HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — A portion of $700,000 reserved for a Minecraft Education and Games in CHamoru program is poised to train local CHamorus to work in video games with the purpose of helping to develop a gaming industry on island.
About $40,000 will be spent on the training. The remaining program funding will be spent on developing CHamoru education through Minecraft.
The $700,000 is just part of a larger grant allocation, the Education Stabilization Fund.
The Minecraft CHamoru education program was submitted under the leadership of Robert Underwood, a member of the coordinating committee for the Commission on CHamoru Language and the Teaching of the History and Culture of the Indigenous People of Guam; and Vincent Munoz, a tech entrepreneur and owner of Next Generation LLC.
Underwood said they are in communication with Microsoft. A similar project was done in New Zealand, with an organization for Maori people, and Guam is “kind of” piggybacking off that initial work, he said.
“In our early conversations with Microsoft, they’re looking at this example as being perfect to start encouraging indigenous languages throughout the Pacific. So the best way to understand this, is this is a digitization initiative by indigenous groups,” Underwood said.
He said they are also using this grant as a seed opportunity for future projects that go into other kinds of digital media.
“This is the absolutely available opportunity to start dealing with (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in a creative way,” Underwood said. “Sometimes people think of this as like, this kind of programming is a way to teach traditional language and traditional culture, and that it ends there. But this is actually about STEM, it’s about math, it’s about algorithms, it’s about just kind of bootstrapping that whole enterprise into an island format.”
World-building based on Guam, local culture
According to Stephanie Flores, the administrator of the Guam State Clearinghouse, the two men brought together a team of young people, some of whom are in the diaspora, to work on developing Minecraft Education and Games in CHamoru.
Most of the costs are associated with the development team and the creation of two Minecraft worlds, $200,000 and $280,000, respectively. There will be two worlds created, one for the multiplatform Bedrock Edition of the game and one for the Education Edition of the game.
These worlds will include language lessons, cultural experiences, legends, and native flora and fauna, built on a one-to-one recreation of Guam in Minecraft.
“These worlds will be built with the flexibility to be used in the future for projects such as recreating historical settlements, recent historical events and future planning for public spaces in Guam,” Flores said.
Another $30,000 is dedicated for the creation of content by Piki Studios for an upcoming featured server, called LORE.
“The content will include traditional characters, some fauna, quests and some language implementation,” Flores said. “This server is expected to have traffic ranging from 2,000 to 100,000 players at one time.”
There is also $20,000 dedicated for the creation of 40 unique player skins and persona items based on CHamoru people. Another $80,000 will pay for the creation of minigames based on CHamoru people and culture.
The program will spend $20,000 on the Bedrock and Education editions of the game in CHamoru, and $30,000 for the creation of a phrase book and dictionary focused on Minecraft, gaming, online video content and social media.
The final aspect is training local CHamorus in video game development within a real-world environment, “with the outcome for those involved to gain experience and skills to help with creating and developing a local gaming industry in Guam,” according to Flores.
Rollout and projections
She said the project will be delivered over 18 months using Agile methodologies, which is a type of software development.
“The project estimates approximately 150,000 to 250,000 downloads of the game across all platforms over the first 12 months,” Flores stated.
Underwood said this estimate is not part of their project application, and may be the result of someone analyzing what could be the result of the project.
He said they are in communication with Microsoft about how people can access the product, which they believe will be at a nominal cost.
The Minecraft Education and Games in CHamoru program aims to train local CHamorus to work in video games with the purpose of helping to develop a gaming industry on island.
