Session Plan
- Gathering prayer
- Friendly inter-tribal swimming race: idea from How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell. Armed only with heave axes and armour the players must swim out into the water and stay out for as long as possible before returning to the shore (alive!). The last one back wins. They must not seek aid from float or boat. We added a few mobs to the water to make this hard. It worked really well and we did a second round! We awarded the winners the "Papa's American Vegetable" (a potato!)
- Rules - We found an empty place and asked everyone to put down signs on which they could write the rules and values that they felt were important to the community.
- Candlemass - We took the tradition at the heart of Candlemass to look at the past and to seek a blessing for the present. We asked them to build a candle. As they built I explained the tradition and the story of Christ being presented in the temple. We also offered some the ability to explode the past by blowing up their candles with TNT if they wanted! We asked them want they wanted to bless going forwards.
- Blessing prayer
Reflections
Rules - Rules and values contained the obvious (No griefing and trolling) and went beyond into "Learn from others", "Be kind", "Only Rev Kev can blow up our stuff", "Have fun". Was helpful time. Probably should have taken more screenshots as some weeks later one player "re-arranged" the signs and removed some I felt were important!
Building candles was surprisingly good for talking about emotions. One girl explained how rotten the last months had been for her in lockdown. Others also wanted to express similar feelings. Some were excited about Minecraft church and that was what they wanted to bless. On boy build a candle that could get loads of people into the base. We carefully blew up a few candles too, which was really cathartic!
"Entity Spamming" we also discovered that in creative mode it is very easy to summon items, animals or mobs. This creates a huge mess of creatures which can slow the server and other's connections down. This sort of spamming is very frustrating for many in the community so we need to consider how to manage this going forward.