You have mysteriously appeared on this island that looks suspiciously like Kaʻula with a slice taken out of it...hanging on the edge of void. It seems made of clay with layers of some glazed earthen material surrounding. Time & space in this place have a bizarre feel. After a strange period of moments pass you hear a booming voice (or is it a feeling?) yell "TO RETURN TO A VERDANT EARTH AND OCEANS YOU MUST FIRST SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF THE KOLONAIO IN THIS HYPERBOLIC TIME POCKET-PLANE."

Essentially, players are stuck in a Minecraft world of sculptures of the many real life islands created by an intergalactic wizard with an eye to giving them more time to explore the many pasts, presents, and futures of these earthly and oceanic places. Because of ocean acidification and global warming, the majority of the waters have been sealed under a solid layer of bedrock that the humans can spend time learning once again how to properly live on island earth through in depth exploration of the islands above the bedrock. Players might considering giving a gander to these sustainable futures scenarios to stimulate their roleplay, writing, and futuring exercises with this map and can gather and share further information about all of the islands and their related epistemologies, languages, peoples, technologies, & ways of being at the dedicated wordpress & padlet sites.

This map is a (very) long term project and is meant to be played and continuously co-developed with a mass population of players hailing from a large variety of (real life) islands. Our team is composed of some dozen and a half seven to fifteen year-olds with one older person.

Our original entry to the contest was meant to focus specifically on the island of Oʻahu which we have been building on for the past several weeks. However, having people from many other islands and parts of the world involved in this work we shifted to a different strategy late in the contest. All of the islands on the map are topographically accurate and all represent real world islands. Island chains have kept relative scale and spacing to their real world counterparts but there are clearly many more islands in the same rectangle than would be found on the version of earth we experience outside of the computer screen. The scale varies from 1:15 to 1:17. The topography is still visible on maps of the world very clearly because every 10 layers is a different color of stained terracotta.

All of the islands are filled with clay so there are no resources other than clay and terracotta and some sands anywhere on the map except for what our team has stashed in various places inside the islands. There is also a hidden library at the beginning island, a train track with a lever that will open the way to the next island of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Niʻihau, if you can follow the clues to find the lever that will open the way.

We have quite a bit of ground to cover to make this the true final product that we want to end up with, but that will be an ongoing project that takes ages, several seasons of gameplay, and generally a lot of collective play/work to attain. Over the past several weeks we have been playing around with and developing our own gameful learning system to learn and teach island living in the 21st century that utilizes Minecraft as a central and crucial component of our alternate, augmented, mixed & virtual reality quests. After the contest is complete we will be beginning Season 1 of Islands Live and we invite all of you to join us in this epic storytelling endeavor.

Mahalos

Team AGILE Hawaiian Kingdom Minecraft Multiversity