Abstract
Abstract. The French national mapping agency, Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière (IGN), decided to develop a new web service, called Minecraft on Demand (www.ign.fr/Minecraft), designed to provide Minecraft maps from the geographic data that IGN produces. This free web service enables the user to select the center of the map and to get a Minecraft world of 5 km long and 5 km wide, at the scale 1 : 1. The player can easily input this map into Minecraft, the world’s most popular video game with 121 million copies sold. Launched in June 2016 in France, the service Minecraft® on Demand obtained a fair success (10,000 maps downloaded), more specifically among young people, since it may enable them to discover IGN data and geography.
Highlights
With more than 121 million copies sold in February 2017 (Gilbert 2017), Minecraft is the most sold video game in the world
In 2013 the summer intern Joseph Braybrook at Ordnance Survey (OS) produced the Minecraft world of Great Britain with OS OpenData products: OS Terrain 50 (a 50 m x 50 m digital terrain grid, with vertical resolution of 10 meters) to create the terrain; the backdrop map product OS VectorMap District to modify the material of the last block on the Minecraft world surface
The IGN Marketing Service considered that IGN Minecraft maps would be an excellent product to promote IGN data for young people: when we interview school pupils in France – and probably in other countries, around 100% of pupils will indicate that they use for cartography Google data, and not data from the national mapping agencies (NMA), and between 80 and 90 % of pupils know the game Minecraft
Summary
With more than 121 million copies sold in February 2017 (Gilbert 2017), Minecraft is the most sold video game in the world. Launched officially in 2011 by Mojang Company and bought by Microsoft in 2014, Minecraft reaches a large public of young people (8- 30 years old) and is a major opportunity for education and training in many countries. This “21st century virtual Lego” which allows building, online and with many players, worlds or maps had to draw attention of national mapping agencies (NMA). A second option to obtain maps, still available on KMS website (KMS 2014) is to load Minecraft world on an area of 10 km x 10 km, at 1:1 scale All these areas are pre-computed by KMS and stored on their website to be downloaded by players. The results that IGN obtained will be presented in the part and some perspectives will be outlined
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