User blog:Antonio R. Castro/Let's Craft an Interactive Video for Minecraft Wiki

Do you know why the music in Minecraft is simply epic?

Every world in Minecraft is generated using a procedural system. It means every game is different from the previous one and the next because the world is simply different, and each time you will have a chance to play differently. There are ways to use a seed to generate a similar world, but it won't ensure you will live the same experience.

When you have a video game with that kind of freedom, it can become a serious challenge to add the music, to make the player feel part of that world. In a video game where the world is static, you can set which music track will play in every place. You can define where the door is to access a house and trigger a track when you enter, so you can have relaxing music while you are taking a break in your home. Or maybe you will have sneaky music while you are cleaning the neighbor's house.

But Minecraft is different. How would you define a house in a game where you can build a house without walls? Or doors? Is a bed the only thing that you need to consider a cave as your home? There are millions of possibilities, and staying at home is not as safe as in other games. You can still hear Creepers on the other side of the walls while you are sleeping in your "bedroom".

So when C418 was working on the music for Minecraft, he made a risky decision together with Notch: the music would be completely random. Some types of music are triggered by events. For example, there is a song that always plays instantly during the credits, but the rest of the experience will be marked mainly by random tracks.

It doesn't sound epic, but it is! Because after a long day of fighting against Creepers, trying to survive, you are coming back home, you are climbing the cliff close to your destiny, and from the top of the cliff, during the sunset, with the outline of your home in the distance, you see the sun, the colors, the safest place in your lonely world, and in that perfect time, a random track called "" is played, and you feel like it's a moment you will never forget.

Welcome to the Minecraft Experience.

The first Interactive Video for a historically Gamepedia Wiki
All of us know the importance of Gamepedia Wikis in the new Fandom's spirit. They are part of our DNA now, and after the success of our previous Interactive Videos for Memory Alpha and DC Database, we wanted to try it with a Gamepedia Wiki. We could have tried it in a community with a medium amount of traffic, about a game with simple gameplay and little complexity, but we wanted to make something great! And we thought Minecraft Wiki would be the perfect candidate for that quest.

After the first contact with the Directors of all the Minecraft Wikis (including international communities), we set a meeting between our Video Team and the Directors. There were some really good ideas on the table, but one really stood out above the rest and made the most sense for this game: a recipe book with the basic concepts of Minecraft.

It isn't easy to reduce Minecraft to basic concepts. You have the immensity of a world that allows you to play the soundtrack of your favorite movies with redstone circuits, create a calculator or play Pokemon Red inside Minecraft. But coming back to the introduction of this blog post, our intention wasn't to create something that would give you the music that your ears always want to hear. Instead, we wanted to give you the possibility to bring the wiki experience to a new level with the perfect timing.

Even the most experienced visitors would find the Interactive Video interesting enough to feel it as something different yet complementary to the wiki itself. Our goal wasn't to improve the wiki content, because the gameplay of Minecraft Wiki is simply great, and it's hard to find something that wasn't included yet in its articles. If you want to know more about Minecraft, the wiki will give you the answer that you need. This video is going to be a new high point of the Minecraft Wiki Experience - something unique without the need to replace the content. It would just be the track that you want to hear while you are browsing and enjoying the wiki.

Please have fun and enjoy the video! This is only the first of many videos to come for Gamepedia Wikis in the next months:



The Creepers of this project
You know, the Creepers are there, always reminding you that it won't be easy to reach the goal. We had our own Creepers during this project, obstacles that remind you this won't be easy.


 * Updated content: Every Minecraft Fan wants to see the updates that the Minecraft team is preparing for them. That's something good, but when you are creating a video that can't be updated constantly (like a wiki), it can be a frustrating, a Creeper that can explode and destroy the whole project. We had to work very closely with the Minecraft Wiki Directors to detect every frame of outdated content to remove it or reduce it to very specific parts. It's part of the history, but the main content has to be the most updated content.
 * Resource packs: One of the key features of Minecraft, the possibility of customizing textures, models, music, etc, was also one of the most dangerous obstacles of the creation process. We wanted to feature the millions of possibilities of customizing the Minecraft Experience, but it would confuse our visitors, because showing customized content in our video could make them think it's original content. Again, we had to reduce the presence of resource packs in our video.

When we finished the first version of this video, we presented it to the Directors and they found a lot of cuts that should be changed. Our experts detected dozens of Creepers that our team should isolate and eliminate. Creepers are part of the Minecraft Experience, but you don't want to ruin your experience with the appearance of one of those mobs!

The team behind the project
It's impossible to talk about this video without mentioning the Director Team of Minecraft Wiki. Their collaboration and support during the entire creation process has been key. They are the experts, and they had the passion to review every frame of the video when we presented it. And we can only thank all of them for all that support.

We felt that support from the beginning, when Max Dionne (Director of Video Production) and Bailey Meyers (Content Producer) had the first meeting with the Directors in Discord. And that enthusiasm was fuel for the team during the months of production for this video. I would like to highlight the commitment from Max to make all the needed changes to create something original and meet the expectations of the Minecraft community.

And we couldn't talk about this video without Emin Bassavand (Supervisor of Post-Production), who was key to reaching the final version of this video, making minor changes here and there to raise the quality of the video.

Thanks for all your hard work! There are a lot of important learnings that we will apply to future collaborations because we are sure this is only the first of a lot of videos that we will create in the coming months.

Result
And finally, we come to the end. We are more than happy to add this video to the list of Interactive Videos created by Fandom as part of this initiative to complement the Wiki Experience with a different look from the content included in our wikis. This is the first Interactive Video for a Gamepedia Wiki, a video that will add an awesome musical experience to Minecraft Wiki and give visitors the possibility to have an epic journey!

We hope you enjoy the video, and let us know your opinion of it in the comments section below. Thanks for watching, and feel free to share in the comments what the most epic moment you experienced in Minecraft is!