Engadget: ‘Minecraft’ is coming to Chromebooks. “Microsoft has announced that Minecraft is coming to Chromebooks and is available to try right away via an Early Access version. The game will include ‘cross-device play with friends, access to Minecraft Marketplace, and the ability to play on Realms,’ according to developer Mojang.”
How-To Geek: Archeology Is Coming to Minecraft. “Mojang, one of the many game studios under the Microsoft umbrella, confirmed in a blog post that a new feature in Minecraft 1.20 will be archeology. Areas with sand, like beaches and deserts, will have a new block called ‘suspicious sand.’ Brushing the block with a new item, the brush, will extract items hidden within.”
The Verge: Microsoft doesn’t own the rights to Minecraft’s ending — no one does, its author claims. “There is no question who wrote the poem at the end of Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time. Julian Gough is the one who gave the game’s unseen gods their voice, beautifully telling the player how the universe loves them — and how the player is the universe, dreaming of itself…. What we did not suspect — not till we read Gough’s new Twitter thread and an epic 10,000-word blog post that is well worth a full read — is that Microsoft may not actually own the rights to the game’s ending.”
Tubefilter: There’s an AI VTuber now and it has 70,000 followers on Twitch. “As her name implies, Neuro-sama is essentially a neural network with a VTuber-style face. Her creator, who goes by the anonymous title Vedal, has steered their virtual creation to a substantial following on Twitch. On the vedal987 channel, Neuro-sama streams games like Minecraft, and her gameplay is strong enough that it doesn’t immediately give her away as an artificial intelligence. Her abilities are fascinating enough to draw more than 70,000 followers on Twitch.”
Boing Boing: Import your old Sim Cities into Minecraft. “Got some old Sim City 2000 cities lying around? Import them to Minecraft with Mine City 2000, an astonishingly precise converter made by jgosar.”
MIT Technology Review: A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing. “OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.”
Lifehacker: Someone Built a 4D Minecraft Clone. “Video games usually come in one of two dimensions: You have your 2D side scrollers, or, more commonly, your typical 3D adventures. Rarely do you see a game that pushes beyond these dimensions, since, you know, we live in the third dimension. Why, then, does a Minecraft clone exist in 4D?” There is a video in the article that really helps it make sense.
Bleeping Computer: Minecraft is hackers’ favorite game title for hiding malware. “Security researchers have discovered that Minecraft is the most heavily abused game title by cybercriminals, who use it to lure unsuspecting players into installing malware. Based on stats collected by the security firm between July 2021 and July 2022, Minecraft-related files accounted for roughly 25% of malicious files spreading via game brand abuse, followed by FIFA (11%), Roblox (9.5%), Far Cry (9.4%), and Call of Duty (9%).”
NBC News: The rockstars of Minecraft are giving teens something to root for online . “Without as many traditional Internet A-listers as years past, VidCon, an annual social media conference for creators and their fans, seemed unusually quieter this year. That is, unless you were at the Dream SMP panel on Thursday. Two hours before the group, made up of Minecraft players, was expected to show up, screams had already broken out from the packed audience of about 2,000 fans. That doesn’t include the 135,000 people who livestreamed the panel from their homes.”
CNET: How Minecraft Is Teaching Kids to Face the Threat of Climate Change. “How do you teach a child about bushfires that could engulf their home? How do you teach a child about how floods and rising sea levels loom over parts of their country? In a place like Australia, where climate catastrophes are not only common, but becoming increasingly ever present, it’s all the more important to prepare children for the future. What better tool than the game they already spend all their free time playing? Minecraft is the answer. If you build it, they will learn.”
Michigan Daily: ‘Minecraft’ gave us the soundtrack to a generation. “I had never cared much for the soundtrack of ‘Minecraft,’ but when I first heard the mellow piano arpeggio of C418 [Daniel Rosenfeld]’s ‘Wet Hands’ fade in on my most recent playthrough, I was immediately transported from soulless, resource-gathering gameplay to another realm, one far beyond the menial tasks (both in the game and in real life) that kept me tethered down to this temporal dimension. I was instantly lost in ancient memories of the game, memories I didn’t even know I had. Within my mind, I casually meandered between entire years of my life: I had become unstuck in time.”
CNET: How the mining industry is using Minecraft to get into kids’ heads. “Cute mascots have always been useful educational tools, teaching life skills in an easily digestible manner. But in 2014, children in the Mackay region of Queensland, Australia, were confronted by an eldritch horror abomination of a mascot: Hector, the human-size lump of coal.”
CNET: Minecraft crosses 1 trillion views on YouTube, most popular game ever on platform. “Minecraft is already one of the best selling games ever made, up there with Tetris, Mario and Grand Theft Auto. Now it’s crossed a new milestone, counting more than 1 trillion views across YouTube.”
HackRead: Minecraft declared the most malware-infected game. “Malware strains have gradually become the leading cause of infection targeting millions of devices worldwide annually. A new report from Atlas VPN revealed that the PC and mobile gaming industry is the current big target of malware authors and Minecraft is their favorite game to bait gamers.”
Make Tech Easier: Minecraft vs. Roblox: Which Is Best for You or Your Child?. “Minecraft vs. Roblox is a big battle between two of the leading sandbox games. They both let players build and explore worlds, go on adventures alongside others, and create something akin to using digital Lego bricks. Even so, there are differences you’ll want to know about before choosing one. This post will look at Minecraft vs. Roblox in a number of areas, and which one’s best for you (or your child).”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.