31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Residential hall recreated in the virtual world Residential hall recreated in the virtual world
Forget couch fires in Castle St.
University of Otago Te Rangihīroa College students have now progressed to setting neighbouring student flats on fire and blowing up parked cars with TNT — but only in the virtual world.
College assistant warden George Jackson has created an online Minecraft version of Te Rangihīroa College, where its residents can get to know each other better by building structures, tearing them down, and then rebuilding new ones.
"Normally on Minecraft, you can destroy everything, but I've put protections on the server so that they can't break the college.
"They can light fires and they can make explosions outside the building ... but it won't do anything to the building.
"It's flame-proof, explosion-proof. It's unbreakable.
"And all they can do inside the building is walk around, open doors, press buttons, and talk to each other."
Mr Jackson said the extremely detailed virtual world had all 450 student rooms, bathrooms, the dining hall and activity areas, and gave residents the ability to interact in a safe place.
"I went to a hall in my first year and I was just not the type that wanted to go out drinking or do sports or other activities.
"That was my choice, but what I found was that a lot of the activities that halls ran were geared towards extroverts.
"Obviously, I'd just play games. That was how I socialised. I've got friends from Australia that I've known for longer than people I was at high school with, and I'm still really close with them today.
"I met them all through video games."
Now that he was working in a hall of residence, he was able to see there were many other students who were the same as he was.
"They don't want to go out drinking or do sports and stuff, but they still want to meet people, and I think the
Minecraft server is a great way
of doing that.
"I've seen students actually meet other students in the building in real life, after making friendships in the Minecraft server."
He said a major attraction of the game was that students could be whomever they wanted to be in the virtual world.
"I think a lot of people identify with their online selves because maybe they aren't that confident in who they are as a person, and when you are playing Minecraft you're completely anonymous, so you really can be whatever you want to be.
"You can slowly drip-feed parts of your personality that you're comfortable with — sort of test the water with people — and then see what type of people they are and see if they'd be someone that you'd like to be friends with in the real world."
It was proving very popular with residents at the college, he said.
The project had taken him a couple of months to get up and running, and he was still developing it.
Eventually he hoped to develop the game enough so that the residents could decorate and furnish their rooms.
"But I can't do that just yet because I need to figure out a way to make them be able to build in their rooms without breaking the entire building."
He believed it would also serve as a historic record of resident activity in the college.
"Next year, and in future years, the new residents will be able to jump on and see what they got up to last year and keep that going for as long as we really want it to — to see what they've built and what they've destroyed."
