One concern with Minecraft is that parents often find it hard to ask kids good questions about it. The good news is that good questions don’t require specific jargon knowledge. Good questions help kids who are poor at managing their time playing it. It’s something that they (and you) can learn and work on.
I make no bones about it, games like Minecraft are exciting and rewarding to kids, often in exact proportion to how boring school and TV is. If you want your kid to be creative-curious-adventurous, Minecraft is hands down better than watching hours TV or copying a set of facts the board in a classroom. But parents – all of us – find managing game time a challenge, as most of us have no experience of it until it manifests in the home.
So, how do parents get better at managing Minecraft? Well its a two part solution.
First, think about the location and second, use questions that relate directly to potential behavioural changes (in you and them). It’s not so hard … but you do have to think rather than react to your own emotions. Yelling doesn’t make it better, which is not to suggest that it’s an easy thing to avoid when she freaks-out as you yank the modem out the wall. We’ve all been there. The first step it to try and better manage the situation.
This is best to do this in two ways. First is about location. Sitting with them as they play (their zone) or in a neural zone (the park). Don’t summon them to the kitchen for a lecture – kitchens are for noms. The second is about using questions that have been shown to promote behavioral change away from regressing back to conflict.
So here are 10 questions that I’ve found work.
1. What are some of the skills that have contributed to your success? (insight)
2. What get’s in your way of success? here (insight)
3. What do you find most rewarding things to do? (motivation)
4. What additional skills or things could I (the parent) do to help them you feel even more successful? (abilities)
5. What do other people say about your Minecraft builds? (real world)
6. What have you said about other people’s builds? (accountability)
7. How much time do you think you play a week? (accountability)
8. Have you ever griefed someones Minecraft build? Why/why not? (accountability)
9. What makes a great Minecraft server ?(insight)
10. If a new person came to you to learn how to play this – is that something you’d like to teach them? (motivation)
Not an exhaustive list – but these are ten ways to talk about Minecraft in a positive way and avoid yelling at each other. I’d appreciate it if you added some more that you find useful too. d
Educators who have adopted social media publicise use it to promote many things. There are only one representation of the future. The dominent one appears increasingly devoid of ethics – which is alarming, as teaching would appear to be a pillar of it.
The limited research available suggests around 5% of teachers have used social-media in relation to their professional needs. This is a distinction between using social media and using the Internet. Despite this, billions of dollars have been spent on the Internet, laptops and so called professional development in the last decade.
The universal phrase ‘the Internet’ is used to confusingly describe websites or services which they are willing accommodate in their day to day practice nothing more though in-culture popularity and bias, rather than any empirical evidence. This is whipped up by other people with un-fulfilled rock-star fantasies (twitter influencers) not practicing teachers or researchers. And this called professional development of teachers. It amazes me that there are no standards, ethics or accountability in this unregulated sector of education. I’m gobsmacked that at a time systems are cutting staff, head offices are still organising seminars to listen to these bar-stool experts. The best thing for kids in classrooms are teachers – ones that are there for a long time, not a lesson.
There’s proliferation of private educational providers which are unregulated, unaccountable, and out of control. The increasing globalised society is mediated though the 24/7 news and commerce cycle and has disrupted many things. However, education performs a particular function.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. – Noam Chomsky
I wince at educational leaders who forge Twitter-famous identities to sprook their schools for their owners. Some are beginning claim games such as Minecraft can change the classroom As though this new-tech-interest is another spoon full of sugar that only those who ‘pay’ can access. It they believed it, they’d be out there doing it for everyone not just their patrons.
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. – Noam Chomsky
I support the idea of society having open and quality communications. I don’t support those who seek to deny people of this right. Many who can most afford to help other schools, teachers, kids and parents – don’t. But if they are at their rich school with their luxury surrounded students – you bet they are on Twitter telling the world how awesome they are and how awesome technology is.
Perhaps consider the relationship between being a professional teacher and an ethical one before you post. I’m pleased you’re kids are doing well, but at the same time it’s those kids who grow up to let other kids sleep in cars not beds. Think before you tell people what the future is going to be. For 70% of kids, it looks like 50/50 unemployment right now, increased student debt and lower life earnings.
