Minecraft: Part Two

we do another one. Yeah, it turns out that people love this game so much that one episode is not enough. In fact, I think there are plenty of people out there who would just like it if we had mind stuff instead of text stuff. But we're not going to do that. But we are going to update that old podcast because, as it turns out, back then when Chris and I corded the episode, neither of us had really

played around with Minecraft at all. We had watched some videos on YouTube, we had read up on it, we had done our research, but we hadn't actually played it. And so at that point in time, it was still in beta, the official version had not been released. They have been taking pre orders, but there, but the official version had not come out yet, it was still just

a beta program. And um yeah, it just turned out that it was to us to Christen myself, it was like Pokemon, something that we could research but didn't really understand. And and I do want to say I have actually not played Minecraft, so so Jonathan has at this point since he is the expert. However, I will I will go ahead and be up front. I have played Minecraft on Xbox three sixty, which all die hard fans of

Minecraft and even casual fans. No, is a much more simple version of Minecraft than the one you can find on PCs and Max. But we'll we'll get into all of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, we really wanted to do another at so because the Minecraft culture has become such a thing. It's you know, I mean for a game that was that was only released in two thousand nine as sold over thirty million copies. You know,

they have a merge deal with Lego. It's an independent game. Yeah, it's kind of No one was ever expecting this to be this big of a thing, certainly not the man

who who programmed it. But it's funny because the Lego thing to me just means it's gone full circle, right, because when you look at Minecraft, if you're trying to explain what Minecraft is to someone who has never played it, you're like, well, it's blocks, and you put the blocks together and then you form bigger things that are kind of blocky, like, oh, so it's like virtual Lego and kinda it's kind of like that, but there there's so much more to it, right if you can make the

legos do stuff, combining them in special if you were to get the Robotic Lego set and then merge it with say the Lord of the Rings Lego set, and the magic worked, but now there are actual legs. Yes, and there were zombies. You have to put the Walking Dead Lego set, and I'm pretty sure there's not one, but but you know, I'm sure there are zombies. There have to be zombie legos. I'm sure there have to be, but they're at least dead pirate legos anyway, So the

basic game. We're going to cover what the basic game is so that those of you who have never played Minecraft but I've heard about it can understand what we're talking about. So you're you go into a world that is essentially created for you. When you first start, the world gets created uh systematically where it has a distribution of resources that is different from game to game. Um, you play a little blocky character inhabiting this world. During

the day, this world is idyllic. You have little piggy's and and and cowie's sheep sheep bees and doggies and caddies running around. They're not called that, you know, not caddies. It's not golf game. Um, but no, they're these animals running around. You've got beautiful forests, You've got scenic snowy landscapes, mountains, caverns, oceans, all this kind of stuff. And uh, when nightfalls, the

monsters come out and they try to kill you. And so if you're playing it on just the classic Minecraft mode, which is also called Survival mode, your goal, at least early on is just survival. You're trying to gather materials build a protective house for you to to stay in at night so that way the monsters don't get you, and then you can explore and build out your your house. I've heard that, in fact, most players do not survive

the first night. No, it's true because if you've never played Minecraft before and you haven't any idea of how to build stuff because there's there's not really there's no instruction manual. When you start playing, you have to craft things. You'd gather resources, raw materials, and then you craft useful materials out of them. Now, technically, if you wanted to, you could craft a house out of the raw material

of wood. But that means that every single block of your house, and a block represents like one cubic meter, it's one meter by one or by one meter um, each block of your house would be one block of wood. So you'd have to knock down the equivalent number of trees to create a house that was the right size to protect you. Also, I imagine that that wouldn't be as strong as a house made of other Actually this, well, it wouldn't be as flammable if you made it out

of stone. Uh. Strength is kind of it depends. There's only one thing that really can cause huge amounts of damage to your house, and that's a creeper. Uh. And I'll talk about that in a second. But anyway, so you what you could do is by crafting, you could convert raw material wood into planks, and so one block of wood would equal several blocks of planks. Thus you would extend the usefulness of that one block of resource and be able to, you know, put down say four

blocks of planks for every one block of wood. That means you don't have to gather as much stuff. You have increased your efficiency. It's teaching new lessons, mostly in how not to die. These are my favorite. Yeah. So then you can also make tools that make it easier for you to gather materials. You can make tools that let you gather other materials like stone, so you can build something out of stone if you wanted to. You can build it out of metal if you were able

to find enough metal. There there are veins of various ores in the Minecraft world, and depending upon which version of Minecraft you're playing, you may have just a couple like iron ore or gold or diamonds something like that. So various metals and minerals um. If you are playing the PC version, there are a lot more that are available, so you can get like aluminum or aluminium uh, and

copper and things like that and ten uh. You can't do that on the Xbox version yet, right, And there are all different kinds of combinations or recipes that you can use to put these the little bits of things into other little bits of things and create new stuff. I think that there's about a hundred and eighty or

