Minecon 2015: day one of the annual Minecraft conference - live

And if you’re reading this on Sunday, day two’s liveblog is now up and running...

Actually, I’ll just leave these Vines here...

Time to wander off, get some food and queue up for the evening’s show: I’ll try to post some photos on the way home to wrap up this day one liveblog, before starting all over again in the morning.

The final panel at day one of Minecon draws a crowd: Geoff Ramsey and Matt Bragg of Achievement Hunter, a division of online video studio Rooster Teeth, that’s one of the longest-running games shows on YouTube.

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They promise an “intimate panel”, by which they mean they haven’t prepared anything to talk about beyond asking the audience for questions. The first few don’t go hugely well - a man in a big bow tries to get the audience to shout his name for a video without success, and someone asks Bragg what three things he’d buy from Tesco (“Three bottles of whisky,” he says. Some parents leave with their children at a trot.)

What would they be if they weren’t YouTubers? “Do they pay you for sleeping?” says Bragg. “I would probably be a rocket scientist,” says Ramsey. “An astronaut maybe.” Although the more prosaic truth is he thinks he’d still be working in a “miserable” job in a tech support company.

Advice for people who want to work for a company like Rooster Teeth: “We have 102 employees at Rooster Teeth now, which is way too many! I don’t know 60 of them,” jokes Ramsey. But that now also includes audio engineers, animators, HR and finance people (“smart people, they use calculators to do accounting stuff”) and so on. He says the company tries to hire from within its community of viewers and fans.

What is the future of Minecraft on their channel? “Minecraft was never intended to be a flagship show for us. It was intended to be one single Let’s Play, and it turned out to be the grandest sandbox in the world,” says Ramsey. “There aren’t a lot of games out there that offer the same opportunities that Minecraft does... People like to complain that we’re bored of it, but really not... There’s still so much stuff that you can do in a game like Minecraft.”

If they could have any animal in Minecraft as a boss, what would it be? “How about Cerberus? You could tame it and have a three-headed dog following you around,” says Bragg. “I’ve always wanted to fight a unicorn,” adds Ramsey, putting a big smile on the face of the young boy who asked the question.

Imagine my relief when I clicked through and discovered this was a “parody account”. In fairness, most people here could simply craft their own gates of heaven as an alternative.

Look, one school of thought says this is £40 down the drain. But the other says if I’d brought my two sons it would have cost £258 for their tickets, more in food, they’d still have demanded the swords, and I’d have got about 10% of the liveblogging done. I feel I’m up in this deal.

I’ve just written a standalone piece about Minecraft: Story Mode, the new narrative-driven adventure game that’s the result of a partnership between Mojang and Telltale Games (of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones adventure-games fame).

Telltale looked back to the 1980s for inspiration. “We wanted a story that evoked the classic film stories that we were passionate about,” said Stauffer.

“The movies we grew up with, the two tentpoles we called out were Goonies and Ghostbusters... movies that they just don’t make any more, not like that,” he said, before admitting that a more recent film, The Incredibles, has also been an influence.

“Roleplaying is pretty key. In a Telltale game where you’re driving the story, it’s literally roleplaying. You’re going to be able to play Jesse however you want to play him,” said Stauffer.

“You might have to decide which friends you want to be with the most, and which ones you’re going to have to leave behind. It’s about driving the story, role-playing as a character, and there’s a lot of tough decisions.”

Read the full story here.

In a session: “Has anyone here killed an Ender Dragon?” Every child within 50 feet of me puts their hand up, while mine stays down. Feeling so ashamed right now.

A lovely scene at the end of the last session: a mother next to me patiently encouraging her shy son to wave to YouTuber CaptainSparklez. When he finally plucked up the courage, and got a wave back, the child screamed and then flung himself into his mum’s arms. She wins all the parent points.

More tweets from around the show:

Here’s the teaser trailer for Minecraft: Story Mode that was shown earlier today at Minecon for the first time. It’s the more narrative-focused game being worked on by Telltale Games and Mojang.

