Stone Marshall's Blog, page 166

Minecraft unveils Discovery Update for Windows 10 and Pocket Edition

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Game developer Mojang unveiled the next update for Minecraft‘s Windows 10 and Pocket Edition: the Discovery Update. The update now bumps the game to version 1.1 and focuses heavily on exploration.

In a blog post, Mojang’s Marsh Davies explained:

It’s not called The Discovery Update for no reason: there are many mysterious and wondrous things to uncover. Barter with a cartographer for a treasure map, sling your supplies into a llama’s pack (or into a shulker box) and embark on an epic quest to locate the dank and dangerous forest mansion! Does your route take you across an impassable river? The Enchantment of Frostwalking will solve that problem! Meanwhile, the Enchantment of Mending will keep your swordblade sharp no matter how many mobs you slay along the way. Defeat the sinister illagers who lurk within the mansion and make off with their precious loot – the Totem of Undying – and cheat death as you throw yourself into further peril!

The update also includes the ability to dye your bed a new color or build with new terracotta and concrete blocks. Players can also alter the movement properties of mobs. Mojang also promised to deliver more features for the Discovery Update.

Update 1.1 for Windows 10 and PE versions of Minecraft does not heavily differ from the Exploration Update that launched nearly five months ago.

Minecraft unveils Discovery Update for Windows 10 and Pocket Edition

Gotta Catch Em’ All – 12 Of The Strangest Pokémon Conspiracies Unwrapped!

Pokémon Go may have already overtaken Tinder and be creeping up on Twitter, but look up from catching that Dratini for just a second and pay attention! If you think finding a dead body during a stroll is bad, here are 12 Pokémon conspiracies that might just ruin your childhood – from mass genocide to possessed PokéBalls, the Pokémon fans sure have a warped mind when it comes to the cute pocket monsters. Whilst we patiently await Pokémon Sun & Moon, here is a run down of some of the craziest theories to come out of the long grass in the past 20 years…tin foil hats at the ready!

1. War Of The Worlds

Wow, there sure are a lot of children wandering around here, maybe it is because adults playing with anthropomorphic monsters is a bit weird, or maybe it is something all together more sinister! There is a theory that our heroes are left to potter around unsupervised because there simply aren’t enough adults around following a ‘Great War’. In fact, this one is so widely accepted, the theory has theories about the theory! It all comes from what Lt. Surge says to you way back when:

Hey kid! What do you think you’re doing here? You won’t live long in combat!

That’s for sure! I tell you what kid, electric Pokèmon saved me during the war!

Are Surge’s words just a coincidence? Well, let’s look at the facts. In the original games you play Red (you have no father), and your rival is an orphan. Most of the adults you meet are either very old, gym leaders, or have a military background. At this point, you realise there was the Great Kanto War, where the majority of adults were killed off! This would also explain the alarming amount of nurses and hospitals, plus why everyone is constantly battle-ready.

2. Bones

No, this isn’t a case for David Boreanaz, this is the rather grim tale of Cubone and its rather unusual headwear. When a mother Kangaskhan dies, the poor orphan is left to fend for itself. The orphan wears its mothers skull and becomes Cubone – when Cubone evolves into Marowak, the skull fuses with the head. Female (and only female) Marowaks can later evolve into Kangaskhans and the cycle starts again. The morbid theory hypothesises that as Pokémon is a kid’s game, this story was too much to take and so Kangaskhan was separated into its own form. You can go on to back up the theory with the fact that Kangaskhan relates to the word ‘kangaroo’ and Cubone knows the move ‘boomerang’…struth Sheila! There in a nine -minute video here for those who want to go into greater depth!

3. Koff It Up

Team Rocket’s Pokémon choices were never going to be the best of the bunch, but a big purple ballooon…really?!? Both Koffing/Weezing can only be found in the Pokémon Mansion – an abandoned lab from the original games, so what was T.R. up to in there? Reddit tells us that evil Team rocket were trying to recreate a ghost-type Pokémon by cloning their gaseous forms. Whatever they were cooking up in there, it looks like they ballsed it up, ending up with two gaseous fart bags instead of the intended ghost-type. Also, if you look at the skull and cross-bones on the Pokémon’s chests, it would suggest man-made. The symbol is the universal mark for toxic, so unless Koffing/Weezing have some pretty clever birth marks, it looks like someone made them this way!