more right now. Yeah, and then there again the PC version, they're far more common sations you can make, and it's less intuitive, Like I think anyone who's played the PC version who then tries to play the Xbox version remarks and how dumbed down the Xbox version is, because, for example, if I want to craft something in the Xbox version, I really just have to have the basic materials to make that thing, and then it does a lot of

the work for me. In the classic Minecraft, you have a little crafting grid that opens up, and you have to place the raw materials in a specific formation within that grid to get the output you want. So, for example, it may be that a plank and two sticks could make a wooden axe or wooden pick axe or woulden shovel, but it all depends on where you place them within that grid on what you get. Fortunately, that's not the case for the Xbox version, so I don't have to

remember all that. As for the other modes, just really quickly the other basic modes you can play in this game, there's creative. Creative just means that you can build and it's just it lets you go crazy and do what you want without needing to protect yourself from monsters at the end of the day or gather materials. You actually have all them. It's like you have an infinite supply of everything that's in the game. So then you can

build whatever structure you want if you wanted to. You could build a world and then allow other people to come into it. So because you can create a server so that other people can play within your world, and that way, you might use the creative mode to create a very interesting world for them to inhabit and potentially destroy, depending upon what levels of permission you give the other players and whether or not they're heads. Yeah, there's you're

always going to get a big MENI head. There's also the hardcore mode, which is terrifying to me. Hardcore is that if you die, that's it. Uh So, for example, if I create a world and it's self contained, I don't have it connected to the internet. I'm just playing by myself, but I'm playing in hardcore mode. If my character dies, it deletes the world. So all the work I've done, I might have made the world's largest castle in Minecraft, and trust me, that's always one of my goals. Um,

but if I die, I lose it, it's gone. I can't retrieve it. If it's multiplayer and you die, you get ejected from the server and banned, so you can't rejoin the game. Uh, it just gives you a message saying sorry, you're banned from the server. Technically, the administrator could allow you back in, but it would require some work on the administrator's part to delete some uh some bits of code within the server world. So most people I don't think would go through the trouble um. And

then finally you have adventure mode. And an adventure mode, people who come into your world are not allowed to destroy blocks unless they have the proper tools for that particular block. So, for example, for a block of stone, they would have to have a pickaxe. Normally, in the game,

if you punch something long enough, it'll break. Uh. Some some materials are harder than others and thus take longer to punch to break, Like if you are talking about Obsidian, I hope you packed a lunch, but uh, you know, in adventure mode you cannot do it unless you have the right materials. Well, that gets pretty tricky because most materials have at the very base of it would if you don't have an ax, you can't chop down wood.

So when you start off an adventure mode, you can't even gather the most basic materials, so you have to kind of adventure around in the world to find stuff that can protect you. Once night comes and the monsters come out, then if you encounter things like chests, you might find the basic tools you need to do some more gathering, and then you can finally start to play the game as if you were playing in survival mode. So those are your four basic modes keep in mind,

and we'll talk about this later in the podcast. The the community around Minecraft has created so many different modifications or just mods for the game that these are just the basic ways of playing. There are dramatically different experiences on Minecraft based upon the way people have modified the game and given it different skins or different behaviors, and we'll talk about some of those a little bit later on.

So that's your basis for the Minecraft games. It's an incredibly simple concept that gets more and more complex as more features have been added into the game over the course of its lifetime, and also as more players have, as he said, created these mods that have you know, it's it's a really self developing community, which is pretty fascinating. Uh. Do you want to talk a little bit about the

man who started at all? Marcus person Yes, I was about to say, I didn't look up any of the the pronunciation, so I'm glad you did because I looked at your notes and I saw that you had some fonetics in there. Um, Now is it? Is it moo young? Is the name of his company? Will get into it, but yesu Yang, I think, But yes, I always go Japanese Young. Sorry, but yes, so Marcus person Um better perhaps known on the internet as not Yeah, we'll go with Notch for the rest of this podcast. Really, he's

a thirty four as of this podcast in October. Um grew up in Sweden, if you could not tell from our mispronunciation of his name, Um, and Uh learned learned to use a family computer when he was very young at commodore. Yep. He his father was a railroad worker, and so I guess he probably got some appreciation for the basis of Minecraft just from from being the son of a railroad worker. Uh. Grew up playing various bootleg games, and I was particularly fond of a legit version of

