Limited Minecraft Server

     As winter break settles in amongst all college students returning for home, my friend group decided to engage in a yearly tradition: the two-week Minecraft phase. For a limited time every year, we start up a Christmastime server for us to busy ourselves with, as we sit around at home, unburdened by our college coursework and extracurriculars. This is always an eagerly anticipated tradition, as it allows us to recede back to simpler times and play some Minecraft with the boys, build cool things, and engage in a limited-time creative project that brings us all together at once.

    However, this year. I wanted to try something a little different. Even though we only do this once a year, things can get a little stale and boring when its the same group of people doing the same stuff every time. So, I wanted to propose a degree of challenge for our next server, something that would incentivize people who don't usually play to get on and try out the challenge, while still being a familiar enough experience that casual players could still get behind. I played with this idea for a little bit of time before landing on my final premise.

    What we ended up doing was setting a very small world border and forcing everyone on the server to play on the same plot of land together, meaning everyone had to strive for the limited resources in the small area we had to play with, as well as collaborate and work together to make sure that the space we had was used efficiently. By keeping the world limit small, we ended up spending way more time directly interacting with one another, as well as extending the lifetime of the Minecraft phase since progress was slower with limited resources. While I didn't no-life the server like I used to, I still felt very connected and in touch with the happenings of the server anyways, since we were all so close together.

    The other cool thing that happened was the visible transformation we performed on our limited land. Usually, everyone lives far from each other, make slight changes to their respective area, and then connect to each other using portals. However, since we were all so close together, our building styles would clash together frequently, resulting in a heavily terraformed and developed plot of land that felt much more detailed and alive than usual. Maybe it's because I'm used to playing single player games now, but it really made me happy seeing people run around so often between the limits of our world. Not many games capture that sensation of just hanging out casually with your friends, but for me, this limited world challenge allowed me to relive a time where we were all much closer together physically, instead of separated by college.

    Overall, as the server comes to a close, I feel satisfied with the results of the two-week Minecraft phase we had. It provided a fresh twist on an experience that's become bland over the many years I've played the game, and it allowed me a nice medium to connect with my friends, no matter how late into the night it would get. Maybe I'll do it again next summer!