The Minecraft Server Community Event – Prologue

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the results of the introduction of my community event for a Minecraft server.

The introduction of my Minecraft server community event was a success. Not only the other members enjoyed the emergence of some wicked statues at central locations, they also started to speculate who the creator of those statues is and what goal this evil force tries to achieve. Furthermore, I enhanced the players‘ involvement by attaching signs to the statues that provided the players with a clear message. However, as each statue had only one word attached to it, the players were challenged to go on a small scavanger hunt in order to find all the different statues allowing them to decipher the message.

The statues are delivering a message.

Interestingly, the narration of my server event received an additional story arc, as, by accident, a player had some bad luck with a chicken the same time as I began to introduce the server event. Thus, the player started to develop an own story arc that put this chicken into the central position of this conspiracy. This outcome showed the effectiveness of slowly teasing the server event as players started to become aware that something was going on but had no clear idea what exactly was causing this. With this additional story arc being part of the server event, it is important to include or at least address it in the narration of the community event to emphasize the creation of spinoffs and to add some more authenticity to the main event.

Also, players who are creating video content used the event’s prologue for their own narrations and helped to spread the word by making the wicked statues an important part of their videos. In the meantime, I was busy to prepare the first chapter of this server event and to address the spinoff in this process. By now, the preparation is finished and I just wait for the ideal moment to bring forth the community event.

In sum, the slow introduction of the community event was a success as the whole server’s population is now aware of the event’s existence and has begun to speculate about its continuation. Now, it is critical to release the first main part of the story to increase the players‘ excitement and enjoyment.

Conelanders League – Status Quo

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the changes of the Conelanders league that took place since I presented this online community for the very first time.

In article #150, I presented the Conelanders league which is a small community of computer game players who enjoy playing racing games and uploading videos of their runs to YouTube. In particular, the Conelanders league featured weekly DiRT Rally events which could be completed by the league’s members. Also, the league was created with the intention to give every player the chance to participate in the virtual racing events without having to be really competitive. Of course, some drivers enjoyed the competition with other drivers as well, but the main idea was to just have fun and to share the runs with others.

Assetto Corsa

Since the early days of the Conelanders league, many new drivers have joined the league and formed a supportive community. By now, the DiRT Rally league has 191 members in total of which at least 50 have participated in every event. Furthermore, skilled and more experienced drivers help and support others to improve their driving skills and no one really focusses too much on the competition.

In addition, the Conelanders league expanded in May as Assetto Corsa became the second racing game that is played by the community. In contrast to DiRT Rally, Assetto Corsa features circuit races during which the drivers directly compete against each other. The goal of the Assetto Corsa races is to create exciting content that allows the viewers to watch the races from any perspective. After the first season, this new format already showed its potential which will be refined over the upcoming seasons.

Moreover, some members of the league provided additional input to increase the spirit of this community. For instance, a database was created that shows the results of every Conelanders race and allows users to explore the career of every driver. Also, custom liveries were created for the Assetto Corsa cars to add a certain style to all the circuit races. Finally, the races were even commentated the same way as real world races.

Ultimately, the Conelanders league shows the potential of online communities that work together and try to achieve something meaningful. Players from all over the world are united by the spirit of racing and created a huge amount of data within a short amount of time.

Preparing a community event for a small Minecraft server

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about initial challenges of introducing a server wide community event.

Recently, I came up with an idea for a community event on a small Minecraft server. As the event has not yet started, I can not analyze its outcomes, but I like to start discussing a few of the challenges I encountered during the initial preparation phase.

Spreading the news. In order to have its full effect, the existence of a community event must be propagated to the current server’s population to raise their awareness. However, as such a gamified event should be fully integrated in the setting of the game, it is also important that the information are spread in a subliminal way. Therefore, the potentially best way would be to allow the server’s members to accidentially get in contact with elements of the community event that will ultimately provide them with a lead that an event is about to begin.

For this purpose, as the server is also used as a stage for video creation, I decided to introduce the community event in one of my videos. During the video, I will encounter the first signs of a server wide conspiracy which will become more and more prevalent as time progresses. This will be achieved by providing new indications of such a conspiracy at frequently visited locations on the server to give each member the chance of learning about the upcoming event.

