Praxis
Praxis is the idea of "a large-scale online multiplayer society-building experience, being developed by a small team of contributors from the Civcraft community and beyond. Praxis is what has been referred to in the past as the ‘Civcraft Successor’, ‘Standalone Civcraft’, [...]. Imagine if you stripped down Civcraft to the core ideas that drive all these awesome socially-emergent experiences, and then designed an entire engine and game around them. That’s Praxis. It’s an open world in which we provide you the tools to build the society you want."[1]
Work on the project officially started 2012[2] under ttk2 through [REDACTED] Games LLC, and ended some time before the shutdown of Civcraft[3].
Goals
"It is designed to provide a toolset that allows players to construct and simulate societies, creating cultures, running businesses or governments or a multitude of other assorted personal objectives. We describe this type of gameplay as ‘social emergence’; there is no built in ‘story’, no mission structure, no levelling etc. Praxis is about real humans interacting within simulated environments, and the stories and histories they create simply by coexisting within a shared space. [...] In Praxis, your actions have real consequences, and part of the agreement you enter into by playing Praxis is that you may end up being subject to these consequences. [...] The core of the game involves gathering, building, exploring and travelling within a wide-spanning open universe alongside a large number of other players."[2]
"Praxis is set in a wide-spanning universe, ripe for exploration. The worlds of Praxis are constructed from voxels, similar to Minecraft but with a few unique twists. Praxis features user-created vehicles for transportation."[1]
Praxis is "the next step, [...] with the goal of pushing ourselves to the limits of what is possible within a ‘game’. What if we could have ten thousand people online? What if the game ‘universe’ was truly that; a universe, with planets and stars and features from a warm savannah to the cold depths of space?"[1]
Successors
Since the end of Civcraft it became obvious the original Praxis was no longer being developed[3]. But the idea of a standalone open world game with a focus on social and political interaction lived on, and several attempts were made by different groups of members from the Civ community to work on such a game.
Praxis as a Spiritual Concept in Civcraft
In the Classic Era, a player named reffelruz joined the Commonwealth and began to work on a religion for Civcraft; he noticed that there was a general air of pessimism in the longstanding members of the community: they did not see the current Civ server, or even Minecraft in general, as an adequate platform for 'the Experiment', and many of them were outspoken about it too; they often shared versions of the vision laid out above, under Goals, and imagined a world other than the one they had on which to play the game. reffelruz saw something very different; he saw a concept that could exist then and there, if only the right kind of people were playing the game, or if the people playing the game had the right perspective on the game, and therefore played the game a certain way: in this fashion, reffelruz believes that Praxis can be achieved in the current world through the effort and choices of the playerbase.
Furthermore, Medic philosophy includes a state of personal enlightenment called 'Praxis', describing a state wherein a player's personal vision of the game and their own role in the world is being satisfied by the simulation; a person in this state is said to be certain to contribute to the achievement of Praxis in others through their actions in the game; when one becomes a valuable part of the world that can be experienced by others, the world moves closer to Praxis.
Reffelruz is dedicated to moving the general culture of the playerbase towards Medic principles; he currently resides on Mount Olympus in The Commonwealth, and continues to develop literature divulging his views and his civ-life.