Denmark in Minecraft

Geodata as a social mediaSimon Kokkendorff and Thorbjørn Nielsen, Danish Geodata Agency

• Minecraft is a hugely popular 3D sandboxgame played by millions around the world.– From minecraft.net:“Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things….”– Minecraft is developed by the Swedish company Mojang.

Terrain autogenerated by Minecraft

The idea

– Minecraft would become a high performance, very intuitive, 3D GIS system with a user base larger than any traditional GIS system!

– So, use Minecraft as a 3D GIS system, where userscan view and interact with our data!

What if we could put real geographic data into Minecraft?

The idea

• Showcase for what can be done with the freedanish geodata!

• Many interesting applications:– Education (math, geography, history, art,….)– Urban and rural planning (democratization –include hard to reach demographic groups!)

• Formalized as a project at the Geodata Agency early 2014 – main focus on the applications in education. 

Creating the model

• Algorithms built on standard open source components.

• Allowed us to complete the task with a fewthousand lines of code.

KF Download PostGISGDAL

DTM

FOT (vector data)Address dataCadastral data

Conversion

Minecraft ZIP

Creating the model

Data assimilation

A completely automated process!

Steps in the development…

And finally…

Project launch – it’s alive!

• Project launched 24th of April• Immediately the press coverage wasenormous!

• Servers flooded, couldn’t keep up!• Arms race between ”griefers” and a few, stressed out, novice server maintainers!

”Griefers”

• Minecraft slang for people with destructiveingame behaviour, like:– Destroying other people’s creations.– Trying to take advantage of ”weaknesses” in Minecraft and crash the server…

Destruction caused by minecart TNT – somethingwe hadn’t thought of disallowing. A now famousmistake!

Griefers building hidden machines – trying to cause server lag! 

Geodata as a social media• After a few days, things were more or lessunder control.

• However, stories about an american invasion of the virtual Denmark continued to travel the internet for weeks!

Geodata as a social media

• People ”moved into” the model and ”lived” in their virtual houses. A kind of virtual society started to form.

• But first of all – people from all over the worldbegan to build wonderful and weird creations!

Fun facts and figures

• Denmark in Minecraft consists of approximately 4000 billion blocks – probablythe largest Minecraft world.

• More than 300.000 downloads of zipped10km x 10km Minecraft tiles.

• More than 30.000 unique visitiors on ouronline servers.

Perspectives…

• Lots of room for improvement of ourMinecraft model.

• A range of still relatively unexploredapplications, e.g. in urban an rural planning.

• Many other game engines with similarcapabilities.

• Lots of public data waiting to be set free! – Who’s next???