Project Proposal: Mods as Remix

Here is my proposal! The project would be to create either a mod in Minecraft or a Machinima using a work of fiction. There is a bit of clarification on what we would actually do at the end of this post. We would be working with the idea of remix in video games. I am going to focus on the mod for this post.

Here follows some information about both mods and Minecraft.

First of all, what is Minecraft? In a word, Legos. Ok not really. But it's like virtual Legos for adults.

Minecraft is a indie PC game that has become extremely popular in the last few years. In the game you have 1m x1m blocks of materials (such as wood, stone, and dirt) to build with. There are two ways to play: adventure mode, where you collect your materials and at night monsters come out to try to kill you. I thought it looked kind of dumb until my husband had me play it; then I was (mildly) addicted. Look! I made a castle in my adventure mode game:

Then there's creative mode, where you have unlimited resources and no monsters (unless you choose to spawn them or other mobs). People do some crazy stuff with creative mode, such as this:

and this:

That's right. Someone built Minas freaking Tirith. And a to scale Starship Enterprise. Now, it's my understanding that they didn't actually have to place every single individual building block, but I don't know how that works yet. Another person build an honest to goodness working computer (a rudimentary one), and another guy built a computer that plays Pong.

So can we all agree that Minecraft is cool? Good. So what's a mod? Wikipedia gives us this definition:

Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games (PC games), especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not stand-alone software and require the user to have the original release in order to run...Mods that add new content to the underlying game are often called partial conversions, while mods that create an entirely new game are called total conversions and mods that fix bugs are called unofficial patches.

In other words, when a gamer wants to create his own level, his own characters, his own weapons, or even his own game, he can create a mod. It is my understanding that this cannot be done with all games, only games where the developers allow this and mainly on PC games (vs games played on consoles such as PlayStation or Xbox).

I may or may not have spent a good hour today looking at Minecraft mods. I found some pretty cool ones, including 2D Minecraft and a mod where you can play a version of the Hunger Games. But this one was my favorite:

My actual proposal: to create a small mod or mods (because the examples I gave are a HUGE amount of work) in Minecraft that is taken from one of our fiction books. For example, we could create our own potion, that, when drunk, turns your character into a Mr. Hyde version of himself. I'm not sure if that is too small a scale to be considered remix, but we will run with it for now.

The only potential problem is that I don't know how much experience in programming we would need to have to do this. This may have to do with the fact that I spent a lot of time that I should have been using to research this subject just looking at the hundreds of cool things to do in Minecraft. I know that people use Java to mod Minecraft, and that's about all. If this turns out to be unfeasible then we can always do a project with Machinima (stay tuned for class Tuesday and another blog post).