It has been said, more than a few times Minecraft is addicting kids. What this addiction is ( spending time being creative and learning how to use the Internet to reach ambitious computing goals) is less clear.
This post is for a kid called Jack, who replied to a previous post, saying how he didn’t think he could talk to his mum about Minecraft. So here’s some stuff that looks at why that might be, and what to do about it.
According to ‘gratification theory‘, kids and adults are drawn to media to meet their psychological needs (information, entertainment, social interaction, mastery, control and so on). As games are absorbing, they can act to reduce children’s anxiety and worry too. It sone reason I think teachers should think long and hard before rolling into kid-game-worlds with their subject mastery agenda. Yet it seems they are keen on gamifying their classrooms … regardless of whether this is a good thing or bad – it’s popular.
Some kids might be rich, they might have everything – but still feel alone. Minecraft might help them with that feeling. This is one of numerous plausible situations where a kid might find Minecraft a place to go to sooth unpleasant thoughts and feelings which are not being met by other games or other media such as Facebook or YouTube.
For each kid I’ve seen play or met during playing Minecraft – they are often interested in two things – self expression and social interaction. This is something they feel they are getting -regardless of parental belief of this. To the kid, this is real and concrete as that is how kids brains work.
Several studies have shown that kids watch television and play video games for entertainment, to spend time with family and when they are bored. Minecraft does this, but it also provides self expression and social interaction (beyond the family hierarchies)
More interestingly, kids choose games which suit their mood, where as adults tend to use media (television, video, the Internet) to improve their mood. For parents – young children are experimenting with social interaction, building knowledge and skills where as teens are using it to relax and escape. If she’s in the mood to be creative, she’s in the mood to play Minecraft. This doesn’t mean she’s in the mood to play Dishonoured, or that Dishonored would change her mood. Theres no association between wanting to play Minecraft and wanting to play an R-Rated game, but this doesn’t stop the media inferring it.
Minecraft is perhaps a new (and therefore more noticeable) media. But it’s still a media. Calling it ‘addictive’ serves to simplify games in the mind of adults lacking schemas and knowledge of games. The media is not particularly moral, ethical or interested in child development and is never un-biased or transparent.
For most adults, learning about Minecraft is hard (too hard). It doesn’t have an easily accessed ‘story’. Adults learn though stories not facts. For example, many people know about the story of Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. They don’t know too many facts.
They probably know about the Facebook guy or the two guys that made Google, yet probably don’t know who Jens Bergensten is. But chances are, their kids know who Jeb is – and of course Notch. In case you didn’t know, Jeb is the lead developer for Minecraft, not Notch.
If you like, Jeb is one of the most important people in the game world – and from all accounts, a very nice guy – someone who I don’t think for a second would be anything less than an amazing influence on my own kids – should they ever meet him. To my kids, Jeb seems real. He’s not like Apple or some game studio – he’s a person, who appears on videos and is talked about all the time. If you like, Jeb is that neighbourhood kid that parents hear about, but don’t know. There is the story of Minecraft, the story of Notch and the ballard of Jeb. See below for a quick intro to what I mean.
So if games are inherently bad or even if good games go bad, then you’d think that those who make them are bad or go bad too. They are presented by the media at least as a type of anti-culture, like Nirvana or Slayer. Making millions by addicting kids to games. However we still have cigarettes and numerous things we know kill people. For example, if two countries want to war – why to they need guns? Why not just go and do some hand to hand? Well because people like to win – and tools help them win. In the media war on gaming, presenting them as the greedy bad-guy harming innocents in an excellent story.
But that isn’t the story I see, what Minecraft says to kids (to me is) - anyone can have a regular job, and still be in the running to do something they really love one day – and right now you can start making unique things from your imagination.
It might not be a cure for cancer, feed the world or regain flagging western interest in religion, but to many kids, Minecraft at least improves their spatial cognition, co-ordination and fine motor skills and is a social-network in it’s own right. It is far less toxic than Facebook (peer-pressure to create rather than be a target/entertainer) – and leads to the all important positive self-identity and agency all kids benefit from – if parents use it for a media-healthy diet.
