That’s a wrap for this liveblog. There is a closing ceremony to come, but I have two young Minecrafters of my own who I’ve promised I’ll be home in time to read a bedtime story to, and it’s a long-ish journey ahead.
The thing that’s hit home this weekend, though, is that Minecraft is much more than just a game that children (and adults - someone was telling me the other day that the average player age is 28, although I haven’t had that officially from developer Mojang) play. For many children, Minecraft is their entertainment - and the YouTubers who make Let’s Play videos with it are their pop stars.
I haven’t written nearly enough this weekend about the crossover between Minecraft and education - from the efforts of Mojang’s new parent company Microsoft to the Wonder Quest education series launched recently by Stampy to the various initiatives exploring whether Minecraft can be used to help children learn and practise programming skills.
That’s something to watch closely in the months ahead. Anyway, off I go, leaving an audience behind me happily waving their foam diamond swords and cuboid balloons. And as for the children...
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fyi Daniel wanted to be a policeman when he was younger, his favourite colour is blue, and he doesn’t speak any languages other than English. And the final question, from one bold youngster: “Will you come to my house?” He might pop round for a cup of tea.
So now you know.
Middleton has just punched a man off the top of Big Ben. “Oh no! I’ve done a terrible thing!” Meanwhile, it has started raining in virtual London. And punching the man has solved the quest, for reasons nobody seems quite sure of.
But regardless, he’s now giving the jewels to the Queen because London. There might be an MBE in this for him one day. Oh, he’s taking a virtual selfie with her. Maybe not.
And now questions from the audience. What does he like best: pugs or Minecraft? He can’t choose. How much Minecraft does he play a day? About six or seven hours. What’s his favourite video on his own channel? DanTDM Gets Sick:
What would he be doing if Minecraft didn’t exist? “If YouTube was still around as a thing then I’d like to think I’d still make video on something. But something in video or music production, as that’s what I did my degree on.” Favourite block in Minecraft? Diamond blocks, although he flirts with the idea of saying the slime blocks.
Who inspired him to do YouTube? “I started watching Minecraft videos like Sky Does Minecraft and VanossGaming,” he says. His favourite mob? A villager, with pigs coming in second. Who’s his favourite YouTuber? VanossGaming, again.
It’s striking how naturally he answers the questions - which are all coming from young children - no talking down or fake-wackiness. “PS my mum’s best friend loves you!” says one questioner, drawing a big laugh from the parents in the room.
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Anyway yes, Middleton is playing an adventure set in London, searching for a missing bus sign, then solving a jewel robbery - all with plenty of audience participation. Fans are shouting the answers whenever he asks a question, while parents give one another “I don’t understand this but at least we have seats for an hour, remember Peppa Pig World NEVER FORGET” glances.
It’s an interesting contrast to what you’d think of as traditional children’s entertainment, though: no exaggerated slapstick or shouting from Middleton - he really is just sat behind a laptop playing Minecraft and chatting about it with a fairly relaxed drawl. But his audience is rapt.
In other news I’m about four rows from the front to watch Daniel of The Diamond Minecart spend an hour playing Minecraft live - along with at least 3,000 other people. What scenes!
There was an extremely grumpy boy sat behind me complaining loudly about not being able to see. He’s moved now. That’s one of the awkward things about being a grown-up at Minecon: wherever you sit, there’s the risk that you’ll end up blocking the view of a six year-old who’s not afraid of calling you names.
'You don't need to be scared of YouTubers. We're as scared of you!'
I heard the quote above while eating lunch earlier, from a woman sat behind me who was obviously famous enough on YouTube to have children nervously approaching and asking for her autograph. She was joking to reassure them, but it did neatly sum up the curious situation that gaming YouTubers find themselves in, when they get popular.
A lot of the ones I’ve met remind me of, well, me as a 21 year-old: gamers keen to communicate their passion to a wider audience. Except that while for me the main option was to take a staff writer job at a magazine publisher like Future Publishing or Dennis here in the UK - I did exactly that with Official Dreamcast Magazine back in the day - for them it’s about online video and audiences in their millions. But also the pressures that brings.