4. Million Dollar Bill

Think before you heal! Ever wonder how the Poké-Center will heal your Pokémon and let you go on your way without so much as a dime? Sure, we have Obamacare, but what pays to keep the lights running and the Nurse Joys joyful? You may just be a child, so you aren’t going to foot the bill, but someone has to! Enter mommy dearest. As you trot around having the adventure of your life, your mom waits at home as the bills pile up. Now not only a widow, but in over her head with hospital bills!

5. Ground Zero

Whilst Pokémon Go is currently getting itself into hot water for people collecting at the 9/11 memorial, this isn’t first time the games have caused controversy at Ground Zero. If great wars and bankrupting your mother weren’t bad enough, how about a Poké-world where 9/11 still happened, thanks to the twisted theory sets the Black and white games in a post-9/11 aftermath. The theory is so controversial, Cracked did an article including it in ‘The 9 Most Offensive 9/11 References in Pop Culture’. Director Junichi Masuda even revealed that the Unova was based on New York City, but was the mistake intentional? You can clearly see Unova’s pond match up to Central Park, but what about that desolate wasteland in the middle…is this Ground Zero?

6. Mew Gotta Be Kidding Me?

What would you rather be, a wobbly blob of jelly, or the rarest Pokémon of them all? Sure, Ditto can mimic the other 721 Pokémon, but by all accounts this little sludge monster is a failed clone of Mew. Mew contains the DNA of all other Pokémon and can reproduce asexually…you know who else can do that?!? Ditto! If you still aren’t convinced, both share nearly identical colour palettes, have a common weight of 8.8.lbs and are the only two Pokémon who can learn the transform move naturally. The difference is that Mew in incredibly rare, whilst Ditto is in abundance on Cinnabar island, could the experiments have escaped the lab? Ditto isn’t exactly a positive case for cloning – it is Dolly the Sheep all over again.

7. Clefable The Friendly Ghost

The ghost Pokémon have always provided us with more questions than answers, like are they just other Pokémon in dead form? There are some pretty great theories, like that Voltorb is simply a possessed Poké-ball after a Haunter became trapped inside, however, our favourite ghost theory is Clefable and Gengar. Ever noticed how Gengar and Clefable look oddly similar? Well Creepypasta has cracked the mystery – your angry Gengar is just a Clefable shadow! Known as the shadow Pokémon has lead people to ask, “Just what is Gengar the shadow of?” Not quite as simple as Peter Pan and his shadow, but Gengar bears more than a slight resemblance to the giant Kirby wannabe. To put the icing on the cake, before the release of Pokémon X and Y, both Gengar and Clefable were unable to hit each other with STAB attack…have you ever tried to stab your shadow?

8. The Missingno-Link

An abbreviation of ‘missing number’, Missingno was the more than helpful glitch in the original games. Aside from the joy of getting one over on the game and giving you unlimited Master Balls or Rare Candy, Nintendo actually acknowledged the existence of the mystery Pokémon. It is believed that Missingno was an underdeveloped Pokémon that creators tried to remove from the game, but ultimately got stuck in the code. A more disturbing theory is that a Missingo is what happens to a Pokémon when it spends an extended amount of time trapped in its Pokéball, which would also explain why Pikachu is so reluctant to go inside.

9. Fly Me To The Moon

Of all the places to visit in the Pokémon world, Mt. Moon is one of the strangest, but also most rewarding locations in the Kanto region. Who can pass up on finding a Helix Fossil, or grabbing a Moon Stone, but where did it all come from? Some people hold that Mt. Moon was once an active volcano, hence all the Pompeii style fossils. However, I always prefer the theory that Clefairies came from space and populated the mountain. The Clefairies landed in their spaceship and brought their precious Moon Stones with them to feel more like home.

10. You Rock My World

So, in Reddit’s warped world, gym leader/travelling companion Brock is in fact Pokémon’s very own Medusa – cursed with the mystic eyes of a Gorgon. If you have ever wondered why Brock’s eyes always appear closed, it is because he has the ability to turn you to stone. The wacky doesn’t stop there – ‘Medusa Brock’ also explains why he is the owner of the rock gym and would imply that Onix was never actually a rock-type.