The Bard's Tale. I think that was the first one that he owned. It was the first game he bought with his own money. And I can appreciate that because I also owned a copy of The Bard's Tale and also enjoyed when he was a child playing all playing around with some of the programming codes that they used

to publish. In the back of programming magazine. Yea, he talked about how his sister would read out the code and then he would type it into the computer, and that sometimes he would make a mistake, and he realized that if he made a mistake, the program would behave in a way it was not intended, and he, rather than getting frustrated over this, felt a sense of power. It's a huge rush. Yeah. He worked in Webb Design originally. I think a few of his teachers had kind of

pushed him more towards graphic design. Yeah, he wanted to go. He knew at a very early age that he was interested in game program Yeah. He and his he and his buddies in school. When he was a teenager, he became a group of h He joined a group of kids who were all interested in programming. They we're using a tar e st computers at that point, trying to outdo each other, and he knew that that's kind of

what he wanted to do. He wanted to develop games, but his teacher said, maybe you should go into graphic design instead. There's this whole web thing that's taking place. If you were a web designer, you can make huge amounts of cash. And so he went into web development. And then something happened, something big happened. Well, I I believe he quit to become a game designer. He was like, you know what, never mind, I'm going to follow my dream and and quit his job, tried to become a

game designer, and the dot com crash happened. Yeah, And when the dot com crash happened, it wiped out jobs across the board on a global scale. We think of it here in the US as a largely US centered thing, but this was a global events um So he was out of work for a couple of years, but finally got into a web game company, working programming in Flash. Yeah, and he built around thirty games in Flash and also

pursued programming in other ways. He was really interested in learning how to make very small efficient programs, sort of how can I use the least amount of code to achieve the thing I want to do? So this is not necessarily the same pathway that hackers take. Hackers will often say I want X result, so I'm going to do whatever I can to get to X result, which means your code might be work, might work, but it

might not be very elegant. He was looking at ways of making it a very small and compact program so that it's very portable. You can you can use that code on multiple devices or multiple machines that have different levels of complexity, so that way you don't you know, you're not limited to just well this this program works, but you better have the hardware that can chuggle longer elds.

It's never going to be satisfying experience. Um. This was right around the time we're getting up towards the late two thousand's, when he had been working at this company for a while. He had been designing flash games, and he came across a game in two thousand nine called Infino Minor. Right. Yeah, you and Chris had talked talked about this one on the previous podcast. Yes, so in

Phinno Minor. If you were to just read a basic description of infinom Minor, he might say, hah, this sounds hauntingly familiar because it was a block based game, a multiplayer game where it was a sandbox game, and you could mind things and build stuff with the stuff you mind, you would gather materials and build objects, and so it sounds a lot like Minecraft. Well, that's no mistake. I mean,

that's that's kind of the the inspiration behind Minecraft. Now, there are many things that Minecraft does that infinom Minor didn't do and was never intended to do. So I'm not saying that Minecraft is a copy of infinom Minor, but you can see where inspiration was also. I believe something happened to infinite Minor. Oh yes it did so E Electronic Industries. Electronics Industries launched in phinom Minor kind of in a beta mode in the spring of two

thousand nine and after a month discontinued support. So, the original the original goal of infinom Minor as a player was that you would go down in a team. You have a team of players, you would play against other teams and your goal was to mind certain types of materials and then bring those back up to the surface

and you would accumulate points. But a lot of players I found that it was much more satisfying to mine materials and then build stuff, not to go for this whole point related game aspect, but to use it more as a true sandbox. So that's kind of what gave not the inspiration of well, you know this, people are using this game in a way that it wasn't intended to be, and the support for the game has gone away. What if I made a game that from the start was meant to be what people were turned ning in

phinom Minor into. And furthermore that you know, no one's going to cut support off too, because I read it. Yeah, And so you know, the the infinom Minor product kept on going for a while because the company ended up uh making the code completely open source so anyone could download it, which meant that suddenly lots of people were running in phenom Minor on their own machines and changing it. But there were so many changes to infinom Minor that

it lost cohesion. It was no longer a unified platform, so there wasn't enough there to be to have a community to stay around it. Right it was, there's so many different niche versions of infinom Minor that you couldn't have a community anymore. So Minecraft took a slightly different approach, and he began to develop Minecraft starting right around well, according to according to the Minecraft site, on May tenth, two thousand nine, that's exactly when he started to develop Minecraft.

And he decided to switch from being a full time when developer and game developer for for this other company to part time, so he scaled back his work hours. He still was an employee with this company, but he the other half of this time was spent developing Minecraft. Uh, and things moved really really quickly. Yeah, the game would release later that year in two thousand nine. Yeah, the

beta version came out. In fact, the beta version. For a long time, people began to wonder if Minecraft was a Google product because it was in beta for a couple of years. But but the meant that people could actually play the game he was working on, and that you know, you could even do pre orders as early as June nine, he had started developing on May tenth. June thirteenth, he begins to accept pre orders for the game.

