Minecraft+Home

= Welcome to the Minecraft Rhetorics Wiki! This site was designed by a Digital Literacy class taught by Marco Fernando Navarro at The City College of New York, CUNY (Summer 2012). =

// This Minecraft Wiki seeks to combine learning experiences, expose concerns, develop a collective understanding, and increase meaning making in a game unfamiliar to most. According to James Paul Gee, literacy and thinking are primarily social and cultural achievements. As we explored the environment of the game, we noted our experiences and learned from the game as well as from each other. Located within these pages is our collective understanding of the Minecraft world, rhetoric, and procedures. Those who contributed to these pages made great efforts to connect themselves to the character they embodied in the game and learn from this interface. Through this connection, we created pages that highlight different areas of the game that help us, the class, and you, the visitor, develop a deeper understanding of Minecraft. Not only is this a game guide, but a guide about learning and knowing. We seek to become better gamers and learners through this unique community building experiment in which we learned the ins and outs of the game together and reflected on our decisions and progress. //

On the right, please find multiple pages outlining different topics pertaining to Minecraft, digital literacy, and many other frustrations and musings!

For starters, please view the “official" Minecraft trailer below:

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This video ends with the following words, "With no rules to follow, the adventure is up to you." Minecraft offers players an opportunity to interact in a utopian world, where participants have a chance to create, explore, and even find and play with friends, in a world "made of blocks." According to dictionary.com, utopia is defined as "...a place in which human society, natural conditions, etc., are so ideally perfect that there is complete contentment." Minecraft is offering an ideal place to play in such a utopia (or sometimes hell...).

More thoughts from the contributors:

"....I really expect this wiki to be experiential in nature. Everyone can contribute to this wiki because everyone will have an experience playing this game."

“…I looked up how to do certain things, but I still had to figure out how to actually perform them and by actually performing them, I get a better sense of their meaning.”

 “…I watched a couple of tutorials, but I found it more interesting to experiment playing on my own even though this meant to keep starting the game over and over again. In the beginning, I couldn't understand anything, but with practice, I guess things will get easier. By the way, I still haven't built the house I want, but I keep trying. I can't be satisfied until I accomplish that.”

“…Playing Minecraft requires plenty of patience, persistence, and especially creativity. Once players become familiar with the necessary steps they need to take, they can build incredible things. I found the following video on YouTube. It's amazing to see what beautiful houses people."

Below, please find a video showing some AMAZING things that can be built on Minecraft:
media type="youtube" key="kzQQOMCxTp4" width="943" height="657" align="center"

In addition to this Wikispace, articles about Minecraft can be found here: [|Minecraft as Web 2.0: Amateur Creativity & Digital Games]& [|An Introduction to Micro-Rhetorics via Minecraft]

Yet another amazing still from Minecraft: