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The Minecraft Generation
- danielvf 11y agoThis is a good article. I couldn't help but laugh though: "telnet, a command-line tool often used by professionals to manage servers."
- wtbob 11y agoYeah, that one got me too. I really hope these servers just call them telnet admins and don't actually use telnet in 2016.
- _asummers 11y agoI dunno man, the amount of people who say "FTP server" with a straight face, not realizing that credentials are transmitted in plaintext, is alarming.
- sdenton4 11y agoYeah, I generally give people the benefit of the doubt on that one, given that the new way is sftp... FTP is still a reasonable shorthand.
- badloginagain 11y agoIt doesn't help that you have either FTPS or SFTP depending on the platform. I call it FTP as a generalization, but if I ever saw it as an actual FTP implementation I'm outta there.
- kefka 11y agoAn FTP server is perfectly fine for anonymous logins, assuming it was configured server side to be running as a low permissioned user. But yes, once you start taking user credentials, you need to move to something like FTPS or SFTP (urgh... double standards).
- jenscow 11y agoBut authentication goes both ways.
- unclebucknasty 11y agoYeah, but e-mail. The overwhelming masses of people still use it for transmitting the most important docs in plaintext.
- jameshart 11y agoAnd people still call TLS SSL. Habits form, technologies change.
- txru 11y agoFrom the way the article describes the Minecraft community development, I thought it was possible that the choice of telnet was deliberate. It's easier to log in to, for one- no key configuration. And while the connection is insecure, I would bet a lot that nothing of value can be accessed from the people actually telnetting in- I bet that all non-game related write permissions are limited to SSH users. And if they are hacked, then they are (probably) inconvenienced, think about their passwords, and really understand why people use this thing SSH instead of telnet. It seems pretty genius to me.
- Terr_ 11y agoWorking in a startup circa 2008, we had a trial-run hire who apparently had some old experience and was trying to get back into things... He was confused why he couldn't telnet anywhere, and I had to explain what SSH was and why nobody used telnet anymore.
- peeky 11y agoI interview people like this all the time. I'm long enough in the tooth to have been using telnet regularly, and it terrifies me that so many people doing what I was doing 20 years ago have found a path to obsolescence in an industry with such a critical skills shortage.
- Jtsummers 11y agoThis bothers me. How are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge? When I interviewed for my first real job they included a programming "test". It was basic C stuffs (really, more C pointer focused). Things like 4 swap functions, each incorrectly implemented, what are the resulting values of a and b after running swap(a,b) or swap(&a,&b), etc. Apparently, I found out after getting hired on, I was the only one to have ever gotten every question correct (note: I was not their only hire, the code there made sense once I heard this, I'm not there anymore). So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that sys admin jobs see similar problems. But it still really bothers me for some reason. This is fairly basic knowledge (telnet/ssh for admins, C and pointers for embedded systems programmers).
- dsp1234 11y agoHow are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge? Because once you've logged in to the box, administration via telnet and SSH is exactly the same. It's not that they don't have admin skills, they just don't have updated security skills. It's not awesome, but if the interviewer doesn't think to ask about SSH skills, and the interviewee doesn't realize their skill is out of date, it's easy to miss. How often is the focus on what to do once logged in, as compared to how to log in in the first place?
- CaptSpify 11y agoSadly telnet is still in use in some places. As of ~4 years ago, I was using it on medical devices!
- vvanders 11y agoIt really does feel like Minecraft is the Doom/Quake/Half-Life of this generation. I'd almost thought that modding had disappeared due to the complexity involved in AAA games but nice to see it alive and well in Minecraft.
- newobj 11y agoMinecraft is the Lego, Crayons, Doom, Tag, and BBS of this generation.
- ben_jones 11y agoDon't forget toxic youtube comments.
- Retric 11y agoSkyrim and Starcraft 2 are recent examples with huge mod scenes. They are arguably far less flexible than Half-Life, but subjectively mods like Requiem can completely change the style of game-play. Hell, Requiem is a few hundred MB's. IMO, the real shift is you don't need to mod an existing game to make significantly different games. Further, AAA games are simply huge now so it's hard for a small group to change everything.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoTo be fair, less flexible than Half-Life still leaves a lot of a room for something to be flexible. What you're saying about AAA games in general though, is a good point. The days of being able to unpack Quake are over, and some of these games are pretty hard even for their creators to manage from update to update.
