's no shortage of amazing creative work going on in this building-block world. Case in point: MrShortee's BladeCraft, a combination map and texture pack designed to recreate the world of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. What almost as impressive as the textures and the map are the machinima that MrShortee's made to advertise them, which capture the atmosphere of their source amazingly well. Check 'em out:

Disney Infinity's Toybox Looks a Lot Like Minecraft

Disney Infinity, an upcoming game franchise from, you know, Disney, has a feature that looks a lot like Minecraft, only with even more building and scripting tools:

The Toybox mode will include basic tutorial modes, adventure missions and a huge level-building mode that looks like it is taking aim at Minecraft. Developers working on the game already made a massive Starship Enterprise and another made the Bowser's Castle track from Mario Kart. There's even a "logic editor" which allows for rudimentary programming, which can allow players to create sidescroller games, top-down games... all sorts of things.

At least that's from an early iteration of Disney Infinity (which starts coming out in June). On the one hand, it's a great affirmation of the sandbox building/user-generated content concept popularized by the indie game Minecraft, since it's now being incorporated into a game from the world's largest and well-known media company. On the other, I also suspect Disney management, notorious for being highly protective of legacy IP rights, will freak out and pull this feature at the last moment. ("They're building the Starship Enterprise in our game?!")

With Minecraft More Popular Than Call of Duty on Xbox, Patterns Appears Pretty Prescient

Minecraft is now the most popular game on Xbox Live, which means it is more popular than Call of Duty, which is a franchise that's ruled the console space for years, which means an indie game pretty much made by one guy I talked to two years ago is now more popular than a game series made by hundreds for hundreds of millions of dollars, and which also means (to me) that we have entered a new era of gaming culture, where sandbox building and creativity are more valued than randomly running around shooting everything that moves (except of course civilians, who don't exist in Call of Duty's fantasy universe, since that would just be a bummer). Which finally means, for the interest of NWN readers, that it seems more and more the case that Linden Lab is right to pursue products like Patterns, which is the kind of product the next generation of gamers seem to be trending to.

Minecraft Gamers Begin Gravitating to Linden Lab's Patterns

Linden Lab's Patterns was launched late last week in a very early version, and we're already starting to see a lot of first look reviews on YouTube. Interestingly, most (all?) are made by folks very familiar with Minecraft, while few (none?) seem to be coming from Second Life veterans. Here's one by "JagThunder1", who usually does Minecraft walkthroughs:

I love how gamers have already dubbed Patterns' avatar "Dorito Chip Man" or another nacho-esque variation. For the game itself (which I haven't played yet), I'm really digging the physics and the user interface, though I still think the visuals are not as appealing as Minecraft. Speaking of which, here's another first look from a Minecraft gamer:

Patterns, Linden Lab's Minecraft-Style Game, Now Available for Minecraft-Style "Genesis" Pre-Order of $9.95

Click here to pre-order Patterns, Linden Lab's upcoming physics-enabled, 3D building, Minecraft-style game that Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson told me "Looks great!" For $10, you can pre-order the "Genesis version" of the game, when it's released on or before October 5, and get "all subsequent updates up to and including version 1.0, that we expect to release next year." If you're a Minecraft fan, you'll probably recall that's pretty much how Notch released that game, selling it in early Alpha back in 2010, which at the time was considered pretty daring. (I interviewed Notch that year, but now that he's a game god, I'm lucky to get a two word e-mail from him.) It's interesting that Linden Lab, a long established tech corporation, is now following Notch's footsteps.

First Look at Patterns, Linden Lab's Upcoming Minecraft-Style Sandbox Game. UPDATE: Notch Says, "Looks great!"

Here's the first public glimpse at Patterns, Linden Lab's upcoming sandbox game that's part of the company's rebranding as a "Maker of Shared Creative Spaces", and as I heard last Summer, it's pretty Minecrafty:

The "Genesis release software" invitations that Rod Humble mentions in the video are coming soon, Linden spokesman Peter Gray tells me. I love the triangle-based building and the in-game physics, but overall, I'm still wait-and-see on how it's executed. The color palette of the world seems quite alien, as do the triangular avatars, which may be off-putting to a larger audience. The lack of a survival mechanic, which drives Minecraft, also seems to be a problem. (Then again, the sandbox game for kids Roblox doesn't have a survival mode that I know of, and it's doing just fine.) All these things can and probably will be improved during the early stages, I imagine.

IGN got an exclusive early interview with the team, which surfaced some interesting points:

Minecraft Used as an Education Tool by 300 Schools

Minecraft.edu, as the domain name suggests, is an educational non-profit that sells a version of the sandbox game as a teaching tool (at a 50% discount, through a deal with Minecraft developer Mojang). According to a very interesting Slate article, 300 schools are using this version for various education applications:

According to [Minecraft.edu's Joel] Levin, about 300 schools have bought the discounted Minecraft so far, and 50 schools are testing MinecraftEdu. One teacher, he says, is using it to teach English as a second language through Minecraft’s online chat system. Another has her students write nightly journal entries about their Minecraft adventures.

Why so much interest in Minecraft, generally seen as a hardcore "gamer's game", from educators? As the Slate author explains:

Lovely Minecraft Machinima With Dynamic Shadow is Lovely

"Crystalline" is a sumptuous new Minecraft machinima from Brett, who made this classic machinima, and this other classic too. And if the world of Notch seems different and even more lovely in this video, that's because it is: "The shadows are from the GLSL shader mod," Brett tells me. "When Mincraft 1.0 was released the author of the mod managed to make dynamic shadows possible. Here is the base mod and here is a flavor of it." More like this please, more like this.

Miss Metaverse Manners: Surviving Survival Mode with Friends and More Minecraft Etiquette Questions!

Iris Ophelia's ongoing take on etiquette & ethics in virtual spaces   

Like any virtual space, minding your manners in Minecraft's multiplayer worlds can be a tricky (yet very important) issue. Luckily, Miss Metaverse Manners has a few tips on how to keep your Minecraft relationships from ending up as creeper bait.

How do I tell my friends that its not funny when they explode/burn/ruin my builds in Minecraft without being a naggy friend?

- Anonymous

Just tell them! There are so many cases in the etiquette world where polite silence is the absolute worst thing you can do, and this is one of those cases. Your friends can't read your mind, so let them know! Of course, demolition in Minecraft can be very fun too, so if your friends have an explosive streak, why not work together on building some structures for the sole purpose of blowing them to bits? What about a sand tower with a TNT foundation, or a wooden water tower? Set aside an area of your map just for you and your friends to mess up with these projects-- you'll probably enjoy it!