Timing. Also, the timing of the initial steps of a community event is critical. The story should not progress too fast as this might result in the fact that some players might miss out on important steps. On the other hand, the time between two steps should not be too long as this might result in the problem that players do not see a connection between the individual steps. Therefore, more signs indicating an upcoming event will be released shortly after the initial video goes live and, after a few days have passed, more signs will follow to complete the community event’s introduction.

Inviting and involving all the members. Finally, it is important to invite everyone on the server to take part in the event. Therefore, some key players of the server will encounter individual intermediate events that will personally involve them in the event’s narration. The idea behind is that the members will start to discuss what happened to them, thus spreading the news about the upcoming event. Hence, it is also necessary to monitor the communication in order to adjust the story’s progression accordingly.

The first strike. Eventually, after the initial introduction is completed, the community event will begin with the first major event that will put all initial signs into perspective and allow the players to draw initial conclusions.

This article is the first part of the analysis of such an event which will be continued as the event progresses.

The gamification of programming

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the way how Human Resource Machine teaches players the basics of programming.

Algorithms and loops are the key concepts of programming as they provide methods to systematically carry out operations until a certain condition is reached. However, correctly developing algorithms and repeating them with loops in order to carry out a given task is often hard to understand and requires a lot of practice. In order to successfully transform a task into an algorithm, a user has to analyze the task and segment it into single steps that subsequently can be sequenced as an algorithm.

Recently, I played the computer game Human Resource Machine that challenges a player with small tasks that can be solved by programming a little office worker. For instance, one puzzle challenges the player to grab every numbered block from the inbox and to put it into the outbox. However, if a number is negative, the player must remove its negative sign first. This puzzle requires the player to grab a block from the inbox, to check its sign and, dependent on the result, put it into the outbox or change its sign before putting it into the outbox. For this purpose, the player has several commands, such as ‚grab from inbox‘, ‚jump if negative‘, ‚jump‘, ’subtract‘, ’store‘ and ‚put into outbox‘, to program the little office worker in order to carry out the developed algorithm.

Human Resource Machine

Aside from correctly developing an algorithm, it is also important to keep the programming code as short and efficient as possible. This can be achieved by looping certain parts of an algorithm and checking if certain sequences can be jumped. These two goals are also a part of Human Resource Machine as the player can achieve bonus goals by not exceeding a certain amount of lines or reducing the amount of steps the little office worker has to carry out to a minimum.

In the end, Human Resource Machine teaches players the basics of programming in an engaging and entertaining way without requiring them to learn a certain programming language first. Once the players have understood the general concepts of programming, they might have fewer issues when they start to learn an actual programming language.

Let’s Play Edutainment

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how Let’s Play videos can be used to address serious topics, thus resulting in edutainment content that is appealing to a younger audience.

Let’s Play videos (LP) usually document a player’s gameplay and enhance it with an additional story arc due to the player’s commentary. Depending on the type of the game, the player’s story arc can also be used to tell the viewers a unique story. This is mostly the case when an open world sandbox game is being played as such a game can act as an empty stage for the player’s performance.

For instance, the sandbox game Minecraft provides the players with a procedurally generated environment that they can explore or use as a building site to construct impressive buildings. Independent of the player’s approach, each play session will be unique and allow the players to tell a unique story. Furthermore, content creators can use the game as a movie set and produce exciting movies with the help of video editing.

However, utilizing a computer game as an empty stage also offers the opportunity to produce edutainment content. During the gameplay, the content creator can discuss serious topics, thus delivering the content in a way that is appealing to a younger audience and computer game players in general. Hence, they will pay more attention to what the content creator is discussing and potentially start to get interested in the topic being thematized.

Ultimately, this approach can help to raise the general awareness for important problems as it delivers the content in a way many young people can identify with. In addition, watching a LP can be more immersive than watching a small news report on TV.

Keeping players immersed

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the implementation of a new user interface in The Long Dark that improves the game’s immersion.