He releases those early builds of the game for testing over the next two years, and he would keep on updating them, adding in new features throughout those those two years as he was preparing the game for its gold release. Right as of the podcast, the game had not come out of beta yet. Yeah, that was when we were still wondering if it ever would come out of beta. And actually it wouldn't take much longer, but before we

get to that. On June one, that was Nacha's birthday and also the day that he quit his job, his his day job and started devoting everything full time to Minecraft. That's right. So June one, two thousand and ten, big day, big day for Notch where he was ready to take the plunge the Minecraft project, which he originally thought was going to be fun but not a huge success. He hoped. His biggest hope was that would be successful enough to fund his next game idea, which he didn't necessarily have

at that point. He was just hoping that, well, this this project will bring in enough money for my fun and maybe and over six million people had downloaded it in the first year, so that's when it was the realization came with Wow, this could be the big money, this could be the game. Well, we'll we'll move on into the rest of the timeline in just a second, but before we get too carried away, I want to

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So we left off at notches birthday on June one, when he had made the big leap, cutting his uh, his job and now focusing full time on Minecraft. Um. And you know the next day I have is in do you have anything else? I do? Not now? Okay, So March second, two thousand eleven, Notch announces development for a new game called Scrolls. Scrolls was a game that was kind of the brainchild of both Notch and another member

of what would become his company, Moo Young. Um. But it's uh, it's kind of a combination of a board game and a card trading game, kind of like Magic the Gathering meets war gaming. So you would have a strategy element on where you placed things in the game as well as kind of this card based system. Although they're called scrolls within the game, which means that I would be terrible at it, but I'm sure lots of

people enjoy it in many ways. Meanwhile, he uh not was figuring that, you know, this was all becoming more work than he was really willing and able to do by himself, and so he founded a company. This this movie Young that we've been talking about a little bit, uh, that was at some point in mid and has since then hired a team of maybe about twenty people or so. Yeah, there's someone who's in charge of fun to work mostly on Minecraft, honestly. Right, there are a couple of other products.

There's scrolls, and then there was one other one that they announced, but we'll get to that because it's it's kind of a sad story. Um. In June, our first episode on Minecraft came out. Just just just to give you give you a concept of when in the timeline. This was in November, the first international convention for Minecraft happened. That was in Las Vegas, and it was aligned with the release of Minecraft officially. In fact, in twenty eleven,

that was a huge year from Minecraft. In August of that year, they released a pocket edition for Experience Play, which was it was an exclusive deal to Sony, but the exclusivity only lasted a very short while. By October seven, it had expired, and so on October seven, eleven, they released the Pocket Edition of Minecraft, which is really meant for mobile devices, is a simplified version of Minecraft that you can play on mobile devices. It's currently available for

iOS and also andreft. The October seven was when it came out on Android, and then on November seventeenth this when it came out for iOS. And on November eight that's when Minecraft had its official release. Keeping in mind that people have been playing this game for two years already, uh, they in various stages and and for a while. In fact, I think you can still get Minecraft Classic for free, which is based upon the original code for Minecraft. The

new game. The game that actually you can purchase it varies depending upon where you are in the United States, around twenty seven dollars or twenty six a five something like that in the US to buy a copy on PC um. But the Minecraft Classic one is free to download. Um there they are two different games, really, And then the Xbox version of course has its own pricing. And while it hasn't happened yet, and I kind of wrote this later in the timeline, but I'm gonna go ahead

and say it. Uh, the PlayStation four and the Xbox One will both also have Minecraft on them um PlayStation four. That will be the first time anyone on the PlayStation platform who didn't have an experience could actually play this game. So I expect the numbers will continue to explode. Um. The game has been incredibly popular. I was really I was at the the Microsoft press release at E three this past year, and uh, the Xbox One press release.

One of the games they showed off was Minecraft. I mean, among all of these really high graphics, crazy sound, all of this, you know, big staff, and then Minecraft. Yeah, and it got a huge response, just big cheer from the audience. I'm like, never before have giant one meter blocks looked in higher fidelity than right now in fidelity and knows the wrong word I should say resolution, but at any rate, it was. It was amusing to me to see the the massive power of the Xbox One

compared to the Xbox six anyway, being used to do Minecraft. However, that being said, again, the differences between the Xbox version and the PC version are pretty vast. Like, the Xbox version is much smaller, the individual worlds are smaller than the the PC version. So for example, if you start in your spawn area and just walk in a straight line from where you started. Eventually you hit the end

of the world. Uh. In the Xbox version, it takes place much more quickly than it would in the PC version, and in fact, in the PC version, it would continue to try and generate the world. And one of the problems that the earlier builds of Minecraft had was that if you went beyond a certain point, it ran out of computer memory, and so you would have these big gaps in the world, and they used to refer to that area as the end. It's now a goal for

you to journey to the end. It's actually part of the the end game of Minecraft, if you want to think of it that way. And it's kind of funny because it's one of those things that sort of popped up as a result of just the limitations of the game itself. But like I said, the Xbox version much more limited. I expect the Xbox one the world's will be larger. They just recently increase the size within um uh the Xbox three six version. I noticed because I'm

