✤MURO Marching : Monument✤

 Have you ever wanted to build something bigger than yourself?

 

     Monument by Sylan Troh takes this feeling and turns it into a social experiment, similar to my previous post about Crazium's Worlds, which you can read here. When you join the World, you begin in a desert valley. A massive tower looms ahead, tall enough to that it fades into the clouds, and you're greeted by a sign.

 

     "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a monument? Something so large, that a single person could never hope to create on their own? The tower before you is synced across all instances: each brick you place is permanently added, and will be visible to everyone. Mine rocks, chisel them into bricks and help us build a monument together!" - Intro message upon loading into the World.

    Initially, when taking these photos, I hit a bottleneck when my game camera was unable to capture the tower. Despite several attempts, I failed to capture the entire scale of the tower in a photograph, resulting in landscape shots with no tower in sight. A recent update seems to have fixed this problem, because now I can use the in-game camera with no trouble.

 

   To add to the tower, I begin by picking up a pickaxe and breaking off chunks of rock from the cliff face. Then, I take all the stones I mined and a chisel from the workstation, and proceed to carve each chunk down into a brick. After loading all of the carved bricks into woven baskets, it's time to make the long trek to the top!

 

    The design of the monument includes a long, spiral staircase that takes you up a winding path to the top floor. There's no railing, so it's easy to overshoot and fall off if you get impatient. When I reach it, I'm so high up that I can no longer see the desert below. When I go to unload my baskets and place the bricks, the spots that I'm able to put them light up blue. When I click, the brick disappears from my hand and fades into place in that spot.

 

 

    A real person placed each brick of this massive monument. You can watch in real time as bricks materialize into existence with a flash of blue light, signalling someone somewhere else has filled in that brick. Even without speaking to them, you can feel connected to these strangers in your united goal. The tower is already massive! There's no way to pinpoint the exact bricks we laid, but my friends and I visited this world and helped fill in several layers of it. And the results speak for themselves! So many people have contributed to this tower, that the top stands far above the valley.

 

    What do you think? Would you participate in a project like this? Let me know in the comments! Finally, here's the World's credit list, photographed on the right! 

 

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!