The theory does tend to lose traction though, as on several occasions you see Brock open his eyes. Just like above, Officer Jenny manages to escape rock free. Another joker says that maybe Brock’s eyes always look closed because he is constantly being maced for his advances on women!

11. R.I.P Raticate

Finally, these last two take the conspiracies to an all together darker area of the Poké-world (you have been warned). Back to the original games and oh, this guy again! Blue/Gary Oak was a pain in the backside of the Pokémon games, always popping up with a Bulbasaur to whip your Squirtle just when you least expected it. With some cunning tactics and a well stocked Poké-army, Blue wasn’t that hard to defeat. Blue’s Ratatta is at the forefront of his battle team all the way up until your fight on the S.S. Anne, where it becomes a Lv.16, newly evolved, Raticate – think of the pride on your rival’s face with his sparkly new Raticate.

You (obviously) kick his ass and carry on with your luxury cruise. The next time Blue pops up, where is Raticate? When you meet after the S.S. Anne it is in Lavender Town, the last resting place for dead Pokémon – in the madness of the cruise and overcrowding, Blue/Gary couldn’t get Raticate to a Pokémon Center in time and he passed away. Why the S.S. Anne wouldn’t have somewhere to heal on board is beyond me, but if it didn’t, and Raticate really did die, are you the game’s ultimate douchebag?!? Redditor WideEyedEspurr has since gone on to debunk the popular theory, mainly pointing out a kids game is unlikely to paint the main hero as a rat-squashing killer!

12. Grey’s Ashatomy

The first rule of storytelling is that it is never just a dream. Finally, for the biggest mindf**k of all theories and one that is pulled straight from the pages of some St. Elsewhere storyline – the whole series is taking place in Ash’s coma. After Ash is attacked by a group of Spearows, then struck by lightning during Ep. 1, he is rushed to the nearest hospital, but never wakes up. All those he meets on his travels represent a part of his life. Brock is his repressed sexuality, Pikachu his humanity and Team Rocket the parts of himself that he doesn’t like. Like the constants from LOST, Jenny and Joy were two women he knew before his accident, helping him remain grounded as he travels further into his own coma psyche.

Mewtwo, everyone’s favourite psychic cat, is an electronic impulse that the doctors apply to Ash’s brain to help bring him from the coma – this is how Mewtwo is able to ‘talk’. Coma theory also nicely explains why all the Jenny and Joy’s are all the same, as well as why Ash never ages, or accomplishes becoming a Pokémon master. Probably the most easily debunked of all the theories, but the one which ties up the lose ends that the other theories leave as question marks Maybe all of Pokémon takes place inside a young boy’s snow globe?

Aside from the may ghosts and goblins, the world of Pokémon can be a pretty scary place – it appears you can’t go for a cycle without ending up locked in a coma, or fighting a great war. Why can’t everyone just go back to swapping shiny Charizards and trying to train an unruly Pikachu. Ok, article over, back to discovering Dugtrios in the maternity ward and Sandshrews down your pants in Pokémon Go.

Gotta Catch Em’ All – 12 Of The Strangest Pokémon Conspiracies Unwrapped!

Where are the kids from Jurassic Park now?

Steven Spielberg changed the game 22 years ago when he released the dinosaur epic Jurassic Park, which remains one of the most successful and popular movies Hollywood has ever seen. Among those featured in the movie were kid actors Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards, who played the forever-traumatized grandchildren of Richard Attenborough. In the two decades since becoming famous for running from velociraptors, where are they now? We dug up some pretty interesting facts to catch you up to (carbon) date.

Now, here’s something that’ll make you feel super-old: Richards, now 36 (!) tied the knot with her hubby, Mark Bolton, in 2013, and is currently expecting her first child, due in November 2015. “My husband and I are thrilled,” Richards told PEOPLE in June. “This is really a wonderful moment for us. It’s super exciting.”

According to PEOPLE, over the years Richards shifted from acting to painting, which is now her main professional focus. “I love to work with people in the art and express their story on canvas and my impression of them and what they want to express and use oils, brushes, canvas to create something that will last the generation,” she revealed. Now reportedly in South America for her art tour, Richards says she’s living a “much quieter” but “still very rich” life compared to her days in the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. “My life story these days, I still experience the red carpet as an artist,” she said. “But on a day-to-day basis I live kind of a country life.”