Minecraft is not linked to poor general health. You won’t get fat, sick or become stupid playing Minecraft. All kids are notoriously poor at managing time. This is why parenting experts have argued for routines for decades. Negative things such as sleep deficit, less time undertaking heathy activities, mental health, education problems and so on, cannot be attributed to Minecraft any more than they can be attributed to television viewing – and numerous large studies have shown no association between screen-time and physical activities.
Kids are complicated, unique and individual. There is no A-typical gamer. Kids, like adults can make unhealthy lifestyle choices – when they lack information and experience. They can easily suffer from fear, anxiety and phobias, yet studies have shown there is no constant link between screen time and these things.
In short you can’t blame Jeb for the epidemic in childhood obesity (in fact he’s kind of skinny, but we can’t suggest he’s anorxic’s pin-up) ,. We can’t see Minecraft as the problem for monumentally un-imaginative classrooms, poor school funding, prejudice against people of colour, gender or ability either. But the media can, and does many of these – maybe not the Jeb bit.
Society can do that perfectly well without video games. It might do better with them. As young kids are concrete thinkers, the violence and monsters in Minecraft (or other games) has far less impact than seeing repeated natural disasters on TV or annual ‘biggest loser’ – which form concrete associations about the world and them. They know they are unlikely to meet a creeper, but the world does tend to kill people with trees and fat people are probably going to die sooner rather than later.
If you are a parent, then take some time to sit down and watch the Minecraft Story. It’s a great documentary. It’s just $8 or if that is too much you can also get it from the Pirate Bay for free (on purpose). You’ll begin to see what kids see in it – the other alternative is to watch Dr.Phil and others recycle fear and moral panic about games … something it seems parents are doing. It’s not a game, its a story which you can be part of. For most parents I’ve shown it to, the people at Mojang are exactly the kind of people many parents hope their kids will associate with – or be like. (I do a parent thing where we watch the film and un-pack it, it’s kind of fun).
And finally, the topic of agression. I accept only this (so far) … because this is what the research says about media violence, and games are a part of that medi – yet have unique properties. This means in all the research, games are the least studied, the least known. In over 30 years of research, there is evidence that media contributes as much as any other studied contributor to community violence. There is a disproportionate amount of media coverage about violence in ‘game media’ compared with other (television, radio, Internet, film and so on) which has a disproportionate impact on public views. This has been found in hundreds of studies over decades.
In short – in all the various forms of media, games are singled out more often and therefore seen as worse yet wholly unsupported in scholarly research which doesn’t see more games or more game-time as contributing to kids and [insert concern] as being a inevitable convergence. In education, there is a similar problem – that eventually subject-mastery and technology will converge. It’s a convenient idea at best to push an agenda, but unproven no matter how much people will it to be true.
Parents don’t have the kind of ‘knowledge structures’ needed to make sense of video games, especially Minecraft. It’s what they call – you are what you eat. If all you eat is an unhealthy diet of media-hate and opinion, then when she’s busy on Minecraft, all you see is negative.
If Minecraft has raised concerns, then this isn’t a bad thing. It’s like finding out eating Burgers and 10 liters of Coke a day is bad for you. It’s an opportunity to think about media more broadly – for yourself. It’s something worth doing, so you are more likely to do it. Thinking for yourself is fast becoming a lost-art in a culture addicted to media-feeds on Facebook, Twitter and so on. Surely not! I am so not addicted to social-media. Sure you are … you just don’t have a hand-controller.
Talk to kids about what they have seen online (in games, on TV as well)
Find out about the factors than enhance negative impacts of media (everyone has a screen in their pocket, the Internet is un-regulated, the media has a commercial agenda, pain and suffering gets human attention – so sells ad-space and so on).
There is no evidence that cartoon violence or fantasy (Harry Potter, Bugs Bunny, Minecraft) is harmless yet media constantly uses violence as a way to condition children that it can be used in lieu of being correct, to get your own way and as a punishment for non-compliance with the norm-behaviours. This is often exaggerated in television and film as fantasy telling a morality tale (See any Disney film ever).