currently building a tower in my quest for the Biggest Castle. Yeah. Right now, I'm just building a skyscraper because my castle's I get to a point where I burn out. So now I'm building a a ten by ten actually I guess it's technically eleven by eleven tower, and it's currently I think thirteen stories tall and each story is three meters tall. So if you want to help me build my tower, look for John B. Strickland on Xbox Life because I'm on there all the time. Guys. Anyway, Um,

so that was a big tangent. Let's get back into the timeline. Yes, So, by the end of eleven, Notch had stopped working on Minecraft, and in December he was you know, I when he speaks about video games, he reminds me a little bit of Sidmyer, and I mean a because he just sounds like a really nice dude and be he is so passionate about creating games, about the actual developer programming part of it, and is a little bit disinterested in in the fame side of it,

and and also in the in the hoopla part. I

mean I it seems like he gets very frustrated. And he's got a really great blog on Tumbler that all um reblogs and stuff from, even though it's like from two years ago, it's just really great, uh you know where, And he just he just talks about getting to this point where he was like, I love programming, I love of talking about programming, and I'm really disinterested in having anyone give me feedback on my programming when it's at such a basic stage, because it's it's just a total

buzz cat. There's actually I've got some great quotes from him. Uh but yeah, like he's he said specifically to that end that he feels the pressure to repeat the success of Minecraft, and that the fact that Minecraft succeeded so overwhelmingly, so saying that it went above and beyond his his expectations is there's that's such an an understated way of putting it. Because he's made a hundred million dollars from

Minecraft and Minecraft merchandizing. I mean when I first saw Minecraft, I never would have imagined that merchandizing would be a big deal. But it's a huge deal. Yeah, in twelve alone, he would earn over a hundred million dollars on mine. Hundred million dollars. So he has the freedom to do whatever he wants, and that part is great. He loves that part. The party doesn't love so much is that because Minecraft was such a huge success, that's what people

expect from him. Now they deal in another huge success. Yeah, they want they expect another Minecraft. So that puts an enormous amount of pressure on him to develop something that's as good as Minecraft is, whereas he wants he wants the freedom to be able to develop whatever he likes and not the pressure of, oh, it has to meet these certain expectations. Because once you have those expectations there,

that puts parameters on what you can build. Because if it's something that just interests you and you really want to do it, but no one else really gets it, then you just you're setting yourself up for lots of criticism as people like, this is not what I wanted. I want you to build another Minecraft that's not Minecraft.

It's just as good as Minecraft. And and you know, for example, when you're the kind of dude who just unto himself, creates a website that lists all of the natural numbers in existence and then tweets about it too. You know, your one point three million followers, maybe you know, maybe you've got other stuff going on. I'm just saying, you know, it's it's the guys. The guy's rain works

in really interesting ways. And and being beholden to an audience about and especially a very large, very vocal audience. I can understand his frustration. Um and and you know so so in everything was really ramping up that year. The three sixty version of Minecraft was more played than Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Yeah, it hit Xbox Live Arcade and then it exploded there. And there are some great shows that are Minecraft oriented, uh Chad from this

Weekend Tech has a YouTube series about Minecraft. The Rooster Teeth guys have let's plays and let's build set in Minecraft that are entertaining and hilarious. In fact, they even Gavin Free of Rooster Teeth created the most ridiculous thing he created. Oh Gavin, So he created a basic structure that was an obsidian block, and then four gold blocks. He mined all this gold. And you know, when you mind gold, you didn't have to refine it, and you get gold bars. Then if you have enough gold bars

can make a gold block. He mined and refined all this gold. They were they wanted the gold for another reason. They wanted to use the gold to create circuits to power a mine cart track. They were they were trying to get an achievement in the Xbox version of the game, where you have to travel a certain distance on a on a rail car and then you unlock the achievement,

which meant they needed gold. But Gavin took all the gold and made gold blocks out of it instead of using it to actually make these power right, so he's being a bit of a troll, which is kind of what Gavin does. And uh, he then created the subsidium. They put an obsidium block down and then uh four

gold blocks and called it the Tower of Pimps. That is that became its name, the Tower of Pimps, and then now has become a thing in the Rooster Teeth games where they compete and whoever wins gets the Tower of Pimps. That weekend. They've actually got a three D printed version of the Tower Pimps that goes from one person's desk to another as they battle over it. Well, it turns out that the Notch must watch Rooster Teeth.