I sat in on the panel session about live-streaming Minecraft on Twitch, with panellists including Chad Johnson (OMG Chad is his handle online), Matt Zagursky (Sevadus), Bacon Donut (real name unknown), Martyn Littlewood from British gaming network Yogscast, and Jordan Maron (CaptainSparklez).

Why live-stream? “One of the advantages is I can’t get bored because there’s always thousands of people yelling at me and commenting on how horribly I’m doing something,” said Johnson. “When I’m streaming it’s much more about the audience than it is about the game. I don’t have to be good at it, I don’t have to do it well!”

“I’m pretty bad at games, so I just try to compensate by being funny,” agreed Bacon Donut. “And I love being in front of an audience, because I can immediately tell if something is working.” Meanwhile, Maron said that he sees live-streaming as being “way more casual” than shooting and editing YouTube videos (which he still does as well). “I just play and have a good time and don’t really have to worry.”

Johnson talked enthusiastically about live-streams to benefit charitable causes, and Zagursky agreed. “To be able to take that kind of influence and to be able to leverage it for something good is amazing. We’re approached a lot to help out, and we always find a way to say yes,” he said. Yogscast runs charity live-streams every Christmas, with Littlewood describing it as an “overwhelming experience”. He praised charity Gaming for Good as one of the organisations spurring action in this area.

The panel were asked about embarrassing incidents while live-streaming. “Every few minutes I do something stupid,” said Zagursky. “I’ve kinda built a career out of embarrassing myself so it’s a little hard to pinpoint certain things,” agreed Donut. Most of the panel, it turned out, had accidentally started streaming when they didn’t mean to, several times. “I was asleep and my cat stepped on the home key, which is my normal hot key to start streaming. And there is 10 minutes of me asleep until my friend saw it and gave me a call,” said Johnson. “You could even see the cat at the beginning, rubbing his face on my mic and then chewing something he shouldn’t... That actually got television shows talking about it.”

The panel also talked about taking donations during their live-streams, and the ethics of people tipping to get shout-outs. “It’s an interesting line to walk between recognising people who are financially contributing and supporting the stream,” said Littlewood. “I never want to put that kind of paywall... but if somebody does pay, I will say thank you to them.”

What has doing online video improved about the panellists. “I definitely think YouTube, streaming all that stuff has helped with my ability to communicate,” said Maron. “Highly recommended to anyone out there: do some streaming!” Interestingly, when asked if they had to choose between YouTube and Twitch, several of the panellists said they’d pick Twitch - because they thrive on the live interaction with viewers. That would be why YouTube is beefing up its games live-streaming activities, then...

Anyway yes, the Hololens demo. I bagged a 10-minute slot in Microsoft’s demonstration room at Minecon, where visitors are getting essentially the same demo that was shown at E3 (above) and tried by my colleague Keith Stuart at that show.

You switch between playing regular Minecraft on a virtual screen projected on the wall, and seeing a zoomed-out birds-eye view projected onto a table in front of you. The set-piece moment is crouching down to look under ground-level: a Dorling Kindersley-esque cutaway view that lets you pinpoint rare materials or interesting caves, mark them, and then explore using the normal view.

Aside from an awkward moment where I mistargeted a lightning strike and set swathes of scenery on fire that I wasn’t supposed to, it ran like clockwork: no obvious technical glitches. It is making me wonder how this kind of hardware will affect the gameplay though, with one player able to zoom out into a kind of “god view” while others scurry around on the surface.

That might actually be one good use for Hololens: the headset wearer playing vengeful deity while friends with regular joypads try to protect themselves and hide away. I sense this may be the next creative job for Mojang and Microsoft though: it’s technically possible to run Minecraft on Hololens, so how do they use that capability in interesting ways?

There’s currently a costume contest taking place on the main stage at Minecon, with added peril provided by the fact that half the children taking part are wearing boxes on their heads with not-quite-rightly-aligned eye-holes. Exiting stage left is a potential death trap *Lynne Faulds Wood face*

In other news, I bumped into Stampy on my way out of the Hololens demo room, and shook his hand. My sons are going to be excited by my proximity to fame OR furious at missing out. Place your bets now.