We know being a good role model with your own media use and encouraging alternates – walking the dog, riding a bike, painting, reading and so on have positive impacts on kids. However, if a parent comes home, eats and settles down to an evening of television most days – this is un-heathy for the child. If the parents reads or listens to music and never turns on the TV, this too is un-healthy. If they carry a smart phone – and use it to socialise virtually and exclude the child (under 13s are usually banned) this in un-healthy for the child. If they watched Die Hard and said to their kids “its not appropriate, you can’t watch it”, this is unhealthy.
So before bagging Minecraft – take a look at the totality of media use in the house. Then try watching The MInecraft Story with your kids … you never know, it might be the first step in connecting the kids world and talking about it.
I hope Jack’s mum reads this … he feels like he can’t talk to you … and he wants to.
Currently there’s a war being fought over corporate copyright ownership. It’s not just in the courts, but in media-representation of morality. It’s vital the public believe the ideas created to keep ideas and information under limited ownership are important. For educators, I highly recommend downloading (legally) Steal this Film to gem up on what’s happening beyond your biome. This post is in part, showing how changes to how be perceive ownership lead people to different solutions many more benefit from.
This is for those who want to play Minecraft, but their computer is too old or slow to deal with that monster java power-drain.
It’s well known, Minecraft creator – Notch has strong views on the topic of software ownership such as
Trivial patents, such as for software, are counterproductive (they slown down technical advancement), evil (they sacrifice baby goats to baal), and costly (companies get tied up in pointless lawsuits).
This leads me to Minetest.It looks a lot like Minecraft and is a great example what I’m talking about here.
Take a casual look at it’s looks like a Minecraft rip-off – a clone, an infringement on copyright. How can they get away with this? Well, not everyone has bought into the ‘feed’ view of ownership of ideas – even creators of hugely popular titles such as Minecraft. In educator-brains, if Minetest isn’t copyright infringement, then it’s plagiarism! – Copying! Stealing … grab the redstone torches and get him!
You see, we’re teaching a generation that copying isn’t okay. Rubbish. It is a brilliant way to learn – especially when you’re a kid – especially if you’re a kid playing Minecraft.
Benefits for schools who won’t allocate money to ‘games’.
So if you’re looking for a way to talk to your kids about ‘copyright’ then Minetest is a great discussion point. If you just want a sandbox game, like Minecraft, that runs free and on older machines — then play Minetest. I would think that for what most classrooms might need, Minetest is a perfectly respectable way to introduce resistent schools and IT-guards to the idea. Now you don’t have to pay for it.
Why you should support the creator-verse.
But you should donate real money to Celeron55 here. Because if educators don’t get off this idea that something free this way comes eventually - very little ‘new’ things will be made at all. So support people who make stuff and give you stuff. Even if it’s a comment or a cup of coffee . Put your head out the window and wave some coin.
I promise you, education will only improve globally in exact proportion to the number of teachers who get off the free-roundabout being marketed to them at the Twitter-Bar.
Imagine if each time a parent looked at child playing Minecraft and said – “she loves this math”. Well, if you spend a few minutes watching this video, I might temp you into believing that learning Math in most schools could be different.
Let me give you an example:
What are the conditions for a redstone torch burning out, and what is the probability (if any) that it will do so once the conditions are met.
What are the conditions for a burnt-out redstone torch recovering, and what is the probability that it will do so…
If you use “ticks” in your answer, please say whether you’re talking about redstone ticks or game ticks.
If you are a parent with a kid playing Minecraft, try giving them this problem to solve. If that all sounds way to hard – just watch the video below. Some maths will come up on the screen as you’d remember it at school.
I’d love to get ideas/links Minecraft specifically for Maths if you have ‘em
Recently I’ve spent some time reading parenting websites about Minecraft. What is said is often repetitive, aggregated and lacks much substance. If you are a parent, or Minecraft player, then I hope this post will provide you with some further ideas about how the game works on our minds.
