Building Utopia

To coincide with the 500 year anniversary of the original publication, we reconstruct the mythical island of Utopia in Minecraft, with the governance and economy coded in smart contracts on the blockchain. The laws, and designs will be selected through a participatory design process, styled as an architectural competition.

"Humanity has Palaeolithic emotions, Medieval Institutions, and (through science) god-like power"- "that is an extremely dangerous combination" - E.O Wilson

Without a widespread and systemic understanding of how mankind is able to reshape it's current institutions using new digital technologies we are not going to be in a position to address the major global issues that our ever increasingly crowded world faces.

Technology is about to impact law, governance, democracy, and financial tools in powerful ways. We need to change our medieval institutions, but not through a financial and technological elite but with the engagement of our younger citizens.

In Building Utopia we invite a diverse global audience of Minecraft players, school children, activists, professors, online communities, opensource developers, indy game developers, artists, architects, poets and musicians to take part in a re-imagining of the future through the co-creation of a global connected game.

We start with a massively popular, brilliantly simple game - Minecraft, and we invite players and the wider community to get together and propose designs for the structures, buildings, laws and systems to be built into the game. Effectively we run a massive architectural competition in Minecraft, where players can use Minecrafts creative modelling tools to visualise how the Mythical Island of Utopia works.

By providing a cheap low cost way for any school or community to work on there own Raspberry Pi based server, we are able to create a rich and yet scaleable competition where communities are able to self-organise their own competition.

At the same time we provide the opportunity for advanced users to contribute code and designs to the blockchain based governance, and decentralised architecture of the game.

Finally the game will be released with live streamed internet radio show, accompanied by a time-lapse animation of the build.

Our prototype is based on an open source Minecraft server, which we have linked to the Ethereum blockchain, and a decentralised file system (IPFS) that holds a map of the entire world in a state of nature, modelled in Minecraft.

This unique game map has been created using a modified script that takes open satellite data to recreate the earth's topology and climate, including the biomes and flora of its different regions. Local communities can then reconstruct their cities in a state of nature - re-imagining them in a sustainable context.

We have tested this Minecraft server of a Raspberry Pi 2, which enables us to serve up individual Minecraft worlds to up to 40 local players. In turn these local servers can be connected to each other to form a global network of schools and community spaces, connecting players in a debate about how to govern their own particular worlds.

This prototype is based around a low cost "Dockerised" cluster of embedded devices, which we allows us to remotely install and update services. In this way we can create a connected community of worlds, whether these be in schools, home based servers, or commercial cloud based servers.

There are over 100 million registered Minecraft players worldwide. Every school in Northern Ireland uses Minecraft in it's curriculum to engage students. It is the most popular game in history, with a surprisingly wide demographic. We presented the idea for the game in a school in a rural area of the South of France and in Southern Italy. Over 70% of students raised their hands indicating they played the game, and the response from pupils and teachers was phenomenal. We have contacts at Microsoft (who own Minecraft and run Minecon in London each year), and together with the support of our project partners at the British Library, and key organisations within the Minecraft community, we will be able to relatively easily reach our intended audience. Minecraft is an excellent vehicle to teach coding using scripting extensions on the server, and we will be creating an educational package based around a Raspberry Pi 2. We will be extending this aspect of the project and working with schools and organisations promoting the teaching of coding, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Working with media organisations and international museums currently organising events we expect the competition to be wildly popular.

We naturally expect Minecraft players to be keen adopters of the project. Kids often play with their families, and there are an increasing number of schools working with the software worldwide. However we will target a wider demographic than simply Minecraft players. We expect schools teaching citizenship, history, architecture, communities interested in the environment, the circular economy, alternative currencies and economic models, and democratic structures - all to find the project to be interesting for their own educational purposes. Competition entries will be expected to come from mixed teams, with contributions in text, sketching and video forming part of the process.