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.
Very interesting! It makes me think of some sort of experimental manipulation (with the experimenter being present in the experimental setting). It is interesting that the narrative got some sort of „contribution“ by other members of the server. By introducing a particular narrative, other „side“ narratives began to emerge. I’m quite excited to see how things will go!
It reminds me of some litterature on how threats to a group will enhance the group cohesiveness. In the long term, these threats are processed into a historical narrative that defines the group. I can’t wait to see if the narrative will have an impact on the cohesiveness of the members and how it will be process into a coherent history!
I’m excited, too! However, I think there won’t be so many effects as everyone knows that it’s a special event. So, I think they’re more excited about what is next. In addition, it won’t actually pose a threat for them, thus reducing the effects. It was different with some event-based deseases in World of Warcraft that partly killed most of the players and made the main cities to a barren place 🙂