These gamers are stars for their audience - somewhere between children’s TV stars and pop stars on the scale of fan fervour. They have gaming skills and video-making skills, but they’re also having to develop the kind of people skills required when every other child you see wants your autograph and/or a selfie and/or a deep chat about a specific element of a certain Minecraft mod or video. Celebrity skills, I guess you’d call it.
And all the time, they’re uploading videos every day, getting involved in conversations on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and having the kind of direct relationship with fans that a lot of traditional TV, film or music stars didn’t. They’re a fascinating new layer of pop-culture stars that, I suspect, the media still hasn’t quite gotten its head around.
I do hope they’re getting good support and advice, though: I can’t imagine the 21 year-old me being plunged into this kind of environment - where fandom crosses the digital-physical divide - and not finding it overwhelming at some point.
I’m assuming this has been announced before, but hadn’t seen it written about: Mattel is making a Minecraft-branded quadcopter drone based on the Ghast character (but you’ll have to wait until Autumn 2016 to buy it):
There’s an online TV show broadcasting from Minecon, with interviews shown live on nearby screens. Here’s Daniel Middleton, who runs the Diamond Minecart channel on YouTube, having his say.
Out of shot there was a growing crowd of children with foam swords and pickaxes, ready to seek an autograph as soon as he dares set foot on the expo floor.
More Mojang staff are giving a deep dive into the process of making Minecraft in a panel session that sounds like it may be useful for young programmers:
Now inflicting on my kids a discussion about java vs. C++ at "behind the scenes" session #Minecon2015
— Roger Milton (@rogermilton) July 5, 2015
"Oh that's secret code, don't look at that" #Minecon2015
— Mikael Hedberg (@slicedlime) July 5, 2015
Enjoying @Mojang panel! Idk dungeons had to be built 100% in code. Now devs use special in-game blocks. #Minecon2015 pic.twitter.com/vIHlTEupsd
— Douglas Kiang (@dkiang) July 5, 2015
A familiar face spotted in the art section of Minecon’s expo:
There’s one area of the expo with a bunch of Minecraft-themed fairground games. Cow Tipping appears to be the biggest hit of the lot, with a long line:
But Creeper Catch seems to be doing well too:
I’ve been impressed by the Minecraft-y trees scattered around the expo here. A close-up view reveals how they get the effect: metal cages and (I assume) careful pruning.
I think I’ve found the parent creche at Minecon...
At the world's largest live #Minecraft show Olivia is sat on the floor playing #CutTheRope. This is OK #Minecon2015 pic.twitter.com/k4JINuNmxw
— Dean Johnson (@activrightbrain) July 5, 2015
Not just OK: common, I’d say. Interestingly, most of the children I’ve seen playing on tablets to while away queue time aren’t playing Minecraft: Pocket Edition. Crossy Road seems to be the usual choice, as far as I can make out.
Block By Block seems an inspiring project: Eugenio Gastelum Pons from Mexico is talking about getting children involved in creating the designs for new parks, figuring out what they want from basketball courts to lighting, with Minecraft the conduit for their ideas to reach city planners.
Matt Needler and Phil Southam from FyreUK are showing some of the models they’ve built for Block By Block, starting with one in Nepal:
“It’s quite a fun challenge, because if you’ve seen our videos, you’ll know we aren’t usually building real structures,” says Needler. “It’s been really interesting trying to find things in Minecraft that can represent things in real life,” adds Southam.
They show their biggest model, built for a space in Haiti, which is massive. “We want to make it as detailed and accurate as possible,” says Needler. “We want to make it somewhere you can visit in Minecraft.” Meanwhile Southam talks about the experience of visiting the real cities after creating the builds: “I’m always worried I’m going to have missed a corner or something!”
“The fact that we can produce something using a game that helps people in the real world is really special,” says Southam, before handing over to Mojang’s Vu Bui, who explains that the original idea came from an outside organisation in Sweden, using Minecraft in an urban regeneration project.
