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The Minecraft Generation

nytimes.com

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Re: The Minecraft Generation

#91

Post by markdown »

david927 wrote: post #19

Last year my daughter, then nine, discovered Minecraft and fell in love with it. The wonderful and surprising result was that it seemed to make her fall in love with problem-solving and architecture in general. Suddenly programming wasn't boring, it was empowering. I was skeptical at first; now we have it on every device in our house and we have a family server that we share with my sister and dad.

My 10 year old spends all of his free time on the cubeville server. It's incredible the things they've built there: http://www.cubeville.org/map/

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#92

Post by sirtaj »

CaptSpify wrote: post #55
danielvf wrote: post #2

This is a good article. I couldn't help but laugh though: "telnet, a command-­line tool often used by professionals to manage servers."

Sadly telnet is still in use in some places. As of ~4 years ago, I was using it on medical devices!

I use it to control my Marantz audio receiver.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#93

Post by nullc »

joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

Minetest is a minecraft quasi-clone that uses lua... and it's free software.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#94

Post by asiekierka »

jameshart wrote: post #68
noobie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Minecraft modding scene is amazing! The Japanese have been doing wonders. You'd be amazed not only by the content but also by the visual effects of some of the mods. Some examples (Not Japanese): ComputerCraft: adds programmable computers in Lua. With in game applications; programmable robots called turtles. Botania and Thaumcraft are two magical mods with stunning visuals. Buildcraft and AE2 are logistics-orient…

The minecraft modding scene is horrific. Forum posts as homepages, adfly for file hosting, closed source mods whose maintainers are hostile to feedback, compatibility issues between everything... ... and yet somehow it WORKS, and probably provides kids with a better introduction to having to hack with computer technology than anything most kids have had to deal with since having to edit HIMEM in your autoexec.bat to…

Actually, most mods are not closed source anymore and most modders moved to CurseForge over adf.ly (which is not perfect, I admit, but much better). This is not 2012.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#95

Post by asiekierka »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #64
Filligree wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the modded Minecraft experience at all, before doing that?

Ah good old tekkit. Now there is test pack please ignore which shows promise but to be honest the modding scene slowed down after the bukkit/forge mess and due to the fatigue of never receiving the promised stable api. The moment ic2 stopped development I lost interest. Buildcraft spawned factorio however, so my logistic nerd needs are satisfyed :)

IC2 never stopped development, it just became... different.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#96

Post by Houshalter »

outworlder wrote: post #51
joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

Well, if you are impressed by Lua scripting in a game, go back to Minecraft, then install OpenComputers. They have it all. Those computers have firmware, an OS (LuaOS), filessystems, network routers, you name it. You can do pretty interesting things with the peripherals. You can also program robots. https://github.com/MightyPirates/OpenComputers

I'm a big fan of computercraft. You can quickly build turtles (robots) and program them to do almost anything a player can do. So you can automate almost everything and it's really fun. (Also in Lua.)

Open computers does have robots, but they are much more difficult to actually build, and have more constraints. I did try to get into OpenComputers, but everything felt so much more limited and expensive, and I just wanted to program cool things.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#97

Post by beachy »

noobie wrote: post #14
vvanders wrote: post #4

It really does feel like Minecraft is the Doom/Quake/Half-Life of this generation. I'd almost thought that modding had disappeared due to the complexity involved in AAA games but nice to see it alive and well in Minecraft.

The Minecraft modding scene is amazing! The Japanese have been doing wonders. You'd be amazed not only by the content but also by the visual effects of some of the mods. Some examples (Not Japanese): ComputerCraft: adds programmable computers in Lua. With in game applications; programmable robots called turtles. Botania and Thaumcraft are two magical mods with stunning visuals. Buildcraft and AE2 are logistics-orient…

Watching that helps explain why MS paid $2.5b for Minecraft. Maybe the most incredible visual computing artefact I've ever seen. Having a channel to that young man's brain... Priceless

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#98

Post by megamark16 »

nullc wrote: post #93
joezydeco wrote: post #18

These days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a fligh…

Minetest is a minecraft quasi-clone that uses lua... and it's free software.

Free and open source, and way faster than Minecraft on older hardware.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#99

Post by gambiting »

joezydeco wrote: post #43
WillPostForFood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roblox is designed like an MMO. But that also has drawbacks. They charge like an MMO (monthly subscription), and you are beholden to their system/servers. I don't think I've ever gotten more value from a software purchase than buying Minecraft for €9.95 in 2010.

I think you can do a lot on the free tier, my son only recently started spending a little to unlock some of the upgrades. Personally I'd rather see subscriptions fund a server that's always up. I've researched running my own Minecraft server for the local kids, but it's really not worth it.

I'm running a vanilla minecraft server for 4-6 people on the Raspberry Pi 3 and it runs beautifully, never had any problems. Pi2 was a bit slow at times, but the latest Pi3 has enough horsepower to support that many people without a problem. So really, setting up a minecraft server costs $30 for the Pi + $10 for the sd card. At 5W power usage it can stay on all the time.

Re: The Minecraft Generation

#100

Post by purplelobster »

>> “An adult mentor opens up these new worlds that wouldn’t be open to them,” she adds. Of course, critics might worry about kids interacting with adults online in this way, but as Ito notes, when there’s a productive task at hand, it’s similar to how guilds have passed on knowledge for ages: knowledgeable adults mentoring young people.

Kids can't interact with adults online? What has this world come to?

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