Koekepan: Minecraft as a research platform

Massive Multi-user Virtual Environment (MMVE) research is typically evaluated using traces obtained in emulated environments. Evaluation results obtained using commercially successful MMVEs, such as Minecraft, could aid industry when considering the adoption of newly published MMVE techniques or alternate architectures. In this paper we present our ongoing work in extending Minecraft to become a research platform. By modifying Minecraft on different layers and functional areas, we demonstrate how Minecraft's single server/client architecture can be reconfigured into either a distributed server/client architecture or a peer-to-peer architecture. This is achieved without modifying the Minecraft client and with minimal modification of the server.