According to a 2011 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richards sent Spielberg a watercolor self portrait of herself that was inspired by one of the scenes in Jurassic Park, which now hangs in Spielberg’s office. For his part, Spielberg is a pretty good gift-giver, too. “He never fails to send me something around Christmas,” Richards said. “When he finds people he likes, he’s really good at keeping in touch.” And here we thought we couldn’t love Spielberg more than we do already.

Richards’ movie career pretty much began and ended with the Jurassic Park franchise. She last appeared in a movie in the 1997 sequel, The Lost World. Subsequent acting gigs were on an incredibly smaller scale; TV movies like Broken Silence: A Moment of Truth Movie (1998) and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001) are among the titles. No, we’ve never heard of them either.

Also in her interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richards—who graduated from Skidmore college in 2011—admitted she hasn’t altogether ruled out a return to acting. “Sometimes I’m on the the pulse of what’s happening in Hollywood,” she said, “but other times, I’m just totally absorbed by what I’m creating on the easel.” Adding to PEOPLE, she said: “If some great role or project finds me, absolutely that could be a nice thing to do, for sure.” Here’s hoping she paid attention to Jurassic World’s record-breaking box office returns…

Where are the kids from Jurassic Park now?

Power Rangers come to Console, Pocket and Windows 10!

Assemble these superpowered skins today!

Mighty Morphing Power Rangers? How about… Miney Morphing Power Rangers? Hmmm, maybe not.

What’s got us so excited we’re throwing out puns this awful so early in the week? A new skin pack in Minecraft of course! The Power Rangers pack launches today on Console, Pocket and Windows 10 Edition. Go go, MINEY Morphing Power Rangers! (Hey, it’s catching on!)

You won’t just find the brightly-coloured buddies in the pack either. Every good superhero team needs an equally bad rogues gallery of cackling villains, so you’ll find skins for wrong un’s like Rita Repulsa, Bulk and Skull terrorizing the pack too. Initiate Megazord sequence!

“As a teen I remember getting out of school, grabbing a snack and settling into the cartoon line-up,” explains Mike Fielder, one of the artists who worked on the skin pack. “Part of that routine was watching Power Rangers. When I found out we would be working on a Minecraft version of some of the character line-up I was pretty excited and even more so when I found out Bulk and Skull would be included since they were my favourite characters. I had a blast creating Minecraft versions of these characters. I hope everyone who uses these skins has as much fun playing them as I did creating them.”

So next time your parents hassle you for watching too much TV after school, kindly remind them that Mike now gets to make skins in Minecraft for a living. Or respect your elders and just try some of these Power Rangers skins for free right now!

Power Rangers come to Console, Pocket and Windows 10!

The Walking Dead’s crap CGI deer looks like it wandered out of Minecraft

We’ve all heard the one about the deer with no eyes, but what do you call a deer with no soul? In The Walking Dead‘s latest episode, ‘Say Yes’, Rick Grimes had his back against a fairground ride, surrounded by zombies, and to escape the situation, he decided to shoot a nearby deer as a fresh-meat distraction. Only problem was, that deer looked like it had wandered straight out of Minecraft.

The glossy cervid in question was at the nadir of uncanny valley. It didn’t catch the light in the right way; it didn’t cast a realistic shadow, it didn’t fit cleanly into the 3D space it was meant to be occupying. It looked about as convincing as Donkey in Shrek. The result is totally jarring, especially considering there was a real-life deer in the second season of The Walking Dead. By comparison, this seventh season seems to be having weird budgeting issues – a lot of money seems to have been spent on making the zombies look as awesome as possible; deer, not so much.

Twitter’s reaction was strong, and there were many pisstakes. Pisstakes like this one:

Actual deer used in this weeks Walking Dead #cgifail #thewalkingdeaduk pic.twitter.com/sp5FUGScj6

— Colin Jellie (@Jelliewobbler) March 6, 2017

And this one:

The Walking Dead has always had cheesy CGI. But they just tried to pass this off as a live deer in tonight’s episode: pic.twitter.com/c6bXZjZkAD

— Bryan Griffith (@Notorious_B_A_G) March 6, 2017

And these ones:

Someone give an Emmy to the deer in @WalkingDead_AMC

Nailed its scene, such realism much actual deer #thewalkingdeaduk pic.twitter.com/Q18vNAHGOP