- yarrel 11y agoIt's the LambdaMOO.
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- Aelinsaar 11y agoI like the expectation Minecraft sets up in players, that the world is going to respond to them in some kind of meaningful way. I hope that expectation drives broader development over time.
- markbnj 11y agoGreat article, and I loved the mooshroom in a pen with pressure plates hack. That is indeed very creative thinking. But this ... >> “My art teacher always says, ‘No games are creative, except for the people who create them.’ But she said, ‘The only exception that I have for that is Minecraft.’ ” I guess his art teacher didn't play many computer games. If she was familiar only with board and party games then perhaps this comment would make sense, but "builders" have been a part of computer gaming for a long time, as any obsessed fan of Railroad Tycoon or Civilization can attest to. In Fallout 4, a relatively new title, you can build entire towns.
- joemi 11y agoTo be fair, that's quoting an 11 year old quoting his art teacher.
- joezydeco 11y agoThese days I'm a bit more intrigued by Roblox. My 11 year-old son and his friends have completely abandoned Minecraft for it. Roblox is designed for MMO play from the start, but worlds (or whatever they're called) are completely open to modification with their free editor. Then you can script things in Lua. Lua! The other night my son was antsy at the dinner table. So I asked him why the rush. He said he "had a flight to catch". Turns out he's joined a group that operates an "airplane" that has scheduled flights in and out of an airport that someone has created. He interviewed to become the first officer on the flight. It's messier than Minecraft, but the players seem to understand the potential. They're hiring, actually. (no I don't work for them). The stats on this page are interesting too: http://corp.roblox.com/careers http://corp.roblox.com/careers
- jshelly 11y agoAgreed, my kids (10) gave up on Minecraft a while ago and have been completely focused on Roblox for the past year.
- Filligree 11y agoDid you look at the modded Minecraft experience at all, before doing that?
- LoSboccacc 11y agoAh good old tekkit. Now there is test pack please ignore which shows promise but to be honest the modding scene slowed down after the bukkit/forge mess and due to the fatigue of never receiving the promised stable api. The moment ic2 stopped development I lost interest. Buildcraft spawned factorio however, so my logistic nerd needs are satisfyed :)
- asiekierka 11y agoIC2 never stopped development, it just became... different.
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- david927 11y agoLast year my daughter, then nine, discovered Minecraft and fell in love with it. The wonderful and surprising result was that it seemed to make her fall in love with problem-solving and architecture in general. Suddenly programming wasn't boring, it was empowering. I was skeptical at first; now we have it on every device in our house and we have a family server that we share with my sister and dad.
- mjevans 11y agoWhen there's a vacation or something I recommend trying out mods for it. TerraFirmaCraft is a total overhaul mod that is 'more realistic' (not fully, but more so) and teaches a general outline of how to progress from the stone age to the ages of metals (different packs also exist that add other mods to extend that up through, say, the (steam) Industrial Age). If automation and distributed systems are a topic you want to cover the automation you setup in something like FTB's recently released Infinity Skyblock pack/map (there are numerous letsplays and streamers doing that now) is pretty fun, if extremely time consuming. I would not play this without a dedicated server (it is VERY nice to leave chunks loaded overnight...).
- markdown 11y agoMy 10 year old spends all of his free time on the cubeville server. It's incredible the things they've built there: http://www.cubeville.org/map/ http://www.cubeville.org/map/
- wielebny 11y agoIf you'll boy or girl is interested in Minecraft, and you want to teach them programming, then I strongly suggest ScriptCraft - a Minecraft server mod that allows scripting in JavaScript. https://github.com/walterhiggins/ScriptCraft/blob/master/docs/YoungPersonsGuideToProgrammingMinecraft.md https://github.com/walterhiggins/ScriptCraft/blob/master/doc...
- voltagex_ 11y agoInteresting. Any idea how the interop works? I couldn't see a Javascript engine in there (Rhino?). I wrote some integration based on web services for Forge but I've never been able to muster the motivation to finish it.
