And Now for Something Completely Different (Minecraft)

Many of you will know Minecraft. Various Pirate Parties have picked up Minecraft to use it as a tool of publicity, relaxation and teambuilding. Pirates around the world quickly jumped onto the train, and various Pirate Parties have been running MC servers for some time.

For you that don't know Minecraft, Minecraft is a sandbox retro game, where you have to mine resources, craft them into items, and use those items to build things. Various things have been built in Minecraft already, ranging from a Venator Star Destroyer in the PPNL Minecraft project, to a Stargate, and various other fantastic works of art. The biggest example is a person building a CPU in Minecraft, eventually causing him to get a job at a tech company.

Building such structures on Minecraft creates 2 things: It brings up a discussion whether building and improving replica's of famous "objects" this way is allowed under copymonopoly law. This is a very important discussion for Pirates around the world, and Minecraft is a great tool to encourage this discussion.

Secondly, building large structures often involves good teamwork, which might build good friendships. These friendships increase the coherence of a Pirate Party on a national and international scale. They also are the basis for better party collaboration later on. An example: If one pirate wants to build a scale model of the Battlestar Galactica he can't do this alone. Where does he get the resources and the time from? That's where he calls the help of another pirate on the server. Even while they hardly know each other, they start working together on the project. After some time, they've finished the project, and see that they've constructed something big. They feel happy about their achievement, and see that this person is nice to work together with. Pirates who get well along with eachother, are more likely to pick up something in pirate context away from keyboard or on something far more serious. This could help the Pirate Parties to construct many more things.

The Dutch Pirate Party has improved this concept over some time, and now hosts building contests, where players on the server are encouraged to work together. Also, the entire setup of the server actually makes people work together, since without working together they achieve way less. This is something the other Pirate Parties have been doing too in their MC projects. It can be very good for Pirate Parties to host MC Servers. But where do we have a centralized list of them?

This is where Hackbard from Piratenpartei Radio steps in. He has created a nifty little site where all Pirate Parties can list their servers in a central place. Other Pirates can then find Pirate Party Minecraft servers here in a convenient manner. The site is currently only available in German, but until translations to other languages are complete, there's always google translate or whatever other translation tool you like. If you'd like to make a translation, you can contact Hackbard at Hackbard23 [at] gmail.com or Roberto/Robske at roberto.moretti [at] piratenpartij.nl. All Pirate Parties are encouraged to list their servers on Hackbard's site.

If you'd wish to see a Minecraft server in action, go to Hackbard's site or connect to minecraft.piratenpartij.nl in Minecraft. The first contest of the Piratenpartij MC server will start at 27th of december. If you'd wish to join in, there's info in the contests room on the server. As last, here's a video to show the Piratenpartij MC server in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_5CUIJ7Vt0