“To be able to use what is designed and created purely as a game in things that are not directly gaming-related... and to use that to help people’s lives, is really special for us. This is not ‘the architect version’, this is just the pure game, but it can be used for uses outside what it was originally intended for, which is really exciting for us,” says Bui.
Currently, UN-Habitat is running between 30 and 35 projects, with 12 of those using Minecraft, with one having been completed. “By the end of this year we should be at about five, and with more finishing in 2016,” says Westerberg. Meanwhile, Needler says FyreUK is exploring the idea of making its builds available for the wider Minecraft community to explore. But they won’t be editable: only people in the cities covered by the projects will be involved in that process.
I’m now sitting in on a panel session about Block By Block, Mojang’s partnership with UN-Habitat to use Minecraft in public space design, which is one of the most interesting offshoots so far.
Pontus Westerberg, who coordinates the programme, describes it as using Minecraft “to involve communities, particularly young people, in the design of good public spaces - particularly in developing countries”. He explains that contact with Mojang began in 2012, and that the partnership has so far raised nearly $3m for real building projects.
His colleague José Chong talks about the definition of public spaces: anywhere people meet, shop, play sport... “All places publicly owned or for public use, accessible and enjoyable by all for free and without a profit motive,” is the official definition. “This is something where we are facing a lot of problems in many countries,” he adds. Not least because public spaces are also places where people can protest and demonstrate.
Chong says that successful cities have 50% of the city area as public space, but notes that this is often a seemingly-impossible achievement in the developing world. The process involves British developer FyreUK, which uses source materials like Google maps, plans and photos to build the virtual versions of the cities in Minecraft. Then UN-Habitat runs workshops with citizens using those builds to get their ideas on how their city’s public space should develop - and often the resulting plans are used for real building works.
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How many chief operating officers of games developers attract lines of autograph hunters at their company conferences? Here’s Mojang’s Vu Bui, currently dispensing big smiles, selfies and signatures for young Minecraft fans.
Meanwhile, around the show:
In my first mega queue now. But it's OK, I'm British. We queue well, we queue very well. #Minecon2015 pic.twitter.com/ARExfrv0pW
— Ector (@ectorvynk) July 5, 2015
MORE SWAG!!!! #Minecon2015 @whaleygeek @martinohanlon @SianTechyThomas 😝 pic.twitter.com/wdwt1iON10
— Hannah Mills (@Digitaldivageek) July 5, 2015
All Nico wanted at #Minecon2015 was the cube balloon from #minechest Tiniest Minecrafter is now happy. pic.twitter.com/w8w8R85TYt
— Amber Smirnow (@Ambersmirnow) July 5, 2015
I’ve been told to bring two of those cube balloons home tonight, which means taking them on the DLR then on a train from Liverpool Street. The chances of them not ending up floating miles above the London skyline are slim.
That said, when I took my now-eight-year-old to In The Night Garden Live once and bought him a helium Iggle Piggle balloon, he spent the next 10 minutes scampering along outside The O2 threatening to let it go, and when he did just that, my despairing dive wasn’t good enough to catch it.
I’d say the expressions on the faces of the other 700-odd parents watching were 20% been-there sympathy, and 80% uncontrollable mirth. With parenting, you have to take your schadenfreude where you can get it.
New features for Minecraft revealed
Here’s the promised standalone story on upcoming Minecraft features, based on a panel session featuring Mojang developers:
“Mojang also showed off a new area of the game for players to visit with a doomy yellow, purple and black colour scheme, and new trees that can be mined for “chorus fruit”, which in turn can create more new blocks.
The company is introducing a new mob called the Shulker, which sits inside a block that opens up, and shoots shuriken-styke projectiles at players that bounce off walls and travel round corners.
Mojang showed a demo of a player leaping upwards - using another new feature, a levitation effect - and fending off a battery of projectiles.”
Although I’ll put my expertise in “playing Creative Mode with two children while they destroy everything you’ve carefully crafted, while cackling” up against anyone, I’m not quite so expert at the business end of the game’s Survival Mode, so hoping I’ve not made any howling errors reporting the finer points of that session.
