Education, Technology, and Society 2013

Beside the Looking For / The Finding’s Always Tame: * Mining, Crafting, Writing, Thinking

*  (The Loving of the Game, Pat Garvey, covered by Judy Collins)

Alice Lesnick, Bryn Mawr College

4C's March 2014, Indianapolis, Indiana

Intro.

Starting again with the essay, essayer, French for "to attempt" – TS Eliot still over there:

". . . perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. " (East Coker, Four Quartets)

While Judy gives the soundtrack: "nothing drives a gambler, like the loving of the game."

Blah Blah Blah     Risk      Blah Blah Blah

Let’s go!  But here --

“Chapter 1 

There was a wall.  It did not look important. “ (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed)

Let the wall be the binary [here we go again]:

Structure – freedom

Engrossment – distance

Debate – difference

Play – work 

Win – lose

Porous - sealed

Abstract - goncrete

Ideal - real

Specific - general

http://thejourneyofgrowing.wordpress.com/ 

http://catlintucker.com/favorite-web-tools/

accomplishment - i built another house, this one even more legit than the first one (which i lost ..). this one has three windows (which i made from glass that i made by smelting wood in my furnace .. i know, duh, of course that's how you make glass, but it still feels really cool to me!) .. and it has a door, and my bed, furnace, and crafting table, and chest. it's not very aesthetically pleasing and its super boxy and dark with a low ceiling, but hey it's mine! i feel strangely attached to this, like concerned with making it look nice .. and picking a 'nice' plot of land and clearing it, etc, as if this is really 'my' land and it all reflections back on me. but in a way, it is totally my creation , and it does reflect on me - so strange, i never thought i would experience this through a game! it really is an eerily good 'simulation' of how we interact with objects in the analog world. 

Day 1 (10/28/13): 

A Struggle: I am still unable to access the game because I did not use paypal when purchasing the game -- I used skrillz (the equivalent of paypal, but british one) because I used the visa card option, and was asked to provide the last 4 digits of SSS and birthday. It said "verified by visa" so I did not think much of it, but then my bank called my mom of suspicious activity and locked my mom's bank account. After a lot of phone calls and misunderstanding of minecraft being labeled as fraud, I was finally able to clear things up and buy it and download it, but the initial struggle was just obtaining the game. 

An Accomplishment:

I was finally able to buy the game via paypal (after many tries and phone calls!)

An observation:

This isn't so much related to minecraft the game itself, but it made me think of the legitimacy of games and the real possibility of fraud- since I purchased the game ONLINE, not a CD disk from Best Buy or anything. It was only because minecraft is a renowned game was the bank finally able to realize that the purchase wasn't fraud. I question if the decision would have been the same if the game hadn't been popular... Made me think of how much technology has evolved, because I know that when I was growing up, I bought the physical copy of the game from a store, not off the internet.

Day 2: 

A Struggle:

Finding cows to turn my humble garden into a farm.

An Accomplishment:

I have been building up my home and creating my own space in the Minecraft world. I know have a small sustainable garden in which I grow wheat to make bread to feed myself so I don't starve to death.

An Observation:

I noticed that another student in the class built her entire empire using glass and other tools I was not familiar with. It seemed like she had done an amazing job laying out her space in the game world and it looked something next to amazing. I was a bit envious coming from a home with a 2 layered stone wall and no roof but when I asked her in class how she was able to do it, she told me to check the wiki and she gave me other tips. When I tried that and it didn't work, I asked her if I could trade her some wheat for a cow because I couldn't find any in the world that weren't hers and she said yes. Something I mentioned in an earlier post was how lonely the game world felt. There isn't a real efficient way to communicate with someone in the game but when I saw the students' home and talked to her about it in person, she said it was totally okay to make that trade for wheat. This made me feel somehow less alone in the game world because although that vital communication factor was missing from the game, I could still interact with those personas in real life and maintain that sociality. Hopefully that makes more sense than I think it does.

A Question:

a friend shared with me 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/theres-a-youtube-trend-called-pretty-or-ugly

      This is my fourth attempt to at least master some basic skills in the game. I did drown a few times and fell in the cliff several times. I am not giving up. I have learned to be more observant of my surroundings, to stop and look around, and to plan my movements. Anyone knows how to get out from falling into a huge hall? I tried unsuccessfully to use the space bar but the hole is too deep.

    I really liked the interview with Thomas on Tuesday. He assigned the minecraft game such a high level of sophistication.

Today I was able to access the multiplayer game and finally interact in that world. I began the game with a few resources in my inventory and started to collect a few other things, but it was a little hard to find any worthwhile resources since we spawn in a place where there is just a lot of desert and there are not really any trees left. So, I went on a search for trees! It took a while to find some and I have to travel across lakes and up and down mountains until I finally found them. (Luckily I also found some pigs and cows along the way so I didn't starve.) I had been making pretty good progress and collecting more resources when I sadly fell straight off a cliff and to my death! :-( I was obviously really upset! I didn't even know that was possible! And of course, I lost all of the things that I had just been collecting and had to start all over again from the spawning point. But, I knew I couldn't give up, so I started out into the "world" again. I traveled for what seemed like a while, including swimming through rivers and climbing up mountains again, but I found an area with tons of animals and lots of trees, so I began collecting both items. I was able to finally make a table and a chest. I was a little bit concerned about just putting these down where I was because I knew that if I was killed again there would be absolutely NO way I would find them. However, I figured that if I die I will lose all of my supplies anyways, so I just did it anyways.