On Minecraft

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in which to start thinking about building Portus in Minecraft. A fortnight ago, after a consultation with my nine year old Minecraft expert, and some reading around the subject I was about to recommend Bukkit to my colleagues as as the best way to set up a custom server, perhaps using some Rome specific modifications and textures (more on those later).

But, having closed my browser and headed off to the Archaeologies of Media and Film conference in Bradford (more on that, maybe in another post), unknown to me Bukkit was being taken off the internet. So when I came to look for it the following week, I couldn’t find it. What seems to have happened in that two of the main developers of the software had managed ot get a job with Mojang, the creators of Minecraft. And what the rest of the community had only just discovered was that they had also sold Bukkit itself to Mojang. One of the other developers (it seems, according to this link) isn’t sure that everything has played out fairly, and has invoked the United States’ Digital Millenium Copyright Act, to have the software removed from public availability (and I guess to make things difficult for its new owners).

This of course was pretty concurrent with hearing that Microsoft was interested in purchasing Mojang, and I wondered whether Mojang recruiting the Bukkit team was to make themselves more attractive to Microsoft. I think I was right in that speculation, because earlier this week Microsoft’s purchase was officially announced, along with the news that Notch, the main developer of Minecraft, and two partners were leaving the company. I wish them well in their future endevours, and hope they enjoy spending their share of the very impressive reported price.

So, where will Minecraft go now? Some have been quick to portend doom and gloom, but I prefer to wait and see.

Now back to Portus. We’re not the first to think about creating ancient Roman civilizations in Minecraft. Romecraft is an ever expanding community/set of projects with similar aims,  they’ve already produced texture packs for “Germania,” “Roma” and “Aegyptus”, and built two role-play Minecraft Servers, and right now there is a project going on to recreate Pompeii.

I think I need to try and recruit them to the next run of the Portus MOOC...


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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