— DingIt TV (@DingItTV) March 6, 2017

I couldn’t believe how realistic that CGI deer was on ‘Dead’ tonight. #WalkingDead #zombies #FearTheDeer pic.twitter.com/2kfXSrL4AS

— Sentient Cow Games (@sentient_cow) March 6, 2017

FX budget cut hard on #WalkingDead #walkingdeaduk #cgi #deer #minesbetter pic.twitter.com/3IQXmc1YVq

— Mark Rayman (@markrayman) March 6, 2017

Other fans couldn’t quite believe how cheap the show looked:

Did the walking dead go back to season one funding with CGI, Jesus that deer… #thewalkingdeaduk #TheWalkingDead pic.twitter.com/9diAA4z9wq

— Paul Edwards (@P_Edwards8) March 6, 2017

And some even thought they could have done a better job:

Applying for the new intern position at @AMC_TV #TheWalkingDeadSeason7 #deer #WalkingDead #TWD #Richonne #CGI #TalkingDead #fakedeer pic.twitter.com/xzxruw73yf

— Ope Aaron (@ope_aaron) March 6, 2017

Deer oh deer.

The Walking Dead’s crap CGI deer looks like it wandered out of Minecraft

Minecraft Update 1.43 Is Live on PS4, Addresses Issues From 1.42

To help address some issues introduced after the release of 1.42 on Tuesday, 4J Studios has released Minecraft update 1.43 for PlayStation 4. Here’s the bugs it fixes:

Fix for MCCE-4226 – Wrong LOD showing for non-block item icons in the UI.
Fix for MCCE-4227 – Nether portals sending players to the wrong portals.
Fix for seeds always appearing as “0” in Load World menu.
Fix for MCCE-4321 – Player may fall through the block below them when jumping in a confined space e.g small tunnel.

“We’re currently working on a bug fix update to address issues found in the last update,” 4J wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Thanks for your patience.”

An ETA for the update on other platforms wasn’t given.

Discussing the recently released Fallout Battle Map Pack, 4J Art Director David Keningale said:

We tried out various different scenarios to see how they would look as Battle maps and we could quickly see Fallout would fit really well. But we knew we couldn’t just take anything from Fallout’s open world and hope it worked: Battle maps have to be pretty self-contained. By contrast, we did think about doing things in a Vault but we felt it was too enclosed for the way that Battle plays and you might get lost in the tunnels a little bit too much. So we decided to take it above ground and condense some of our favorite areas from across the series.

The Fallout Battle Map Pack is available for $1.99 USD/£1.99 and includes three maps: Libertalia, Capitol, and the General Atomics Galleria.

[Source: 4J Studios (1), (2), Minecraft Forum, Minecraft]

Read more at http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2...

Minecraft Update 1.43 Is Live on PS4, Addresses Issues From 1.42

Minecraft-Like Lego Worlds Delayed For PS4, Xbox One, And PC

Lego Worlds, the Minecraft-style sandbox game that lets you build basically anything with virtual Lego bricks, will launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in March, Warner Bros. has announced.

An announcement today on the PlayStation Blog doesn't mention a specific date, but the Xbox Store lists it for March 7. The game is currently available on PC through Steam Early Access; the final version is slated to launch on March 7. Today's announcement confirms a delay, as Warner Bros. previously said Lego Worlds would launch for console and PC on February 21.

A Nintendo Switch version is in development, but a release date for it has not been announced.

A DLC pack called Lego Agents, featuring more characters, vehicles, and weapons inspired by the Lego Agents physical toys, will launch first on PS4. It will be exclusive to Sony's system for 90 days.

Lego Worlds was released on PC in June 2015 with little fanfare. The sandbox game is made up entirely of Lego bricks, which players can manipulate to build almost anything they want. You can play solo or with friends through local co-op and online multiplayer.

GameSpot's Lego Worlds Early Access review from June 2015 said, “It's an absolute delight to explore and build even in the game's current state, but there's still plenty of room to grow.”

Lego Worlds is developed by Lego series developer Traveller's Tales. It is priced at $30, but the Early Access version is available for $15.