The thing which most articles omit is understanding of why imagination is a primary trigger for learning. Wherever we are, in school or at home, the immediate environment can either support or stifle children’s imaginative abilities. For example, copying notes from a wipeboard is submissive. Additionally, our brain has to work really hard to keep our imagination under control, as while we’re copying it down, our imagination is kicking and screaming to be let out, and we’re not thinking about all about the importance or significance of the information. This is why they invented photocopiers, mobile phone cameras and dropbox.
Minecraft puts players to work by providing the imagination with images and metaphors that give it direction. The blocks represents a random open world and the challenge to control it. Players learn which resources help them to thrive and what dangers need to be overcome. Next, kids use their imagination to make sense of the real world – more than facts or information. Ever wondered why parents say the same thing over and over and the kid does it anyway? … so Minecraft is a game which helps kids make sense of the real world – even though to the adult brain, it’s a lego world and nothing like real life – or the things kids need to know to thrive. Wrong, yes it is, just like kids in ancient cultures learned about hunting, or in the 1800s kids recited facts as in a factory reciting facts is was all that was needed for most kids.
The methods commonly applied in classroom towards what teachers call ‘learning out comes’ today routinely omit the word imagination from tasks and exercises. Schools like more measurable things such as list, find, calculate, show and so on. They can mark this … but marking Minecraft – what would be the point? Well the point is, for most people marks and league tables have been proven to de-motivate and train us to be submissive. So if you like freedom and liberty a kid playing Minecraft is unlikely to be submissive – hence why they wont’ get off it when you demand.
Academics have shown how important imaginative play is to child development for hundreds of years . This hasn’t stopped schools ignoring it. From the age of 9 or 10, a child’s day become less and less imaginative and more standardised as the great hammer of measuring kids by test scores emerges. There comes a tipping point where imaginative becomes day-dreaming and off with the faeries rather than a stand up student getting straight A’s. This is a social rule, the way we begin to define who is seen as a success and who isn’t. Again, ignore the fact many of the worlds biggest corporations and most valuable inventions were developed by people who dropped out of school, or crisscrossed it – like Einstein and Jobs.
All these things are set aside in ‘Minecraft is evil’ posts – not because it’s not true, but because life feels somewhat easier to adults who long ago submitted their imagination to someone else. The use iPhone apps, rather than imagine themselves making them so to speak. Kids don’t. In Minecraft, they can build anything … the imagination light is lit up like a 20,000 watt light the whole time they play.
Imaginative behaviors in Minecraft
Imaginative behavior is based on the brain’s ability to draw upon and combine elements from our previous experiences. Educational scholar Len Vygotsky wrote in 1930 …
The brain is not only the organ that stores and retrieves our previous experience, it is also the organ that combines and creatively reworks elements of this past experience and uses them to generate new propositions and new behavior. …This creative activity, based on the ability of our brain to combine elements, is called imagination or fantasy in psychology. (p. 9)
So here are eight things I see happening when children and adolescents play Minecraft.
Sensation – Learning as sense-pleasure
Fantasy – Learning as make-believe
Narrative – Learning as unfolding story
Challenge – Learning as obstacle course
Fellowship – Learning as social framework
Discovery – Learning as uncharted territory
Expression - Learning as soap box
Submission – Learning as mindless pastime
Note that of these eight ways of playing Minecraft, children switch between them. One minute they are searching a cavern (Discovery), the next they are building a Library (Expression). At times, when they lack direction or motivation with other ways to learn, they wander about the open world in a state of Submission until something happens.
To me, parents can be the something happens. Even if they don’t play the game. Asking “how high can you build a tower” switches the child’s effort from submission to challenge for example. In many ways, a teacher or parent in a world without games used to do this all the time.
Like it or not, games now do it too. Minecraft is very special because unlike something like Tetris or even Grand Theft Auto, it has all 8 of these facets firing all the time. When it becomes multiplayer, kids stimulate each other constantly – not to make new things – but to change state.
