Below are three projects from Darren Wershler’s 2014 Minecraft class: Class Effect’s Scavenger Hunt; Gameception’s Ludus Arena; and Project X’s Atlantis. Each group consisted of about 10 students, and each project took about two months to complete from the proposal stage.
In each case, the point of the project as a class exercise was to move from their physical construction projects (which Minecraft players frequently call a “build”) to what Bart Simon and Darren refer to as “the allegorical build” — the relationship between material in-game play experience and the critical texts that we read along with the play. The idea isn’t to use the critical texts to interpret the play, but something closer the opposite, where working through situations in a game provides some insight into the questions the theoretical text is addressing.