The people must watch it because um, they incorporated the Tower of Pimps in a secret part of the tutorial world of the Xbox three sixt version of Minecraft. If you play the tutorial world and you know where to look,

you can find a pre built tower of pimps there. So, I mean, this is this is again kind of showing how they value that community that has grown up around the game, where people who make something that resonates with an audience, they acknowledge that it's not one of those games where you put it out there and then you just you divorce yourself entirely from it and then you

go do something else. Yeah, the company Muang was big enough as they were included in this total patentroll lawsuit along with like Electronic Arts and Square Enix um over over paid Android usage. Yeah, some sort of it was either in game payments or something along those lines. Yeah. But but I mean, you know that's that's a pretty huge sign of of you've made it. You know you've made it when you get sued, when you get targeted.

I hope I never made it. Not. Also that year was presented with a special award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Video Game Segment uh in uh.

He also during this time was also working on a new game called Zero Times Tend to the Power of C which was supposed to be that the Zero Times Tend to the Power of C was supposed to be a coding error within the confines of this game that causes the entire human race to go into cry genic sleep, and when they wake up, it's eons later, and the universe has changed as a result because so much time has passed, and it's another it's another sandbox kind of game,

you're it's it's also very sixteen bitten blocky. Exploration was a big theme, as is trading, but as of August of this year, um it is no longer in development. Notch said that he had uh had stopped developing the game and did not have any aspirations for it to continue. It's actually been taken over though, by a fan group that calls themselves Projects trillic And, and he's basically given

them his blessing. Yeah, they're from what I understand, they're trying to create essentially the game he was building, but they're not necessarily using the code that he had developed, so they're they're they've got the same end goal, but they're taking their own pathway to get there. Meanwhile, UH Minecraft kept on keeping on. In February eleven, two thousand twelve, it launched on a new platform, one that we just got access to because I think we think we have

access to this. I think this is one of the things that's sitting on your desk, the Raspberry Pie twelve. It came to the Raspberry Pie the Minecraft Pie addition, and it's available for free download on the MoU Yang's blog. We should fire that thing up. Yeah, I was just saying, like, let's fire up the Raspberry Pie download that because it's

meant to be an educational tool for novice programmers. It's actually it's not necessarily meant just for entertainment, but to learn how to program and using that as sort of

another platform on programming. All right, Well, it's Java based, and I've heard that actually a lot of a lot of kids are getting into programming through Minecraft onto themselves, and not only just uh programming, but also circuitry, because you can build circuits within the world of Minecraft, and you can even build the you know, you can think of them as macro processors, not micro processors, because they

span entire fields within the game of Minecraft. But you could build a working calculator in Minecraft using all the basic electronic components that you can create or mine in the game, which you know, I've seen some of the videos of people who have done this, where you know, you hit a switch and it creates a very simple computer algorithm that follows very basic rules. But it's of an equation for you or you know whatever that yeah, whatever,

whatever it's designed to do. Yeah, and piece of music or yeah, yeah, I've seen those two where they set up the various music blocks and set up the circuit so that it plays a specific tune. It's a level of understanding of this game that is really surprising to me. But it also means that people are learning the basics of electronics as well as the basics of programming, uh, through this one game and it and it can inspire people in other ways to we'll talk about that in

a second. One of the interesting things that I read, and I know you read the same piece, it was a there was a piece in the New Yorker about Notch that was quite good. Yeah, that was great. I thought I had it written down. Uh. It was written by Simon Parkin. It was published in April. I'll see if we can remember to link it on social. Yeah, it's it's an excellent article. And in that Notch is quoted as saying, I don't want to feel like I'm in charge or anything. Of course, it doesn't really work

that way, because we all know I'm the founder. But I try to have a studio where people go to make games for the fun of it, not just because some investor has said we have to make money. And that kind of boils down to his basic philosophy. And it's very similar to sid Meyer, this idea that I love to build things. I love to make games. I love to make things that are fun to play, and that's my motivation. It's a huge games games where you

get to decide what the story is, what your motivations are. Yeah. Yeah, these are games where there's not necessarily a pathway that you have to follow. You can take one of a billion pathways. Now, Minecraft does have kind of an endgame. I had mentioned it before that there are three basic worlds in in the in the original version of Minecraft. Keep in mind there are mods out there that have all sorts of worlds, but the three basic worlds are the overworld, which is where you spend your time when

you first start off. Then there's a a kind of Hades like region called the Nether where everything is on fire and trying to kill you. Uh, that's only a slight exaggeration. Uh, there are certain things that are not on fire, and there are a couple of critters that aren't actively trying to kill you. But there everything else is like how I feel about our new office environment. Yeah kind of. Yeah, well, I certainly think Robert's out to kill me. He's already set up his his second

secondary monitor to block me off. I don't know if you've noticed that. I'm sure it's not personal. No, it's just so he has a semi cubicle through himself. Uh, I love you, Robert anyway. So that you know, there's the overworld, the nether and then there's the End that I mentioned before. That's where Enderman come from. Enderman are these kind of creepy characters that are three blocks tall.

