How to build a safe, social and fun virtual playground for children with Minecraft
Emergent gameplay takes on a whole new meaning when you combine the depth and breadth of Minecraft with the imagination of young children. What could go wrong?
According to Wikipedia, “Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics”.
Minecraft, first released in 2011, certainly qualifies for having relatively simple game mechanics. In the classic sandbox game, players explore a world consisting entirely of pixelated blocks. The world is procedurally generated, and features a variety of landscapes, structures and creatures. Players can discover, craft and create as they desire. It has been wildly popular, with an estimated 166 million monthly active players. This popularity led to Microsoft buying the game for $2.5 billion in 2014, and it can be played on a multitude of different platforms: PCs, Macs, mobile devices, consoles and more.
Minecraft is very much a complete brand. In the official shop, you can buy everything from plushies to chess sets. And, in sync with Valentine’s Day this week, why not treat your loved one to a personalised Minecraft mug?
Like LEGO, it’s also a great way to use technology to stimulate the imagination of children. They can build! They can play! They can explore! They can…. face danger! Wait, what? Well, the default game mode of Minecraft is SURVIVAL. In this mode, creatures with nefarious intent spawn at night, and the player needs to watch their health and food supply. An initial priority is to build a house so that the player can be safe at first nightfall. A pretty fun and challenging game experience for older ages, but anxiety-driving for younger children.
For our family adventures, we put Minecraft into its non-scary crafting and peaceful mode. No monsters come out to hunt you. You don’t have to worry about food and health. You can fly around the landscape at will. You can choose any block in the game to build with, without needing to find its constituent materials first. UNLIMITED IMAGINATION FUEL!
My children (4 and 7) both enjoyed single player Minecraft in different ways. For the younger child, the basics of exploring and building very simple and frankly incredibly random structures (BEHOLD THE TOWER OF WINDOWS!). The seven year-old was able to better appreciate building more complex things and exploring the wide variety of block types on offer (over 150).
I soon learned that some of their friends were also playing Minecraft, so decided to set up my very own server to allow them to play together. There are a few ways to do this. The official Microsoft way is via Minecraft Realms which uses a subscription model to rent a server (1 month free, then $7.99 per month) - this is the most straightforward due to how well-integrated it is with the game. There is also a wide range of third-party hosting companies, such as Apex Hosting who have plans ranging from $7.99 to $26.25 per month, depending on the processing power you want behind your virtual world.
Or… you can do it yourself!
I have a bit of a Home Lab going on for tech things, which easily gave me the ability to spin up a private virtual server to run Minecraft on. This is on the other end of the spectrum of using one of the providers mentioned above where you can just click a few buttons to get your server running. For those who also like spending far too much time on this sort of thing, you can find out more details in the Links section at the end of this article.
Once installed, everyone could connect and start playing together! A WhatsApp group was born for parents to co-ordinate activities.
There were some initial squeals of excitement at seeing ANOTHER PERSON exploring the world, and then the building began. Handily, one of the invited friends was already a bit of a dab hand at Minecraft. This meant some pretty cool structures started springing up early on, which in turn helped inspire my own children.
This was wonderful to see and my cold heart was filled with joy.
This is where the emergent gameplay aspects started to, well, emerge. Out of the box, Minecraft uses the honour system for building. One player can build something, but there is nothing to stop another player from knocking it down again. This led to a spate of signs like this cropping up in the game, and stronger parental intervention being required at times to prevent an escalation of tears:
It got even more challenging when the children’s voyage of discovery went on to include a fateful combination of TNT and FIRE. Suddenly, vast swathes of the landscape were ‘mysteriously’ vanishing.
Although some clever plugins always allow the culprits to be identified:
The potential for chaos led me to create this gem (ALL THE RAGE ON TIKTOK):
This was starting to put our entire Minecraft civilisation at risk due to a TNT-fuelled arms race, so I moved quickly to disable explosive blocks from working in the world. It’s a hard job, but someone has to be the benevolent dictator of this slice of the Internet.
Finally, although we’ve had parental supervision throughout this experiment… why should it be the children having all the fun? One Dad, a surveyor by day, started deploying his architectural vision at night. Behold, the waterfall of our hearts!
What have we learned?
The children (and adults!) are having a lot of fun. They are getting to express themselves by building whatever they can think of - and there are books that can help with the creative spark. Social dynamics are at play in terms of creating, destroying and having to get on with each other (most of the time). The children are reading books on how to build new things (including portals which were VERY exciting and naturally no-one obeyed my ‘DANGER - KEEP OUT!’ signs).
Every time I log into the server to see what has changed, something surprises me. The swimming pool shown earlier wasn’t there yesterday. Nor was the fancy new cow petting zoo.
What will be new tomorrow?
Links ‘n’ things
The server is running on an Intel NUC PC running Proxmox (Open source edition). The host VM is Ubuntu hosting a suite of Docker containers, one of which is docker-minecraft-server. It’s paired with docker-mc-backup for regular backups of the world.
Plugins are essential for a sane experience, due to Minecraft being wide open out of the box. Start with EssentialsX (does LOTS of different things), LuckPerms (permissions for players) and CoreProtect (lets you see what players have been doing - e.g. track the TRAILS OF DESTRUCTION and rollback afterwards!).
In more adult gaming news, I have mostly been playing Helldivers 2 on PC. It is the video game equivalent of Starship Troopers, both in terms of action and tone. Here’s 18 minutes of gameplay courtesy of IGN.