Planning and Reflection of the Psychopath Sanctuary By Haley Stockton
So I first started off by building a modern home, thinking that psychopaths usually blend in with society. Then I knew that I wanted to build a secret dungeon/layer of sorts where a psychopath would do his/her psychopathy like things. Naturally, I put it under the house.
Once the outside structure of the house was built, I built a couple houses farther away in order to emphasize that the psychopath lived more in isolation.
After I finished the outside, I started getting to work on the inside. I wanted to make it look as normal as possible to coincide with the human aspect of psychopaths.
Underneath the house I built the secret basement. As far as that went, I just built in a trap door that led to the basement. The basement was a long hallway with a couple rooms as seen below. I really struggled for a while to try and find things that could go into the basement, but just decided to put people in cages and the creepiest stuff I could find in there.
The entire thing definitely took over five hours, maybe around 10. Just because I wanted to build a neighborhood near by (before I figured out you could spawn villages so that was cool). Anyways, I tried my best making the interior look like a home, but I quickly found that Minecraft education doesn't use mods, which is what people use to make stuff look cooler from what I understand of them. The basement took a little bit of digging since I built the house on a cliff, but other than that, no huge complications.
But, after all that, I sat in class and was looking at the more detailed structures people built and decided that mine wasn't really all that detailed, especially the exterior of the house. So, naturally, I lit up my house.... literally.
In my next attempt at the sanctuary, I decided to google what a modern house looks like in Minecraft. The youtube video that I watched to get an idea is in the link below.
After I watched the video, it gave me an idea of what I needed to make my house look like to create a modern vibe. The exterior of the house are presented in the photos below.
I was much more proud of this build than the original. It just seemed to come together much nicer than the structure of the other house. I was bummed out; however, that Minecraft education doesn't let you make black stained glass. The interior of the house is pictured below.
The next thing I tackled was the basement. I really wanted to try and do something cool, so I created a sliding underground hidden basement with redstone. That was much more of a struggle than I thought it would be, but I got it done. The youtube video I watched is in the button below and the sketch of how I built it is also below.
In order to hide the materials that I made that with I added an extra room to the house. I had to put trap doors in the middle of the floor because regular blocks would get destroyed when the ground moved. I was really excited once I got it done. It took a few times of doing practice builds off in the grass somewhere before I finally got it working properly.
As creepy as this may sound, putting the people in the cages was the funniest part of this. Every time I would spawn a villager they would hop over the iron cage until I finally made it fast enough so that they wouldn't. They would just make noises and run around in place for a while which was entertaining to watch. One weird thing, though, was that some of them would disappear. I'm not really sure why because I've had some that never disappeared and were in there the same amount of time. So, if you go into my world they might be gone who knows. Also, one got loose in my house and getting him out was an effort.
Overall, I had a lot of fun doing this project. I learned a lot of stuff about this game and about the process behind creating work. I feel like the house represents a psycho well. It is very organized, it has neutral colors, and the creepy basement that they always have in TV shows. The project made me think pretty hard about my decisions with it and what they meant in terms of rhetorical strategy and representation of psychopaths.