- e0m 11y agoIt's amazing what you can do with redstone these days. YouTube effectively turned into the GitHub of redstone. I can't imagine how much more powerful this could be if you could "fork", "clone", and "pull request" red stone designs and compose them as easily. Most people rebuild each and every single bit from scratch.
- kraftman 11y agoCan they not just import the schematics with WorldEdit?
- mrmb 11y ago> To play, you’ll need a computer with Minecraft and a child who’s familiar with the game. Hilarious, and true. Oh, I hope someday to be asked how one plays Minecraft...
- phaed 11y agoWell written article. Dude fucks.
- chezhead 11y agoI'm a bit younger than many of you (talking about your grandchildren and sons playing this game!). I'm 20, and played a lot of Roblox and then Minecraft before they were this popular. I even interviewed Notch on a cute little podcast called "MineCast" I made back then. Administrating a medieval-themed role-playing server back then taught me a lot about server administration and general diplomacy (handling bans and choosing admins), chatting on the MinecraftForums and its IRC showed me how to function well in online communities, and now children are experiencing this all over again. I'm a lot older than the majority of fans, but it's a great touching stone when chatting with younger cousins. My haircutter's son was playing Roblox on a computer a few feet away from me last time I got my hair cut there, and she went on and on about how much time he spent on that game. It really brought me back to those days. It's going to be fun watching these little nerdlings growing up with such a great toy. Minecraft's popularity goes to show that we don't need to worry about a lack of modding-friendly games (Doom/Quake/Garry's Mod), the kids will find them :)
- Joof 11y agoI'm 25 and love minecraft. Knew notch from IRC before he got famous which was a pretty weird 'this random guy I met is rich and famous now'. I was a big dwarf fortress fan before minecraft came out. That's probably where my obsessions really are :p.
- Kenji 11y agoI love minecraft. It is actually through redstone circuitry in minecraft that I understood many things of digital design, for example I discovered the contamination and propagation delay all by myself while playing. When the professor taught us those things, I instantly understood he meant this. I had trouble with my redstone circuits when I built a combination lock because, while the circuit was settling to a stable state, the door would open and close erratically. I then had to build something like a timer that isolated the door from the circuit until it settled to a stable state.
- bsharitt 11y agoI have two kids, a son 5 and a daughter 8 who spend a lot lot of their free time on Minecraft(pocket edition on Kindle Fires). I'm kind of amazed at the kind of stuff they come up with. My daughter mostly uses for "artwork" building sculptures and statues and things like that, basically an extension of the drawing she does when she's not on her Kindle. That was basically my expectation when I got Minecraft for them as I was familiar with the "virtual lego" aspect of it, but my son has really surprised me. He uses pressure plates, switches, dynamite, red stone, etc to build all these little machines(my daughter does too, but not to the same extent). Looking closely at what he builds I didn't expect my 5 year old to have the kind of grasp on programming-like logic. I had originally set up a Raspberry Pi to hopefully teach him some beginning programming(my daughter has a Chromebook with regular Linux installed, and I've taught her some Python and HTML) with Scratch, but he had not interest in it at all, but he did find Minecraft on the Pi and for the first few days both kids where gathered around it until I put in on their Kindles to give them a newer version and one where they can play together.
- wintersFright 11y agois it just me or does this article smell like advertorial?
- ap22213 11y agoThe article describes it as 'clunky'. But, I think much of its popularity is due to its accessibility. It's a very intuitive system, and even my 1 year old gets it. She messes around with it on the tablet and enjoys moving and looking around and watching the cows and chickens.
- megamark16 11y agoMy kids love Minecraft, but more recently they have been playing an open source, highly extensible, and much faster game called Minetest. The mods are all written in Lua, and it runs so much faster on the older hardware I make my kids use, it even runs well on Raspberry Pis.
- purplelobster 11y ago>> “An adult mentor opens up these new worlds that wouldn’t be open to them,” she adds. Of course, critics might worry about kids interacting with adults online in this way, but as Ito notes, when there’s a productive task at hand, it’s similar to how guilds have passed on knowledge for ages: knowledgeable adults mentoring young people. Kids can't interact with adults online? What has this world come to?