Design considerations for a Japanese language learning environment

Spawn:
The first place players see as they enter your Minecraft server. It has to have that wow-factor to guarantee return visits. It also has to be functional, lag-free, easily traversable and appropriate for the theme of the server.

Our old spawn was massive, sprawling, and processing power heavy. Don’t get me wrong, it was phenomenally beautiful, but was much more “form over function.” If players have difficulty negotiating the first place they see on your server, guess what, you’ve lost them. And we did.

この鯖ちょっと重いというか動作が遅い。ノーパソだから余計重い


Just look at the size of this thing. Not only is it a whole town square, but a floating town square that requires some serious walking just to exit it. Half of those buildings you see are unused and the bridge over to the left is to another huge castle that remains little used to this day. Time to fix all this!

Kotoba 2.0 spawn

This server, and particularly spawn, addresses all of the previous problems.

Overarching server theme

The design considerations of the new server can be summed up in the following points:

• Close to vanilla in nature to keep the playing field level between players. i.e. no teleports, no MCMMO, no OP skills.
  
• Large emphasis on establishing and maintaining small towns with strong communities.
  
• These towns will have a purpose for language learning and be used extensively in the new Japanese 101 course. (New blog post on this coming soon)
  
• Economy is based on supply-and-demand, and there are strict monetary requirements for 1) establishing a town, 2) paying upkeep on towns, 3) expanding towns.
  
• Quests will be utilised for players to improve their Japanese reading and speaking skills. Quest development for homework, quest completion as out-of-class activities.
  

Spawn2.0

In my opinion the new spawn is:

• Aesthetically pleasing
  
• Appropriately themed to the server
  
• Devastatingly simple
  
• Informative
  

There are only two major buildings (the town hall and shop), a dojo which houses the server rules, and a small 千と千尋の神隠し-inspired downtown area. I will now introduce these three areas and their purposes.

The town hall
This is for town introductions and recruitment. It is a little bigger than originally intended, but in retrospect the size allows us to host a number of additional informative areas such as common player commands, an 王室. The building is inspired heavily by the 帝国ホテル (Imperial Hotel) by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Source: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Imperial_Hotel_Wright_House.jpg



On the first floor is information about the “Towny” plugin to familiarise players with common commands.

The second floor will be used to showcase towns on the server.

At the top is the throne room with NPCs of important and influential players on the server.

Global Shop (player-driven, dynamic economy)

One of the most difficult things for a server to get right in Minecraft is the economy. Common questions include

• What do we use as currency? (Gold nuggets? Pumpkins? Lapis?)
  
• Who can build a shop?
  
• What is the value of ?
  

The new shop uses Hyperconomy, a plugin which features a dynamically changes the price of items in the shop based on supply and demand. in other words, get loads of money for the first few saddles you sell, but see that price drop rapidly as the shops stock increases. Already the price of a saddle has gone from ¥80,000 to less than ¥30,000 when I last checked.

Downtown Quest Hub [in progress]

The downtown area to the right of the shop will feature a number of player-made quests in a similar vein to those found in MMORPGs. The plugin used is called Quests and features a simple way to make quests, give rewards, and even make complex quest chains that build up in difficulty. The plan, then, is for admin and players to create quests using the Japanese they know (and some they don’t) to create interactive, text-based adventures.

In conclusion

I’m extremely excited for the next step in the history of Kotoba Miners, and am even more sure that with this iteration, we are heading in a direction that will promote more language learning, a more integrated course and Minecraft specific task-based methodology that I’ve been working on. This methodology is built around the notion of:



But that’s for another post. ＾ー＾