This to me is why they find classrooms boring – they don’t change state in the way games do. Or rather they can, if the classroom is designed to change state and I don’t mean from ‘listen to me talk’ to ‘write this in your book’ – that leads to learning as a mindless pastime. Of course, when mass education was invented, being a submissive worker, following instructions and not ‘day dreaming’ was what school was all about.
So if your kid is playing Minecraft, then according to deeply respected academic research and principles, she is not undertaking a mindless pastime. I’d argue playing Minecraft now might be one of the things that saves them from it in the future too.
The trick is to know how to design day to day learning the way Minecraft works … or to say it isn’t possible and write another ‘Minecraft sucks post’.
One of my favourite Facebook groups right now is called Moms Against Minecraft Addiction. It’s a fascinating group of people, all with valid concerns. In a mom post about a 5 year old girl playing Minecraft, I liked this small piece of advice.
Sit down and watch them play. Get excited about what they are building. Help them find guides to building more advanced structures. Ask them to show you how it works and why they chose certain building materials. Find out what they want to build next.
What if parents became addicted to this kind of thing?
A school in Sweden has made Minecraft compulsory. Settle down, this is a headline – Minecraft didn’t become a subject like Maths or Science, just another ‘thing’ schools make kids do during some appointed time. Mums against Minecraft will be horrified still.
This is a dilemma, as it’s impossible to make learning compulsory, however I get the point that as an immersive experience, some students would perhaps find it of use. How you’d measure that is another matter – especially as standardized tests are lump-hammers. Other comments immediately called for ‘evidence’ that it would be edumacational. A standard volley these days, but indicative of the cultural assumption that other parts of academic activities are more educational. This is the belief that what has proven true in the past is stable and improvements can be made every year.
I am not denying the nobility of that idea, but as this comment reflects, schools seem to assume while technology is useful in modernity, and notionally see this as ‘computer assisted learning’ – they remain unable to deal with the potential that it is only now that accepted educational theory from respected scholars like Dewey and Pappert can be leveraged though well designed games. Note that I am talking about ‘networked independence’ and ‘learning’ – not ‘teaching’ as an act.
I am also not suggesting that this would be true for all learners, or that having an adult teach something is not a worth while and valid part of childhood development – far from it – as there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise, though like games, there is no universal truism. For many kids (one of my own) not understanding how he learns, means he will tune-out. Many teachers do this too, “oh, video-games … I can’t learn anything from those” … and tune out too.
Tune back in – it may well be that kids can play games in learning episodes that don’t rely on teacher’s to police it, or put it in a lesson-cage at a certain time of day. This again is well documented in early childhood research. Games are useful for learning in many ways – however the outstanding problem with schools and teachers is pedagogy – something that remains dominated by teachers. Game design remains dominated by imagination and controversy – as games are also a form of art.
Art is education. Playing a guitar teaches you many things, and draws the learner into ever deeper learning. It is only objective bias that argues, picking up a game controller is time-wasting entertainment – mostly in order to deny the possibility that a more of the school-day can be given over to greater freedom of choice, liberty and art – not less. I do advocate for Minecraft, but endorse the sentiment in this comment completey. Learning is not better is you put it in a straight jacket and assume a teacher has to teach it.
I argue this lack of attention to games, and right now Minecraft is part of the reason parents are picking up the heat at home and concerned about the amount of time kids are playing it. When they think ‘is this learning’ – they imagine what learning looks like. If it looks like lessons, cells and bells – then you know what most will decide.
Games like Minecraft are a role model for how learning could occur – and schools as a function of society still refuse to accept their resistance to change the day to day regime is setting a bad example to kids and parents. Teachers are a function of school, so it’s futile to say they ‘don’t get it’. They do a good job, inside the parenthesis of the job. When people say “I’m stuck in traffic, the correct reply is, no … you are the traffic”. This to me is the impass in educational technology right now. The gurus that espoused Web2.0 can’t see past it – because web2.0 dogma is based on computer assisted learning. You can sell that to schools, but clearly you can’t sell it to all teachers and only a handful of students.
Great to see Minecraft in schools – but better to see schools operate more like Minecraft.
