Notes

It's a Great Idea but you May not have Heard of It.

This post started as an email to some researchers with whom I work. They study user experience, especially with families. (They're the ones who created the fun Nokia/Sesame street stuff). Today, I was thinking about the email and realized I could not post it on this blog without permission. I find it fascinating.



My nine-year-old son Alex played with me recently at our house After a while, he wanted to show his friend Minecraft Pocket Edition, which I recently purchased for our iPads (we both have one, the my best investment so far in his education). He and I had spent a few hours making virtual castles and underground hideouts on a Saturday. It was a lot of fun.



If you haven't heard of it, Minecraft is an independently developed block-building-slash-survival game that hit it big over the last year, and they just came out with a tablet version a few weeks ago for both Android and iPad. The tablet version of Minecraft is a lighter version. There's no zombies, fighting and so on. The only thing it has is the ability to make stuff, like the PC version. At first I wasn't going to buy the iOS version because it costs $7 on the iPad, but Google has been promoting apps for Android, and Minecraft was on sale for only 10 cents which is why I purchased it for my Motorola Xoom (which I use for testing). MINECRAFT-SERVERS.CLOUD It was then that I realized how fun it was! I quickly purchased the iPad version and Alex and I have been playing it since then.



However, I was unsure if Alex's friend would be as enthralled as it's a bit geeky and an enormous success. And because the Android and iPad versions are compatible, we were all in the same world together using all three tablets at the same time. We spent two hours in the living room, each using one of our tablets, building cool things together and then navigating the virtual world looking at what others had made. There were no challenges or puzzles or blasting bad guys and no fighting them. It was pure virtual creation.



For me, there are so many parts of this experience which I find to be quite unique:



- Minecraft PE isn't a game' in the traditional sense. It's a sandbox. Minecraft PE is a sandbox similar to Lego blocks, but better because you can actually construct the world you're building. The interface is easy that anyone can use it without any prior experience. It's incredible how fast you can build a tiny tunnel or shack, to clearing 10 acres of virtual land and constructing the largest castle ever. It was great to see the boys ambitions get ahead of themselves, then scale back, help each to help each other and so on. The social aspect of sharing your creations is really compelling - although I had to remind both kids at one point or another to look at what the other one had made, because they were so absorbed in their work that they couldn't stop. Once they did there were plenty of "Oh! Cool! I'd like to help! Come see my work! This is the first time that some sort of lesson has come up while playing any type of game with co-op that I've seen. Being able to jump in with the boys and help them along was a great experience. This was in terms of new ideas or getting lost. One player tunneled all the way to the virtual world's boundary and was unable to find his way back. :-) ) - Cross platform compatibility - this may seem obvious, but it did enable all the above. The boys eventually found an app called Hide and Go Seek. It was quite amusing particularly when you consider you could create your own endless tunnels.



It was fascinating to watch the boys get involved in the game, come up with new things and have fun. It was a bit odd that with everyone's heads down on our own device it will be less personal - it was actually way better than the typical co-op game where you all play in one direction, and you communicate using grunts and occasional elbows. Instead, we all sat comfortably in the living room and talked with each other. We also glanced around to see what the others were doing. This was a more normal social setting than a screen-sharing one.



It's been a while since I'm amazed by how advanced tablet computers are. Touch can make UIs so much more accessible and intuitive, and the tablet form-factor melds easily into social situations without imposing barriers like the game console or laptop.



I think this is just another convincing example of the technological advancement tablets really are. It's not like tablets are an additional type of computing system that is oddly matched to the mobile phone and PC, but it's obvious that tablets will be the main computing device of the future. Maybe they'll be thought of as PCs with touch interfaces or big mobile OSes, but the design factor that I think has been awaiting for decades is here and it's just as good as we believed it could be, or better.


My Website: https://minecraft-servers.cloud/