Over the Christmas holiday, the enterprising Flickr user Post-apocalyptic Research Institute published a set of pictures showing off its physical creation of a village from Minecraft using 3D printing technology and superglue.
The original world in Minecraft
It was achieved by exporting chunks of the game world into CAD software to colour them, then sending the 3D files to a Zprinter 650, which sprays glue and ink on to powder, layer by layer, slowing building up solid objects, which are then glued together.
The finished model
The result is a strange feedback loop - a blocky recreation of reality made back into reality. More so when you get recreations of real-world objects like the Eiffel Tower remade as statuettes, as demonstrated by Mineways, free software that pulls models out of Minecraft for use with services like Shapeways, which print out your files and send the results to you.
There's even a service specifically made to ship your Minecraft avatar to you, the Strasbourg-based Minetoys, by uploading your skin file.
3D being 3D, in principle, any game object or environment can be printed, though it still doesn't deal with complexity too well - making Minecraft's blockiness an ideal subject.
Incidentally, Post Apocalyptic also showed off Minecraft's hitherto uncharted potential in Christmas decoration design. An idea for a year's time, perhaps.
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Humour in games, then. And not just the Monkey Island kind. Daniel Cook of Spry Fox writes about some of the pros and cons of making games funny through storytelling (the Monkey Island way) and through mechanics.
Though he says that neither technique is inherently superior to the other, humour-through-mechanics seems more native to the interactive nature of games, and, as Daniel says, tends to have longer legs. Once you've experienced a Monkey Island gag, it rarely has quite the same impact again, but humour that arises out from the rules of the game has more longevity. Which is to say, messing with Deus Ex never quite gets old.
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Look, Eiji Aonuma's patent for a Z-targeting throwing system. It references the GameCube, so is it for Wind Waker's Grappling Hook - though it was filed a year after the game came out in Japan?
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Ah, Swapnote. Game design student Ben Gray has developed a Dungeons And Dragons RPG out of Nintendo's new messaging app for 3DS. It uses its graph paper stationery as a grid for map design and multiple pages for giving its players choice and for giving descriptions.
(via Tiny Cartridge)
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Finally, some words on gamification from Mac and iOS developer Brent Simmons:
"'Gamification' treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them. And it makes bad software."