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Minecraft Moodding Community Analysis

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Whether you are just watching developers live stream the designing of their mods, making mods yourself, or just enjoying the commentary of various YouTuber’s interactions with the developers, the Minecraft modding community is extremely easy to become a part of. During my observations, I had interactions with people on Twitch, YouTube, MinecraftForum.net and the Industrial Craft 2 forum. The community pulls you in by teaching you the complicated intricacies of modding such a simple game. Since my personal background is Computer Science, I decided to dive head first into the technical side of the community. The Forge Mod Loader is the primary framework used to build mods. It is also the way people load more than one mod into the game. Its …show more content…

MCP was originally developed by Thomas Guimbretière, better known as ProfMobius. ProfMobius is clearly an integral part of the community. Currently, he works for Mojang (developers of Minecraft and acquired by Microsoft), but previously has made multiple mods for the game and is part of a group that calls themselves Forgecraft, a group of servers where mod-developers can test their mods in a private environment. A number of YouTubers and Twitch streamers also gather on the server and interact with the developers in a way that I’ve never seen in a community before. I feel like the publicity Forgecraft provides for mod developers is one of the reason’s that Minecraft mod development is so popular. One of the most influential names in the Forgecraft community is Direwolf20. He started uploading videos to YouTube showcasing Minecraft Mods back in 2011 and has been posting a video nearly every day since. Being one of the first channels to showcase mods individually, Direwolf20 played a huge role in growing the modding community from the ground up. In the book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal claims “Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful l communities from scratch” (McGonigal, 2011). Direwolf20 wanted to show the world the cool things that Minecraft mod developers were making, and did so by forming a

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