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!
Once I took up playing on a map where I was griefed and robbed after amassing enough 'riches'. The strange part was, someone im'd me in Second Life after that, proclaiming their innocence and inquiring about my store items. What you do in this situation?
- Anonymous
That is rather... awkward, isn't it? It's very likely that the person who IMed you was the guilty party, but if you were playing on a PVP server then they didn't really do anything wrong (unless they violated some written rules developed by the admins.) Simply put, this is sort of the situation where you thank someone for their interest and quietly move on... and, if it ruffled your feathers enough, should make you consider finding a PVE server to play on instead. Although it's tempting, getting into a bitchfest with someone after a kill is behaviour we're all better off leaving to preteens trolling on XBox LIVE.
I play on a server with my friends but half of us want to play creative and the other half want to play survival. Can we resolve this without splitting off into two different servers?
- Anonymous
It sounds like you're a group of close friends running a more or less private server, so the answer is quite simple. Have the person running the server switch the players who want to play creatively into creative mode. The console command for this is 'gamemode <player> 1' and, to switch them back into survival mode, 'gamemode <player> 0'. This will allow your creators to create unhindered by petty mortality and resources, and your survivalists to continue playing unhampered by godlike Minecraft powers. Hopefully this will keep both groups happy and your server united!
Tweet Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
Typically, signs around protected builds saying "Don't blow this up" help. So your friends know that that area of the build is not to be touched. This won't protect 100% against jerks who aren't your friends, but most people won't destroy a build that's annotated as not to be destroyed.
If it's not so labeled, then it's part of the game, and build/destroy IS the whole idea behind Minecraft.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Thursday, June 07, 2012 at 10:28 AM
If you build out of obsidian in minecraft it can't be burned down.
Posted by: fararden | Thursday, June 07, 2012 at 10:58 AM