

Minecraft Makes Little Girls Cry - felipemnoa
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/03/minecraft-makes-little-girls-cry.html

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tptacek
Not directly apropos to this article but let me reenforce the data point:
Minecraft is BANANAS with 10-12 year olds. My kids discovered it on their own,
and their friends (from decidedly less geeky families) were already playing
it.

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Natsu
Agreed. My cousin's kids are about that age and they're the ones who got me
started on it. We joke about making a "Don't fear the creeper" t-shirt
someday, too.

Which reminds me, I still have to finish that gigantic automatic monster
harvesting building one of these days, assuming I can find the schematics I
wrote out for it.

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lotharbot
I was at a church gathering recently and there was a 10-ish year old kid who
couldn't stop talking about MineCraft. He was really impressed when my wife
told him she'd written a mod for the game (the original Marble mod with the
texture that tiled over multiple blocks).

Is your monster harvester similar to
<http://ripminecraft.blogspot.com/2011/08/monster-condo.html> ? Larger?
Smaller?

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Natsu
Assuming I ever finish, it'll have a central chest-high "lava blade" as the
wiki called it to kill monsters. The rest is just a large area with water
flows to push monsters towards the water blade.

It's big enough that cobblestone generator is pretty much mandatory. It
probably spans roughly an 16x16x8 volume, though not all of that is filled in
for obvious reasons.

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5hoom
Quite an amusing story. Minecraft sure can introduce you to the importance of
planning & strategy.

I recall early in my minecraft career learning painful lessons (don't dig
down!) as I was exploring a large cave, fell in lava & lost my hard-earned
diamond-tools, respawned & had no idea where I just was.

If it weren't for the peer pressure of being at a lan surrounded by other
players, I probably would have cried too ;)

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Natsu
One of the first things I learned was to build a giant torch-studded tower in
order to mark your house. Sure, you may have to suicide to get off of it, so
leave your good stuff at home. This prevents exactly the scenario they
encountered.

Yeah, you can also build a compass, but that takes gold & redstone. Huge
towers can be made with mere dirt.

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jamesgeck0
Build a bed. The last bed you sleep in becomes your spawn point, and they look
less ugly than giant dirt towers.

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Natsu
I have several, but sometimes you want to walk home. And they help you know
your relative location when exploring so you can find your items if need be.

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ggchappell
> Nothing educational can have value without the possibility of crushing
> failure.

That's a thought-provoking statement, I think.

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ErrantX
I think he's identified the root cause of the ongoing failure of our modern
education system.

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lloeki
Minecraft is 21st century digital Lego, for better and worse.

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jarin
I was just looking at the comments, and I'm kind of surprised that spambots
aren't smart enough to skip a site when comment links are nofollowed (and
Blogspot seems to be terrible at blocking them in the first place). Seems like
it would be more efficient to move on to sites that don't nofollow their
links.

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dmc
Off Topic also: google still count them as backlinks, but do not pass on
Pagerank juice. They might still count them as a small factor in website
rankings.

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GoGlobal
Really cannot understand the fascination with that "game".

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jrockway
If only there was an article somewhere that described one reason why someone
likes it. Oh wait, that's what this discussion thread is for...