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Minecraft-Like Lego Worlds Delayed For PS4, Xbox One, And PC

‘Minecraft’ players design Elon Musk’s secret SpaceX Tunnel for him

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, may be working on a secret underground tunnel that runs from his office at SpaceX to the Los Angeles International Airport. He tweeted a picture earlier this month of what looks like the start of the tunnel along with the word “Minecraft,” and a group of Lithuanian Minecraft players saw it as a challenge.

The crew of players spent two days in Minecraft creating an imagining of the tunnel that runs from SpaceX to LAX and posted a timelapse of the project on YouTube. This was the same crew that built a proposal for a Tesla Gigafactory in Lithuania, which caught the attention of Tesla.

Maybe SpaceX will catch wind of this new Minecraft project and use it as inspiration for whatever secret projects it has going on.

‘Minecraft' players design Elon Musk's secret SpaceX Tunnel for him

Learning chemistry within Minecraft video game

Date:
February 15, 2017
Source:
University of Texas at Dallas
Summary:
Scientists are exploring whether teaching real-world science through a popular computer game may offer a more engaging and effective educational approach than traditional concepts of instruction. A group of 39 college students from diverse majors played an enhanced version of the popular video game “Minecraft” and learned chemistry in the process, despite being given no in-class science instruction.
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Using the mod and instructions provided on a Wiki website, players can, for example, harvest and process natural rubber to make pogo sticks, or convert crude oil into a jetpack using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes. (stock image)
Credit: © Monkey Business / Fotolia

A University of Texas at Dallas team is exploring whether teaching real-world science through a popular computer game may offer a more engaging and effective educational approach than traditional concepts of instruction.

In an article recently published in Nature Chemistry, a UT Dallas team — including a materials scientist, two chemists and a game design expert — describes how a group of 39 college students from diverse majors played an enhanced version of the popular video game “Minecraft” and learned chemistry in the process, despite being given no in-class science instruction.

Dr. Walter Voit led the team that created “Polycraft World,” an adaptation or “mod” for “Minecraft” that allows players to incorporate the properties of chemical elements and compounds into game activities. Using the mod and instructions provided on a Wiki website, players can, for example, harvest and process natural rubber to make pogo sticks, or convert crude oil into a jetpack using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes.

“Our goal was to demonstrate the various advantages of presenting educational content in a gaming format,” said Voit, a materials science and engineering professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “An immersive, cooperative experience like that of ‘Polycraft World' may represent the future of education.”

Crafting a Teaching Tool

Dr. Ron Smaldone, an assistant professor of chemistry, joined the project to give the mod its accuracy as a chemistry teaching tool. Dr. Christina Thompson, a chemistry lecturer, supervised the course in which the research was conducted, and joined Smaldone in mapping out assembly instructions for increasingly complex compounds. Voit spearheaded a team of programmers that spent a full year on development of the platform.

“Eventually, we got to the point where we said, ‘Hey, we can do something really neat with this,'” Voit said. “We could build a comprehensive world teaching people materials science.”

For Smaldone and Voit, much of the work was finding in-game objectives that provided a proportional difficulty-reward ratio — worth the trouble to build, but not too easy.

“If the game is too difficult, people will get frustrated. If it's too easy, they lose interest,” Voit said. “If it's just right? It's addicting, it's engaging, it's compelling.”

Thompson and Smaldone produced more than 2,000 methods for building more than 100 different polymers from thousands of available chemicals.

“We're taking skills ‘Minecraft' gamers already have — building and assembling things — and applying them to scientific principles we've programmed,” Smaldone said.

Some of the “Polycraft World” gamers became surprisingly proficient in processes for which they had no prior instruction, Voit said.

“We've had complete non-chemists build factories to build polyether ether ketones, which are crazy hard to synthesize,” he said. “The demands of the one-hour-a-week class were limited, yet some students went all-out, consuming all this content we put in.”

Dr. Monica Evans, an associate dean for graduate programs and associate professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, is a co-author of the paper and leads the University's game design program, which is ranked as one of the top programs in the country by The Princeton Review.

“It's quite difficult to make a good video game, much less the rare good game that is also educational,” Evans said. “The ingenuity of the ‘Polycraft' team is that they've harnessed the global popularity of an existing game, ‘Minecraft,' and transformed it into something that is explicitly educational with a university-level subject.”

Classroom Instruction Not Included

Voit and Smaldone see “Polycraft World” as an early step on the road to a new format for learning without classroom instruction.

