Kudos to UC Berkeley for using a virtual world. Somehow I read the choice of virtual world as a comment on our education system.
Even if they had a restriction on using Open Source only, they could have used OpenSim. If they had been ok with commercial servers and free accounts, they could have used Second Life.
Instead they used Minecraft, and "A team of more than 100 UC Berkeley students built the virtual Blockeley University in the popular Minecraft video game"[1].
Where is the lasting contribution of this? How can others reuse these students' work?
How would doing it in second life be a more lasting contribution than in minecraft? At least with minecraft people can always host their own servers using the world, while if second life shuts down, everything is gone for good.
And why is there even a need for a lasting contribution? A normal graduation doesn't, so why does a virtual one?
Second Life might not be. I argue OpenSim would be more lasting because:
* The model of UC Berkeley can then be Open Sourced and used by anyone in an Open Source OpenSim server, either run by themselves or hosted commercially at their choice. Some of the privately hosted virtual world events I have taken part in that would benefit from that big of an accurate model of a campus are Tornado emergency response virtual world drills for training, active shooter virtual world training, virtual world career fair.
* Hypergrid on OpenSim would allow the UC Berkely virtual world campus to be hosted by UC Berkeley and have anyone from another OpenSim virtual world teleport to the campus and visit it.
Regarding the need for a lasting contribution.. A typical graduation doesn't need it, other than a motivating speech. This though involved making something. I am of the firm belief that if you are going to make something you should make it to be a contribution to the world's body of knowledge, if possible - doubly so if you are making it as part of academia and likely funded in part by grants.
There is another perspective on this. A lot of those students probably grew up playing Minecraft, and all this time later the game is still getting major updates. Microsoft and Mojang are very dedicated to their work.
Minecraft is an institution.
> Where is the lasting contribution of this? How can others reuse these students' work?
The Minecraft format is well understood, and you're free to convert worlds to whatever other format you want.
It's like making a PDF in Adobe Reader. Yes, it's proprietary (was?)- but it's so well understood it might as well not be.
Also, Minecraft is both easy to use and familiar. If we used something else, this project would probably never have gotten as big as it did. I think that's more important.
On commencement day we had about 200 users in game and viewing on stream. It was chaotic, but so worth it. I have so many plans for Minecraft UConn, and we had such a great volunteer team spend their off hours making campus picture perfect.
We mostly used Google Street View to guesstimate where to put things. We started off building a 1/3 scale model of Gampel Pavilion (the stadium where commencement takes place), then we expanded on the roads around Gampel and started on the buildings connected to those roads. There are a variety of console commands (like /fill) that enable you to basically cut and paste portions of the world, so we could start building something in an open area and then transfer it to where it belonged once it was done.
disclosure: ive never been to college, I went to a trade school.
Im sure this is a novel and gimmicky way to hold a graduation during a quarantine, but do college kids get any refund on tuition for having to do this? To ask another way: How much money did the college take from students specifically for their ceremony before deciding to use a video game.
This is an important question. most college students will face decades of undischargeable debt after college, and im concerned that this gimmick is flashy enough to distract them from the fact that they are graduating on the cusp of a financial depression.
Of course, but that’s not the point. At my alma mater graduation is a hugehuge event. Easily millions of dollars to actually run the event. Musicians, professional photographers, videographers, full AV crew, event staff, parking staff, very famous speakers, swag, catering.
To just cancel it it does really suck for the students and parents who want the experience and memories. Just because the ticket price is hidden in the tuition doesn’t mean it’s not there and deserves to be refunded.
Wow, that’s great way to host virtual graduation! Feels like the world is becoming more virtual, and in an accelerated manner - because of the virus. How long would it take for one to spend more time everyday in his virtual identity than the physical one?
Can't speak for Berkeley, but for our virtual graduation we just set a server property to put everyone in adventure mode on join. Adventure mode prevents you from breaking blocks or opening chests so the only thing you can do is walk around.
You can also set a certain radius around the spawn read only in the official server. I’m not sure what practical difference that would have vs adventure mode.
Haven't played Minecraft for years but even 8 years ago-ish there was a fairly mature ecosystem for server owners to control permissions to build/remove etc.
Even a few years into the game some of those mods were ridiculously good, thinking about it.
There are a few ways, the easiest and only way the vanilla Miencraft server implementation offers is to set everyone to adventure mode. Adeventure mode doesn't allow players to destroy blocks, but they can play blocks if you manage to get any.
More advanced server implementations like Spigot have a plugin api. There are plenty of popular plugins like WorldGuard that allow you to manage what players can to within a certain region. You can define a region in the world an allow or prevent players from destroying and placing blocks. You can also control other things like mob spawning, PvP, etc.
These server implementations have quite capable APIs and building plugins using them is actually a lot of fun. Its what originally brought me intro programming.
I learned Java because of CraftBukkit. For many teenagers, some even under the age of 10, Minecraft was their first experience in server administration.
From setting up game servers, optimizing settings so Java did not crash, installing plugins, setting up config files, maintaining backups, writing their own plugins, learning basic networking issues, dealing with abuse (griefers), etc... Minecraft has taught a generation a lot.
Even if they had a restriction on using Open Source only, they could have used OpenSim. If they had been ok with commercial servers and free accounts, they could have used Second Life.
Instead they used Minecraft, and "A team of more than 100 UC Berkeley students built the virtual Blockeley University in the popular Minecraft video game"[1].
Where is the lasting contribution of this? How can others reuse these students' work?
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/05/16/watch-blockeley-uc-berk...