{"id":7499,"date":"2016-05-12T12:07:12","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T19:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7499"},"modified":"2016-05-20T12:12:53","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T19:12:53","slug":"the-builder-generation-rises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/05\/12\/the-builder-generation-rises\/","title":{"rendered":"The Builder Generation Rises"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/17\/magazine\/the-minecraft-generation.html\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>THE MINECRAFT\u00a0GENERATION<\/h1>\n<p><em>How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching\u00a0millions of children to master the digital world.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>By\u00a0CLIVE THOMPSON \/\u00a0Illustrations by\u00a0CHRISTOPHER NIEMANN<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3mlSWxRWhVQ\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap.<\/p>\n<p>An 11-year-old in dark horn-\u00adrimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities. He recently read \u201cThe Maze Runner,\u201d a sci-fi thriller in which teenagers live inside a booby-\u00adtrapped labyrinth, and was inspired to concoct his own version \u2014 something he then would challenge his friends to navigate.<\/p>\n<p>Jordan built a variety of obstacles, including a deluge of water and walls that collapsed inward, Indiana Jones-style. But what he really wanted was a trap that behaved unpredictably. That would really throw his friends off guard. How to do it, though? He obsessed over the problem.<\/p>\n<p>Then it hit him: the animals! Minecraft contains a menagerie of virtual creatures, some of which players can kill and eat (or tame, if they want pets). One, a red-and-white cowlike critter called a mooshroom, is known for moseying about aimlessly. Jordan realized he could harness the animal\u2019s movement to produce randomness. He built a pen out of gray stones and installed \u201cpressure plates\u201d on the floor that triggered a trap inside the maze. He stuck the mooshroom inside, where it would totter on and off the plates in an irregular pattern.<\/p>\n<p>Presto: Jordan had used the cow\u2019s weird behavior to create, in effect, a random-\u00adnumber generator inside Minecraft. It was an ingenious bit of problem-\u00adsolving, something most computer engineers I know would regard as a great hack \u2014 a way of coaxing a computer system to do something new and clever.<\/p>\n<p>When I visited Jordan at his home in New Jersey, he sat in his family\u2019s living room at dusk, lit by a glowing iMac screen, and mused on Minecraft\u2019s appeal. \u201cIt\u2019s like the earth, the world, and you\u2019re the creator of it,\u201d he said. On-screen, he steered us over to the entrance to the maze, and I peered in at the contraptions chugging away. \u201cMy art teacher always says, \u2018No games are creative, except for the people who create them.\u2019 But she said, \u2018The only exception that I have for that is Minecraft.\u2019\u2009\u201d He floated over to the maze\u2019s exit, where he had posted a sign for the survivors:\u00a0<em>The journey matters more than what you get in the end.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/17\/magazine\/the-minecraft-generation.html\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at NYT Magazine<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Times THE MINECRAFT\u00a0GENERATION How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching\u00a0millions of children to master the digital world. By\u00a0CLIVE THOMPSON \/\u00a0Illustrations by\u00a0CHRISTOPHER NIEMANN Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-\u00adrimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}