GMU:Minecraft Ecologies/Meike Haller

what we did during the first workshops+ personal experiments

In the first sessions we were like "fooling around" with what we got and knew. So first we learnt a bit about the usable programming languagues (as for example Java and Phyton) and leant, how to use them to communicate with the Minecraft servers we set up. After some little exercises to get the workflow going we startet to play with our newly learnt skills.
So one of our little exercises was to kill the other guys on the server. Basically we opend a server with all class members and we had to use programming to track and then kill everybody exept yourself. You had to get theposition the other person was in and then spwan or despawn blocks to get rid of them. Some tried it to chamber the people up in obsidian or TNT, I myself went for a little more destrcutive way. I took the players position and let Lava rain on and around them from the sky. Not only, that Lava itself is quite destructive, in also sets the world on fire where it lands. Sure enough we had some pretty nice fires and good light in the night.

Screenshots, and things you discovered, observations you made during the first two workshop-sessions:

Wolf-Sheep-Predation made by NetLogo. It :"This model explores the stability of predator-prey ecosystems. Such a system is called unstable if it tends to result in extinction for one or more species involved. In contrast, a system is stable if it tends to maintain itself over time, despite fluctuations in population sizes." basically this was, what inspired us for our final work, where the "tracked" people had to spawn sheep or wolf to make the really unstable system stable as long as possible.