“The games that already exist mostly serve only as a companion to classroom learning,” Smaldone said. “The goal here is to make something that stands alone.”

A significant advantage of using such a tool comes in the volume of data it returns on student performance.

“We can measure what each player is doing at every time, how long it takes them to mix chemicals, if they're tabbing back and forth to our Wiki, and so on,” Voit said. “It gives us all this extra information about how people learn. We can use that to improve teaching.”

Smaldone agrees: “With traditional teaching methods, I'd walk into a room of several hundred people, and walk out with the same knowledge of their learning methods,” he said. “With our method, it's not just the students learning — it's the teachers as well, monitoring these player interactions. Even in chemistry, this is a big innovation. Watching how they fail to solve a problem can guide you in how to teach better.”

Smaldone admits the concept must overcome doubts held by some that gaming cannot serve useful purposes.

“There's a preconception among some that video games are an inherent evil,” he said. “Yet in a rudimentary form, we've made a group of non-chemistry students mildly proficient in understanding polymer chemistry. I have no doubt that if you scaled that up to more students, it would still work.”

Voit's plans for the next version of “Polycraft World” will take it beyond teaching chemistry. Perhaps the most ambitious objectives revolve around economics.

“We've worked with several economists, and are developing a monetary system,” Voit said. “There will be governments and companies you can form. A government can mint and distribute currency, then accumulate goods to prop up that currency. We'll see teams of people learning how to start companies or countries, how to control supply and demand, and how to sustain an economy.

“Learning about micro- and macroeconomics by actually doing it can impart a much richer understanding of what monetary policy looks like and why.”

Evans sees great potential for this project.

“It's a pleasure to be part of such a unique, transformative project, particularly as it moves forward into the next few stages of development,” she said.

For Smaldone, the appeal of the project comes from both its uniqueness and potential to yield change.

“No one else is doing this to this level. That's why I think we've gotten traction,” he said. “I think we have a chance to make an impact, even if only demonstrating how powerful it is to infiltrate a game with real, serious content. That's a proof of concept that so far, at least in chemistry, no one has done.”

Learning chemistry within Minecraft video game

From trees to towers, this Minecraft model of Chicago is incredibly detailed

After spending four years building Chicago out of virtual blocks, an 18-year-old from the north suburbs unveiled an intricate Minecraft map of downtown on Saturday.

Ryan Zull, a New York University student who grew up in Deerfield, posted the model on Reddit under his username, Koodoo25. At a 1-to-2 scale, it's among the most detailed models of the city ever made in Minecraft.

The model lets users navigate Chicago's Loop and areas just north of and west of the river, including the Wrigley Building, Willis Tower, Trump Tower, Millennium Park and Jeanne Gang’s Aqua.

Microsoft to buy ‘Minecraft' maker for $2.5 billion

Minecraft, which was first released to the public in 2009 and bought by Microsoft in 2014, is one of the best-selling video games ever, according to Time. Minecraft is a sandbox video game, which means it has no rules and it’s up to gamers to create their own experiences. It allows users to build and explore worlds where they can compete or work alone or together.

Zull said he first started working on the model in July 2013, though the work wasn't continuous, and the project sometimes sat untouched for as long as a year.

He's not the first to publicly release a Minecraft model of Chicago — another Reddit user posted one in 2015. But Zull's is more than twice as detailed as that model, by scale.

“I started by making Mies van der Rohe‘s Federal Plaza and eventually worked my way outwards from there,” Zull said in an email. “All the buildings and streets were created directly within Minecraft. … All the design is done by measuring dimensions of buildings and streets in Google Maps and fitting them into the Minecraft world as proportionately and accurately as possible.”

He unveiled his Chicago map on Reddit Saturday and quickly gathered acclaim. But Redditors were also instantly curious about the project's future and were quick to request additions. One user asked if Navy Pier and Lincoln Park would be built, while another asked about CTA lines.

Zull said the model is a work in progress and that he plans on building all of downtown.

“There may be a few tiny details or dimensions a little bit off, but everything down to the placement of streetlights and trees was done to recreate what I saw in Google Maps Street View as accurately as I could,” he wrote on Reddit.

Minecraft players can download a playable version of the map themselves on Planet Minecraft. As of 4 p.m. Monday, 515 people had downloaded it.

From trees to towers, this Minecraft model of Chicago is incredibly detailed