Many kids will be getting Minecraft for Christmas. The media, as ever has begun to both praise it as the 21st Century Lego and the next day call it addictive.
So what can you do to make Minecraft a positive experience this Christmas?
Set expectations for play – Minecraft has no end. It’s fast-fail-succeed feedback loops engage kids for hours as they literally dig-away at rendering their imagination through Mincrafts deceptively simple aesthetic world. Kids are not good at managing time. Make sure you set time expectations (not limits). Make even more sure you arrive at the appointed end time and genuinely ask about what they did. Avoid yelling at them to get off at some random time. One great way to do this is to ask them to make a map/build for a family Minecraft play-session. The host literally hosts the game. Next time, hold it somewhere else.
Enable Minecraft Family Jams – its easy to boot up a LAN session with 3 or 4 kids. Make an effort to have organised ‘Mine Jams’ between your family members. It’s great for kids to play with family members of all ages. Set some expectation and goal so your family can have a lot of fun making something together. Just like scrap-booking or playing in the pool, family game play has many benefits – well beyond the activity at the centre.
Get a family-slot server – a small 6-10 slot server is inexpensive. The cost is shared between the family. It’s also likely that 2/3 will play at a time. It’s fun to return to the world and see what has changed or been added since you were there last time. This avoids the issues of being in someone else’s kingdom, and has the benefit of being able to ‘own’ what they make. On a large server, the server owner owns everything and its hard to keep or export things you make.
Many parents of kids playing Minecraft have little experience of using multiplayer servers – the other players you meet are unknown entities. I think it takes time and experience as a parent to risk-assess this, but is increasingly a parenting-skill needed. Getting together and buying a multi-slot for a year is a great way for the whole family to feel-out the world of multiplayer gaming. Later you will know more about, and have more reasonable expectations of larger servers and their admins – and be able to make stronger judgements on what a “good” server is for your kid. Remember all kids are different.
Furthermore, all families are different, yet often share common understandings and cultural-codes. There is also some deeper trust between members than of people outside it, family-play allows some shared de-coding and contextual reflection. Families do this all the time, it’s part of raising kids. However, sharing cynical anecdotes and negative stories of your kid’s game habits over cheese and wine can easily become more positive at low cost.
Family play narrows the generation gap and allows some degree of inter-generational creativity. While older members might not be as fast or as skilful in building, they have seen and done more in the world, so bring deeper narratives. Kids often as “what shall I build?”, a great reply is “do you think we can build a Roman fort?”
This isn’t so different from kids bringing the DS to the family BBQ … All you need to do is plan and organise it a little. Over Christmas, you’d be amazed at how many kids in your near-family play Minecraft … Just ask around … And get Minecraft Jamming.
Just over a year ago, I went to the Northern Territory to a small community, famous for honey-ants called Papunya. It was a short trip, but has finally resulted in getting the local kids immersed in all sorts of learning and fun – at all ages. This is great as often the ‘computer room’ was sees as a place for young-men, and others tended to not get a look in. I can’t take any great credit for making it happen, that was down to the local brilliance of CAYLUS - an organisation fully worthy of support.
Many challenges included lack of bandwidth, hardware, local supervision, busy day to day needs and so on, but thanks to amazing Blair McFarland, Minecraft has arrived with a local server, locally-sourced youth-expert and a dozen accounts. From a year ago, these photos show a completely transformed computer room.
They’re adopting the model of allowing kids to explore the vast open landscape and along the way, use the experience to produce stories and art. Papunya is famous for its Indigenous artists and art-centre, so it’s even more amazing to see a culture more famous for dots that squares leap into Minecraft. The room is packed – and of course no one has to be there.
What is great to see is how using imagination and ‘positive deviation’ from the purpose of Minecraft (as a game) leads to kids of all ages working both collaboratively and independently .
With the help of CAYLUS I hope that it will grow and maybe to get back there next year to help other communities (*doubts will get funding). Best of all the Chief Miner has handed over running it to the local community already which has given several kids new ‘roles’ – something I suspect will pay dividends in the months ahead.
Grats to Blair, Jenny and Lelep – Massively Outback is up and running.
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