YOUR PLACE OR MINECRAFT? #6 - Where Villagers Have Sex For Iron
This witty web series follows the virtual lives of a handful academics playing Minecraft together. An online adventure of fun, smarts and drama. In episode 6, Tynian_Brahe (Pierson Browne) confesses the ethical dubiousness of denying non-player characters (NPCs) of their humanity in favour of farming resources, and ponders the ultimate aesthetic goals of Minecraft. Is the point of the game to build awe-inspiring functional structures, or is it in the teasing out of their nuances and intersections?
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Yourplaceorminecraft.com
The 'mLab server' is one of the most modded Minecraft servers in the world. But what makes it really special is that it is owned by academic game research centres of Concordia University where the players—students and professors—all work together in real life. Their real life friendships, objectives and conflicts result in fascinating, self-reflexive and sometimes explosive gameplay.
ABOUT Tynian_Brahe
In his ongoing quest to convince the University of Waterloo to award him a PhD in Sociology, Pierson Browne has devoted his graduate research to the study of game culture, ludic sociality, and metagaming. Pierson is affiliated with the University of Waterloo's Games Institute where he currently serves as Associate Editor, Essays for the institute's in-house publication, First Person Scholar. Pierson's path through academia has been circuitous (to put it graciously), and has seen him explore and write on topics such as indie development praxis, simulating sustainability, racial representation in games, and flows of inspiration in communities of play. Pierson swears he doesn't intend for his in-game creations to be deeply unsettling; they all just seem to turn out that way.
Your Place or Minecraft? is not an official Minecraft project, and is not associated with or endorsed by Mojang.