Minecraft is far better than Lego primarily because you don’t need a big table or a lot of floor space to play Minecraft. Trying to build a house of any size means you have to have a lot of space to spread the bricks about to find that exact brick which will make your garage door to work properly. If you’ve never pondered the idea of Lego being a metaphor for existentialism, then let that one sit heavily on your mind as you watch your child make a blue and green house.
I think that reference to existentialism is a little tenuous but I’m sure if you’re familiar with Baudrillard and hyperreality then you can use it to understand the work of Joseph Baybrook. Joseph is an intern with Ordinance Survey, the national mapping agency of the UK and recently transformed 86,000 square miles of the UK into more than 22 billion Minecraft blocks in a map pack which allows players to build on a geographically accurate United Kingdom.
Let’s be honest here, this is a post-structuralist interpretation of hyperreality and leads us down a dark, dark path. Who am I kidding? The idea of building a giant Spiderman statue smack bang in the middle of Piccadilly Circus makes me not care at all about simulacrum.
You can get the map pack from the OS website.