Keeping players constantly immersed in a computer game is one of the biggest goals in game development. A constant immersion can only be achieved if the gameplay results in a continuous flow that is rarely disrupted as a disruption will negatively influence or even break the immersion in most of the cases.

However, players need to be informed about important values and, dependent on the type of the game, need to have a means to select different tools allowing them to interact with the game world in order to successfully play the game. Communicating those critical information to the players is mostly done via the user interface (UI) which ultimately displays all the relevant values and choices. Therefore, one of the most critical elements of keeping players immersed in a game is the design of the UI.

Hence, the main goal of the UI design is to provide the players with all relevant information without distracting them from the game world. This is especially critical for computer games that provide a first-person perspective which gives players the actual feeling of being a part of the game world. The immersion of such a game would immediately break or be reduced, if a player suddenly sees a static screen or a static display of information in a vivid virtual environment. Therefore, the main challenge in UI design is to create an UI that provides all relevant information and is as transparent as possible to reduce its distracting effect.

The Long Dark

A great example for a good UI design is the survival game The Long Dark (TLD). In TLD, the player is lost in the Northern Canadian wilderness and has to survive in this harsh and cold environment by searching for valuable resources that will help the player to stay alive. As the game realistically simulates the fight for survival, the player must be informed about critical values such as the own body temperature, the calories stored and the apparent air temperature. With the release of version v.321, TLD received a new UI that informs the players about all the relevant information without compromising too much the immersive experience of TLD.

The Long Dark – Status Screen

Previously, the player’s only option to access those important information was to open a static overview screen that immediately broke the player’s immersion. Additionally, the same static screen had to be accessed in order to carry out certain interactions with the game world such as crafting a basic camp or healing a wound.

The Long Dark – Improved Status Display

This was changed with the implementation of a new UI that allows the players to directly display all critical stats in the lower left corner of the first-person view without switching to a static screen. In addition, the information are not constantly displayed and will fade out after a couple of seconds removing any distraction from the player’s first-person perspective. A similar solution was found for the most important interactions which can now be accessed via a radial menu that is directly displayed in the center of the player’s view. This menu allows the player to carry out all relevant interactions without the need to switch to a static screen first. The only static screen that is left in the game is the inventory management. However, this is not really affecting the immersion as accessing the own backpack will also distract the player in the real world and thus works without breaking the immersion.

The Long Dark – Radial Menu

In the end, the new interface allows the players to access all relevant information without breaking the immersion of the game. Moreover, the player’s view is not compromised as the information are only displayed for a short amount of time.

The 4096 pixels you are made of

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about different methods of avatar customization.

An avatar is a player’s representation in a virtual world and enables a player to interact with this environment. Hence, the customization of the own avatar is an important part of playing a game as players often like to use an avatar they can identify with. For this purpose, most games that provide an avatar game mechanic allow players at the beginning of a new game to design their avatars by customizing their visual appearance. The degree of the customizability is dependent on the style of the game and can range from a selection of predefined attritubutes to a gradual customization of facial elements as well as the physical appearance.

Although the latter method of customizing the own avatar allows for the creation of really unique avatars, the choices that can be made are still finite. However, there are also a few games that allow players to import custom made textures into the game and subequently use those so-called skins to design their avatars. Despite the fact that the uniqueness is a bit limited by the 3D model the textures are applied to, this approach gives players full control over the avatar customization process.

One of these games is the sandbox game Minecraft. At the beginning of the customization process, players can chose between two different 3D models that are distinguished in their size. Subsequently, players can start to edit a 64×64 pixels texture template for the 3D model chosen in order to customize their appearance. The customization process is finished once the user has uploaded the texture to the Minecraft skin server. From this point on, Minecraft will always apply the custom made texture to the chosen 3D model in order to represent the player in a Minecraft world.

A Minecraft avatar using the unchanged texture template.

Ultimately, this customization approach allows players to completely distinguish themselves from all the other players sharing the same world. Moreover, this approach resulted in the fact that famous Minecraft video creators are recognized by their personal skins.