If there’s one thing John Carmack loves, it’s Minecraft. The Oculus CTO practically lives and breaths Mojang’s hit game, so who better to judge a Minecraft VR competition?
The legendary developer and his family will be judging a new contest for Minecraft Realms, the game’s official private server service. The competition is being set up by Reddit user Mallmagician and will be a monthly event, though the Carmacks are only taking part in the first one. This month’s challenge tasks players with building around the theme of ‘The Metaverse’ which, funnily enough, is the topic Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey spoke about before announcing that the game was coming to VR at Oculus Connect last year.
Carmack and co will look over entries and select their favorites. Players will be competing for a pretty cool prize: a three-inch sandstone statue of a Minecraft character wearing a VR headset and holding a controller. The competition officially launches this Saturday, September 10th and you can sign up to take part over on this Reddit thread.
The Oculus CTO didn’t say exactly which members of his family would be judging the competition but we’d guess his wife and son will be involved.
It should be a fun challenge; we’ve previously written about how VR’s amazing sense of scale is best realized within Minecraft, so a contest to build something within its blocky world is a great idea. The addition of realms to Minecraft is also a bit like the metaverse itself. Once you start a realm, the world exists whether the creator is in it or not. Also, in this particular realm creators have built an interconnected system of portals to reach outlying areas.
Carmack himself was instrumental in bringing Minecraft to both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. In fact, he dedicated most of his Oculus Connect 2015 keynote speech to talking about how he helped get the game on the mobile VR headset. Since then he’s appeared on stage at Microsoft’s E3 press conference demonstrating the Gear VR version’s cross-play features with other editions of the game. He’s even taking a break from his own Minecraft Realm to spend time judging the competition.
The contest is meant to be focused on the Gear VR version of the game, so complicated machines or giant mobs are discouraged.
