UPenn students recreated their campus on 'Minecraft' in painstaking detail while stuck at home - take a look

Mary Meisenzahl

Apr 5, 2020, 18:21 IST

UPenn students recreated their campus on 'Minecraft' in painstaking detail while stuck at home - take a look

Damian Owerko

Penn "Minecraft" Fischer Library.

Students at the University of Pennsylvania are recreating their campus on "Minecraft" after COVID-19 ended their semester early.
Events including graduations and weddings have been moved online to "Minecraft," "Animal Crossing," and other online games since the coronavirus spread throughout the world.
Most US colleges have moved to remote learning for the rest of the semester
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The school year at the University of Pennsylvania, like most other US colleges, is over, but some students weren't quite ready to leave.

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A group of UPenn students set up a Minecraft server and coordinated recreating the campus together over the last two weeks of March. Since then, they've talked with Columbia University and Dartmouth University students working on similar projects to set up possible Hunger Games-like challenges between schools and made plans to host spring traditions in the server.

The block-building game "Minecraft," which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion, has been one of the most popular games worldwide over the last 10 years. As of September, it had a staggering 112 million active players every month, a number that has reportedly grown to 145 million.

Colleges and universities across the US have sent students home and turned to remote learning for the rest of the semester. Some schools made the switch after a student tested positive for COVID-19, the coronavirus disease, while others did it preemptively. Colleges also noted the risk of bringing students back from spring break after they'd traveled all over the world.

While they can't be on campus, Penn students recreated their campus in painstaking detail, a process that is still ongoing. Take a look at their incredible work here.

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Junior Andrew Guo first came up with the idea for a virtual UPenn campus in "Minecraft" in March.

At the time, he said, he didn't know other colleges were working on similar projects, but he was inspired by news of a Japanese elementary school graduation on "Minecraft."

Soon after coming up with the idea, Guo told a friend about the plan. He wanted to start his own server but wasn't sure if there was enough interest.

On March 16, he started a discord where interested people could chat about the project, and on March 17 the two Minecraft servers went up.

Guo said he chose to make two servers because they wanted one with Penn's campus, where people could be creative and build things, and another for standard gameplay.

Another Penn student, Damien Owerko, hosted the server and joined the project after jokingly commenting on Facebook "we can just build campus in 'Minecraft.'"

"The pandemic not only separated our student community but also caused widespread anxiety. I hope that this will prevent people from feeling isolated and help channel student's stress into this large creative project" Owerko said.

He worried that a single server could be intimidating to new players.

A few days later, they created a third server, with "crazy mods," or additional free software modifications to the base game, Guo said.

Guo told Business Insider that someone posted about the server to Penn Crushes, a Facebook page where people submit anonymous posts, and then to the official Penn meme page on Facebook.

From there, the project took off.

Right now, Guo says there are about 300 people in the Discord and about half of that number in the Minecraft server.

He estimates that there are probably eight students working on building the campus right now.

Guo said that he doesn't actually know all of the main builders in real life. He met them through Discord but hopes to connect with them more.

They created a Google Sheet to organize who is building what, and Guo says anyone can claim a building they want to recreate as long as they make it true to life.

They agreed to a scale of 1.3 meters = one "Minecraft" block.

The students focused on building the most recognizable buildings on campus first, like College Hall, seen here.

So far, they've mostly constructed East Campus.

They've also created the LOVE statue, a favorite photo spot among UPenn students.

Incoming architecture graduate student Michael Willhoit built Fischer Fine Arts Library, another one of the most recognizable buildings on campus.

Willhoit told Business Insider that he tried to balance maintaining the feeling of building with the scale. "I try to assess which features best capture the feeling of the space, and then make some compromises to make as faithful a recreation as I can."

For example, he made one wing of the library five floors, though in reality, it has six, to keep the proportions with the rest of the campus in check.

Guo and the other mods hope to finish building the campus within the next few weeks.

Some buildings have elaborate interiors, while others haven't been created yet.

Once the campus is finished, they hope to host several events on Penn's virtual campus.

First, they're talking to the coordinators of the Penn Relays, the oldest and largest track and field event in the US. They hope to hold the relays in "Minecraft," in some form, in two weeks.

Then, there are potential collaborations with other schools.

After the server went live, students at Columbia and Dartmouth who were working on similar projects contact Guo.

Students from the three schools plan to host a virtual "Hunger Games" competition once the servers are complete.

Then, the server will be home to various Penn spring traditions.

As a junior, Guo was especially looking forward to the spring tradition of "Hey Day."

On the last day of classes, juniors walk through campus wearing red and celebrate moving up and becoming seniors.

Seniors will still get to graduate at Franklin Field, where graduation would normally be held.

Finding a host for the servers was the first problem, but not the last.

Since the server went online, the student moderators have faced some challenges.

Guo told Business Insider that the gameplay server was originally hit with a griefer, someone who plays an online game in bad faith and harasses other players.

The person, who the moderators never identified, bought 250 accounts to overwhelm the server.

In response, the mods created a bot where players have to input their UPenn ID to enter, proving that they're students. Since then, Guo says, things have gone smoothly.

Players must send mods a photo of their UPenn ID.

They also made a whitelist of confirmed Penn students who can access the game when no mods are available.

Finally, another mod to undo griefer damage has been useful, but the process has been fun overall, Guo says.

So far, there are never very many students playing on the server at once.

Guo suspects that this is because UPenn students have returned to homes in different time zones around the world, and they're adjusting to online classes.

Big events like the Penn Relays should bring more people into the game at once.

Makarios Chung, another student involved in the project, said students would probably be happy building the campus just for its own sake.

"I think playing Minecraft with other people is a great way to form a community, especially when we're all isolated," Chung told Business Insider.

Not every UPenn students plays "Minecraft," of course, but Guo said that they hope to stream many of the events so the whole community can watch.

He hopes to host virtual "Quaker Days" for accepted students to experience campus as best they can before committing to a school.

Guo said that he would personally host tours of campus.

The tours will hopefully also be live-streamed.

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