They're the the tallest regular characters you would encounter in Minecraft. Uh. They also are not aggressive unless you look at them. If you look at them and you look above their legs, essentially they become aggressive and we'll try to kill you. They can also teleport, so they're tricky critters to defeat. But if you go to the end, which is where the Injerman supposedly come from, you can encounter the Ender Dragon.

The Indo Dragon is enormous and deadly and probably requires multiple people ganging up on it at once using enchanted weapons. These are all things that were added into Minecraft over the course of the game. Obviously, when it first started, you didn't have ways of enchanting items and you didn't have dragons flying around. But if you defeat it, then you get a little um, you get a story that

unfolds that's supposedly very beautiful. I have not read this story because I have not defeated the Indo Dragon, and I refuse to watch a video and see it for myself until I have done it. So I'm waiting until I get to a point where I feel like, all right, let's give this a shot and let me get like at least three or four other people who want to throw their lives away and and take on the Indo Dragon. So, uh, there is an end game in the game in that sense, but you never have to play it that way if

you don't want to. There's no reason for you to go after that goal if it doesn't interest you. Um. And we've seen some interesting uses of Minecraft in ways other than just as a game. Right, It's kind of a semi official educational tool. It is being taught in schools. Yeah, yeah, it's being used as a tool in various applications. So you've got some where it's like city planning, you know, the idea of how do you how do you lay out a city so that it makes sense? And they

use Minecraft as the basic building blocks for that. Literally. There are other ones where it's just teaching teamwork, where you throw a group of students in a newly developed world and say, all right, here are the basic thing or what what basic things do you need to do in order to survive? What? How do you prioritize those steps? How do you delegate who does what? How do you actually achieve your goals? And so that's another way, or

even just as a motivator. I read about it being used in a in a in a foreign language class and that you know, the student that the teachers like find you guys can play Minecraft, but you have to speak entirely in this language that you're learning in order that's it's the only way you can communicate, communicate via text or you can talk to each other, but you have to speak and write in this other language that you're learning UM, which is great because it turned you

into this. You know, it's an immersive environment where you have to communicate in order together. So that was I thought a very clever way of using Minecraft. Uh. There is an organization called Teacher Gaming which runs Minecraft e d U, which is a tool designed to help teachers incorporate Minecraft into lesson plans. UM actually has a special build of Minecraft where you can sign in as a student or a teacher and can create specific goal oriented

tasks UM and encourage things like communication and teamwork. I've read about a lot of gamer parents who have played with their children are set up servers for their children so they can play in a safe environment and um. Another example of that is Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth, who talks about playing it with the son and then that's in fact how he got introduced to Minecraft and uh, and now it's a big part of what Rooster Teeth does. Yeah, so uh. And of course he was not the only

person in the company to have played the game. Gavin also had an unfair advantage in those early games because he knew what was going on, whereas everybody else was like, how do I make an axe? So the car. What does Gavin do with that knowledge? He builds the Tower of Pimps. Yeah, so, um, you know, knowledge is power people, then with great power comes great something or other. Yeah. That there was a frolicking motion by the way that that I really felt got lost in. It was Lauren

doing the frolicking, but not Jonathan. I do not frolic cavort. I'm not a frolicker. I'm a covorder. Um. And so there are other interesting mods. I saw a mod where you can build and maybe this isn't even a mod, but I don't play the PC version, so this is this is brand new to me. But you could build a rocket and then actually go from the world of Minecraft to the Moon, which I just blew my mind. I was like, this is incredible, and that it also involved a lot of the materials that occur in the

PC version but not in the Xbox version. So I saw it. I was like, well, there's no way for me to do this right now. I could always go out and buy the PC version, but then that means I have to learn. There was there's a mod that you guys talked about in the original episode that was

of the Starship Enterprise. Yeah, I was a guy who had who had gone essentially into creative mode and wanted to make a to scale one to one version of the enterprise like that you can get in and like crawl around and being a Jeffreys tube and you could you could explore the various text And this was the uh, the n c C seventeen o one, so not the not the not the later enterprises. We're talking original series

enterprise and an update on that story. Over over that enterprise, mod Millang got hit with a season desist from Universal Studios to to which not was Paramount Picture sexually. Uh, I read Universal videos that I'm willing to go with either UM and it would to which Notch replied, like, it's it's like sending a letter to Adobe because someone drew a copyrighted image and photoshop right. He's like, like, I built the tool, but I didn't build that. Yeah.

And put Putt, which is actually a brand name of of UM, also has sent a season desist and further misunderstanding, it's the same, you know, the same sort of thing as Safe Harbor with sites like YouTube. Right where YouTube is offering people the platform to you can upload videos, YouTube itself is not responsible for the material inside those videos.

