Inspiring Young Writers with Minecraft

Maybe crediting Minecraft with it is "not correct", but I see with my own son too that a lot his creativity centers around open-ended games - including Minecraft - that helps provide structure when he wants to sit down and write.

It provides ample inspiration, and a setting that he can describe rather than have to invent from scratch, and that is very helpful "scaffolding" to be able to focus on the story in the beginning.

As he gets "caught up" in describing something, what he describes starts to morph away from the game world he started with.

Look at the vast amount of heavily scripted Youtube videos that use open-ended sandbox games as "set" and you see much of the same, where the games clearly affect the creative process by letting people act and react and describe rather than having to jump straight into inventing from scratch.

My daughter loves telling Minecraft stories when we are going for walks or in the car. They're long quite complicated stories about her, me, and her friends having various made up adventures in the Minecraft world. More often than not they'll spin off to include elements not possible in the game, but they always start in the Minecraft world.

It's a fantasy world that is more tangible to them than most, because they can dip in and out at will and explore it more.

I know for my own part, I can still remember part of the geography of various CIV games I played 10-15 years ago, and often elements of what played out.

It's the same with Minecraft - once you get games like this, where the spatial aspects of the game world hangs sufficiently together, we're very good at remembering it.

And what we're good at remembering, we have a better shot at describing well.

That makes it a comfortable, safe, but still exciting starting point.

IIRC the rules regarding income get fuzzy when basing one's written work on the Intellectual Property of another entity. As in a "Minecraft story" revenue would likely default to the owner of the IP, not the unaffiliated writer. If the entity such as Minecraft reaches an agreement to give the writer of the derivative content compensation, I think that's their choice (e.g. they never hired the writer and are allowed control of their IP, which can include take-downs). There's a lot of good publicity to be earned by including fan-works into a global campaign, for sure! Also, money! See: "50 Shades of Grey" and its relationship to "Twilight" being a way where both parties became fiscal winners.

Children want to play minecraft. All their friends play that, not Minetest. Who will they play with on their minetest server? You?

It's like when I was a young kid, I wanted a game boy, but I got those shitty tiger electronic games. My parents saw it as the same thing, but I couldn't trade pokemon with my friends or talk about Zelda. Proprietary software either way, but children don't care. Let children find their own way to FOSS, not force them into using some half-baked clone.

In the context of this article and the application, most kids don't care about being able to "share freely with their friends and family." They care about playing a game they're familiar with, enjoy playing and that their friends play too.

The suggestion reminds me of when I was small and some classroom didn't have Legos but some knock-off that was nearly identical, functionally, but much less inspiring to play with.

Is that really the case though? I mean, I'm no longer a customer of Mavis Beacon, Mario Teaches Typing, and Dino Park Tycoon ...

I could potentially see a conflict if we were talking about a subscription-based or microtransaction-based game, but Minecraft is a one-time purchase. And, I expect, most of the kids who are super-excited about Minecraft already have a license anyway.

Yeah but Minecraft is perfectly suited for children entertainment. It's not Joe Kool selling cigarettes to kids, it's a video game about cubes.

What a dim view. More to the point, one that cuts both ways.

Children playing outside are in the early stages of a physically and financially devastating addiction perpetrated by those monsters in the sporting goods and sports medicine industries. Before you know it, they'll be loading up Subarus full of REI snowboarding gear and burning gasoline in the direction of Tahoe. Keep your kids away from the outdoors, everyone, there lies capitalism!

Children reading are merely a resource being ripened for exploitation by publishing companies, who have somehow duped the taxpayer into providing customers for them!

Communicating with each other? Oh God, the horror.

On the other hand, if my daughter is anything to go by, they would play Minecraft no matter what. Might as well get some education in there while they are at it.