The new levitation effect and Shulker mob look fun though:
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Children keen to get their foam swords and pickaxes signed by YouTube stars Stampy or iBallisticSquid, good news: they’re still in the building. Although unless they spent the last hour in that block pit, they’ve probably moved on from book publisher Egmont’s stand.
Look who just popped by our block pit! @stampylongnose @iBallisticSquid #minecon2015 pic.twitter.com/R7FXjdoqRw
— Egmont Publishing UK (@EgmontUK) July 5, 2015
You just know that Egmont’s stand staff, once the show finishes, are going to be leaping into that block pit. Just like gleeful adults on a bouncy castle at a family party once the kids have gone to bed.
We’re about to start an hour-long session called The Minecraft Team - Upcoming Features, in which several Mojang staff will talk about what’s next for Minecraft across computers, consoles and mobile devices. I’ll be scribbling a report and then linking to it from here, so expect an hour’s quietness.
Can't make it to London? Here's a tour of #Minecon2015 in just over a minute: http://t.co/EZ4oD6R7pK pic.twitter.com/7DMR2zfxLX
— IGNUK (@IGNUK) July 5, 2015
Last thing from yesterday: since the opening-night show, dancing Minecraft Steves have been playing on a loop in my head overnight, so it’s only fair to share them with you...
While we’re going over yesterday’s news, here’s the standalone piece on Minecraft: Story Mode, an entirely new narrative-led adventure game being worked on by developers Mojang and Telltale Games.
“Telltale looked back to the 1980s for inspiration. “We wanted a story that evoked the classic film stories that we were passionate about,” said Stauffer.
“The movies we grew up with, the two tentpoles we called out were Goonies and Ghostbusters... movies that they just don’t make any more, not like that,” he said, before admitting that a more recent film, The Incredibles, has also been an influence.
“Roleplaying is pretty key. In a Telltale game where you’re driving the story, it’s literally roleplaying. You’re going to be able to play Jesse however you want to play him,” said Stauffer.
“You might have to decide which friends you want to be with the most, and which ones you’re going to have to leave behind. It’s about driving the story, role-playing as a character, and there’s a lot of tough decisions.”
One aspect that is sparking debate online, as it was in the venue, is the fact that the game’s playable character is set: a male character called Jesse, although Telltale said that there will be strong female non-playable characters.
The Observer also sent photographer Katherine Anne Rose to Minecon yesterday, and her best shots have been gathered in this Minecon 2015 - in pictures gallery. Some of the costumes are excellent (and, parents, worth bookmarking for later reference before Halloween, perhaps).
Minecraft's Minecon day one: recap
If you want to quickly catch up on the first day of Minecon, you can read yesterday’s liveblog, or the report that appeared in today’s Observer newspaper, and is now online:
The likes of Sqaishey Quack and iBallisticSquid may not be familiar in the wider world, but to their young audience they are genuine celebrities. When the compere asked children in the audience how much time they spend watching Minecraft on YouTube, one mother’s muttered “Years!” sparked laughter from the parents around her.
“Minecraft is a bona fide phenomenon on YouTube,” said Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s global head of gaming. “Its beauty is its openness: anyone can create a new Minecraft world and share it with others. The result is really rich, often weirdly wonderful content and very engaged communities.”
Wyatt added that, in 2014 in the US, Minecraft was the second most searched-for subject on YouTube. “Could anyone have predicted the huge success of Minecraft way back when? I doubt it. But content beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Long may the reign of this game continue.”
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Good morning! It’s 10.15am on a Sunday, and I’m perched in a plastic seat near the front of a cavernous room in London’s Excel conference venue, listening to uplifting trance music while a lush (if somewhat blocky) jungle environment spins on the giant screen above.
No, not a new music festival: Minecon. The annual conference for Minecraft is into its second day, and I’m here for the day covering it. My two sons (aged six and eight) are at home, fuming that they weren’t invited along - “I don’t see why I can’t liveblog,” said the eight year-old. Maybe next year...
Anyway, expect news and views from the conference sessions, photos from the accompanying exhibition, a sprinkling of quotes overheard in the crowd, and more evidence that the creative community around Minecraft is one of the most interesting, positive things in gaming right now.
