Strange that with all our talk of Fatality Servers hosting plans, we haven’t made reference to Minecraft yet. Just reading through this excellent article on Medium I was struck by the following quote.

In the 2010s and beyond, it is not the case that every cultural product ought to be a generative, networked system.

It is, I believe, the case that all the really important ones will be.

One of the things that came up in discussion at the recent Stoke workshop was the idea that instead of an story being a single narrative line which you can follow, a digital story can be more like a landscape which you can traverse. You might follow the route set out or you might divert and explore for yourself.

It’s not so much that this is the right way to tell a story, or even that the stories generated in this way will be necessarily more satisfying, but as with Minecraft the possibilities which open up when the system is collaborative and networked are enormous.

We’ve been clear about this being one of our aims. Creating an open-ended, flexible and reusable system as the basis of Pararchive has been of utmost importance I think Minecraft provides yet another great example of why this approach is so appropriate and potentially so powerful.