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Two years into the project, they construct the city in short and mobile sprints. “We circle around different districts,” explained Minefact. “We work one week in Chinatown, then one week in Tribeca, one week on Bowery and then come back to Chinatown. We always work on multiple districts at the same time to keep things interesting.” — Curbed
The crowdsourced design-build was begun by a German user named MineFact who had attempted a similar project the year before for his hometown of Frankfurt using rendering software that incorporated data taken from Google Maps. Incorporating a replacement for the obsolete Mercator projection... View full entry
Minecraft lovers may soon be able to wander around a virtual Albany.
A voluntary group of builders associated with Build the Earth Northeast USA is building the city and other parts of the Capital Region into the game.
— Albany Times Union
The organization is made up of thousands of volunteer gamers who have produced successful virtual versions of other cities distributed across regional networks. Building in the hugely popular MMOG has seen a renaissance of late thanks to a mod intervention which produced construction techniques... View full entry
Arthur Szlam and colleagues at Facebook Research have begun work on an AI assistant that can learn from its interactions with humans and then perform a wide range of tasks on request. The more it learns the more it can do. The team has chosen Minecraft, the best-selling 3D sandbox video game, as... View full entry
Minecraft has come a long way since its introduction a decade ago. It remains one of the top paid mobile games in Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store, while Minecraft: Education Edition has become a popular way to teach kids things like computer coding, engineering, architecture, urban planning and math. — CNET
The popular sandbox video game, Minecraft, known for enabling players to craft worlds, structures, objects, and pretty much anything one can imagine within its framework, has been due for "a major update since 2017." The "Super Duper Graphics Pack was expected to bring more lighting... View full entry
While normally used by online gamers to create a generated world for exploration and combat, the world-building computer game Minecraft has been noted for its architectural capabilities. BlockWorks, a design studio in the UK, uses the game as a design tool to create materials for marketing... View full entry
The BlockWorks studio proves, yet again, that architects can use Minecraft as a design tool to produce rather magical results with impressive detail. The team of architects, designers, and animators envision mystical cubic worlds in response to what they refer to as "Briefs", which include... View full entry
Australia’s next national park could be designed on the video game Minecraft – and by primary school children – if a new venture by the [NRAMLR] goes to plan. In a move worthy of Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, pupils from the Adelaide Hills area have been invited to design their 'perfect national park' using the block-building game, with $8.9m allotted to bring the winning student’s design to life. — The Guardian
The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...]
“Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
Related: Tate Museum Creates Minecraft World Inspired by Famous Paintings View full entry
Tate Worlds are exciting Minecraft ‘maps’ that present virtual environments inspired by artworks from Tate’s collection. The maps allow players of Minecraft to explore a range of paintings and sculpture, undertaking various activities and challenges that relate to the themes of the artworks, or exploring how they were made. Tate has teamed up with some of Minecraft’s best known mapmakers to create these virtual artworks, offering a unique combination of art, history and adventure. — Tate.org
The first two maps were released by the museum on November 24th and were based on two famous paintings of urban settings: Andre Derain’s 1906 painting of London, The Pool of London, and Christopher Nevinson’s 1920 painting of New York, Soul of the Soulless City.André Derain, the... View full entry
People often compare Minecraft to LEGO; both support open-ended creation (once you’ve mastered the crafting table, you can build nearly anything) and, of course, they share an essential blockiness. But I think this comparison is misleading, because a LEGO set always includes instructions, and Minecraft comes with none.
Minecraft is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge.
— Medium
Swedish architecture firm Equator, in partnership with Mojang – the creators of Minecraft, invited players of the popular video game to submit their ideas for an architecture competition that would be held within the game itself.
The Minecraft design competition, which runs until July 31st, is in line with a 2023 housing project by HSB Stockholm in Kungsbroplan. The housing company is holding an architectural competition for the project and wants to see ideas related to the future of housing.
— psfk.com
Equator and Mojang invite all minecrafters to a Minecraft Competition July 1 to July 31. HSB Stockholm has chosen a site, at Kungsbroplan in Stockholm, for its future project in 2023, where they want to see new ideas about housing in the future. But a good city is not just about housing, it... View full entry