It does have a responsibility to act when those videos violate intellectual property, But how do you do that when someone has just built the enterprise on a server that they own. You know, essentially you have to serve that to that season desists to the person that built it, not to the company that provided the tools. But yeah, we we've seen lots of other interesting builds besides that. And I talked about how these mods are, uh pretty popular.

There are a lot of different skins that you can get for um for Minecraft, not just for your character. You can put give your character a different skin, some of which are based upon other popular games. They have Halo skins, so if you want a little blocky master chief, you can make one. Although although Nottch did write a really nice I I linked this on Twitter today because I was just so impressed with it, a really nice post about how Minecraft is genderless, um that that your

natural avatar. You know, at some point started being called the Minecraft guy because he's kind of blocking and dude ish and and that and that's yeah. Well, someone I think someone asked not at some point, oh what's the dude's name? And he was like Steve, and I think that's how that one got started. Um. But but that you know, all all the animals and minecraft are genderless.

They can all make little babies with any other animal that if you get it, and babies were really new for the Xbox three sixty not that new now, but I remember when it uh like if you you can make animals be receptive to the mood of love by giving them food, and um, so you can tame them sort of. You can. You can lead them into like a fenced area and then and then fence them in and if you feed them, they're they're like they have

little hearts appear over their head. And as long as you have two of that kind of animal, you're good to go. There's gonna be babies popping up soon. Um. So yeah, there's no like, there's no fifty fifty chance that you accidentally put two of the same gender because there they're this non gender gender and and that you're in you know, and that also your avatar is technically non gendered. Yeah, and so so you know, skins are great, but right well, and they also have skins that overlay

the entire world, not just your character. So you get there's like one specifically for the Xbox three sixty where you can uh do a mass effect texture overlay, so suddenly the world looks like, you know, a mass effect world, and all the all the structures look different, all the materials look different. You have to relearn what everything is actually. I're like, what is this? Oh, that's what Iron looks

like now. Um. They also have one recently added to the three sixty that is more of a plastic look, so it looks kind of like the actual Lego Minecraft set. It's very very plastic because there are textures on those blocks, but they're very simple textures. So you can get these

different skins that make them look totally different. And that Those are two examples that are actually found on the Xbox three sixty one where you can purchase them, but there are countless user generated skins and mods out there. I Uh, I'm really impressed by the community that's grown up around Minecraft, and it's a very young community too.

This is one of those games that really resonated with a young audience where you know, kids who have that natural curiosity to learn how things work and to build things and to exp barament. This was a playground for them. To use that kind of that kind of inclination, and it really encouraged people to do that. So that's one of the reasons why I think we've seen so much

incredible innovation. Yeah, yeah, you know, I think that all goes back to just not being an awesome dude and and wanting people to have that experience of being able to create and play and make up their own minds about what the game is agreed. And so I'm always curious to see if this kind of philosophy will trickle out to other developers. I think that there are some developers that will want to try and capitalize it based on the fact that it was such a huge success.

So in other words, from not just perspective, they be coming at it from the wrong wrong motivation right there, coming at it from the motivation of what can make us a lot of money, not what is going to make a compelling gaming experience. And it's it's certainly not that this kind of world has never been seen before in gaming. I mean, you've you've got lots of sandbox kind of things out there, but but yeah, you know, this,

this it just resonated. It was one of those things that that was uh just just complex enough to be compelling, but not so complex as to be infuriating, and perhaps just at the right time when I think there was a high level of frustration with some of these really big names in games that were coming out with these laborious like like kind of overwrought, kind of overdone, or or like the eighteenth sequel to a game, whether where that just didn't seem to be any kind of innovation

or nothing new. It was a it was a new maybe like a new skin on an old game, and maybe a couple of new gaming elements, but this was something that was very different from everything else that was out there. So yeah, it's uh, you know, I will not ever make another game that will resonate as much as Minecraft. I don't know. I say, we let Notch build whatever the heck he wants to build, and whether or not it's as successful as Minecraft, it'll probably be awesome.

It doesn't Yeah, it doesn't matter, you know. He he deserves, I think, the opportunity to play around and and not be badgered about what the outcome is going to be, because you know, he's already made an incredible game. Let's give the guy some space to do what he does best, you know, so hey, Notch, if you're listening, we're with you, buddy, all right. So that kind of wraps up this discussion

about Minecraft. I hope that fulfills all the deep driving needs of all of our Minecraft fans out there who have been begging for us to do another Minecraft episode. I always showed them the link to the old Minecraft episode. He said that's not enough. So um, I hope this is enough at least for the time being. We're gonna talk about some other topics in future episodes, but hey, we need your help. We need your help to decide

what future topics we're gonna talk about. So you need to write into us and tell us what you want to hear about, as long as it's not Minecraft, yes, smart Alec. And the way you do that is you send us an email. Our address is x stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on one of the many social networks you can find a set, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Our handle at all three of those is text Stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more

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