(No. 11) Minecraft is good and fun, actually
One person reads their Kindle and the other plays Minecraft. Who's smarter?
I’m about 10 years late, but this is my decree. Wedged somewhere between non-wickedness and pitfall-laden pleasure is this dang video game.
But why do I care? I’m in my late 20s. I have a career, a social life, and passions, one of which you’re reading right now. The last video games I played were on a much-loved SpongeBob GameBoy.
My opinions on video games were complicated and negative. I can’t say this was an independent POV because I’m a sponge, one of many. I’ll try to inspect why society dislikes video games so feverishly, even though we gamify nearly everything, but I know a lot of my dislike stems from my own insecurity. I’m easy prey for avenues of escapism, so I’ve been speaking from envy and a twisted meritocratic view of pleasure.
I’m glad Minecraft is the first video game I’ve played as an adult. It’s fun and it’s hard. And, YEAH, I think kids should play it. I’ll tell you why.
Society values things less when they:
Don’t have productive or monetary outputs
Engage children as a primary user-base
Aren’t personally experienced
I remember when my little brother Matthew was still young. He would grab a box of Nilla Wafers and disappear to the basement for days. This was a combination of offenses #1 and #2. The work he was putting into his game didn’t count as chores, homework, or exercise. It wasn’t a portfolio or romanticized hobby like tinkering on a circuit board or oil painting. Plus, he was a child.
One by one friends around me are starting families. As joyful and monumental as this is, it’s terrifying for our peer group. They’re almost dropping into a state of societal non-being by caring for children and engaging with their interests. It takes them off the hot and profitable map. And even though that map is socio-economic Trash, the sentiment remains. It’s not rocket science or corporate marketing, it’s Daniel Tiger. And that’s lesser.
The soft and open is ridiculed—ironically because of the fear of being ridiculed. We don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge hide and seek, picking flowers, or playing in the sand as activities that make us more educated and skilled because we don’t value those lessons and skill sets. Even though the global north is more accurately a class-based society, we’re fed a strong meritocracy narrative. Cartoons and stuffies are supposed to be for children, and children’s interests and/or hobbies are supposed to be boring to adults. What is not education or skill is not power.
I had put this lesser lens on video games, especially Minecraft because that was my little brother’s game of choice. They’re not easily monetized. They’re marketed for children. And as for offense #3, I’d never tried it myself. What a tired blindspot.
On a weekend morning, my cowpoke man said they were off to play and I asked to watch. I wanted to see what all the fuss what about with these digital legos. By that evening, I had texted Matthew for his username and password. He really got a laugh out of that.
Most people recognize the name Minecraft. It’s the most popular video game in the world. The original PC version registered 100 million users within two and a half years.
First available in Java Edition in 2009, Minecraft was purchased by Microsoft in 2014 and now operates alongside Mojang Studios. It’s a sandbox game, meaning the player has the freedom to roam and alter the virtual world at will with no set game path. Interactive life-simulation games like The Sims are similar.
The game’s essence is construction, with the creation of tools usually being the player’s first action. I was surfing around a while ago for a game to design and develop property—I’m absolutely gripped by the desire to play house—but I couldn’t find one. My first charge on Minecraft was building and I was thrilled for it.
The limitation of the game breeds beautiful creativity, but it’s a lot of staring and mouth-scrunching before eureka. I’m in awe of the ways players use blocks; trap doors on stairs to make sofas, yellow-dyed carpets as hay spread for a barn, and buttons on logs as nails. A phrase I often hear in my career is “it’s easier to design with restrictions.” Easier, sometimes. But more often than easier, it’s savory, delightful, and numbingly frustrating.
Previously mentioned Matthew (PMM) famously created a 1:1 replica of the Royal Carribean’s Oasis of the Seas cruise ship that was so detailed and accurate, it required developer intervention to raise the ceiling of the game. It was the largest cruise ship in the world. He must’ve been in 7th grade.
Experts make their craft look easy. But I didn’t think he was an expert, I thought he was wasting his time.
The name is accurate—everything has to be mined, gathered, or crafted. All the while, you have to find food and avoid hostile ‘mobs’ (short for mobile entities) to stay alive. It requires precision, strategy, and creativity. You can enchant, create electronic systems, and, if you’re really good, automate farms and villager trading with pistons and hoppers and… jeez.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t know what an ore was before Minecraft. What does it mean to smelt? To be a fletcher, cleric, or mason? Absolutely absent from my brain. Naturalistic roleplaying and fundamental practices are a big draw for me.1 I would say cottagecore, but your world could be western, modern, retrofuturistic, anything. In all cases, you have to make your own way.
I live in a city apartment. I have groceries delivered from a CSA box. If I need something, I can order it or drive to the store. It’s nice to work out how to feed sheep so you can get wool to make a bed. Flex a muscle we’ve long forgotten.
The logic grips me for hours. There’s a sequence for everything. But the game will tell you little, it’s all self-discovery and crowdsourced research (via Minecraft Wiki). Playing is an exercise in learning how to learn.
You’re rewarded for knowing, experiencing, and learning, and the more you uncover, the more the game unfolds. But, miraculously, being a beginner isn’t punishing. In fact, most advanced players I’ve seen prefer to start a new world every so often because the possibilities and challenges of early game are so exciting. This is not a common phenomenon.
My stress resilience is getting better as I play, too. I was struck by how scared I felt when I first peered over a cliff in the game. Lack of exposure makes my fear of heights worse—a midwestern symptom—and I think height exposure in the game mirrors other beneficial exposures.
I’d rather not fight monsters. Generally.
You have to prepare diligently before entering dangerous situations in the game. It’s a nice mirror to life. I can delay my response when someone sends me an aggressive email or yells at me from their car, smoothing out my knee-jerk reaction of acting quickly or acting unprepared. Thanks for your email, I’m not prepared to respond to you right now.
Crops don’t grow instantly. Swimming is slow. The time element fuels a lot of contraptions to automate tasks, but they may as well have added laundry to the game. This type of stress is antsy and exasperated. It threatens our ability to watch full-length movies and pay attention to the group speaker. Under this threat, we respond with bullet points and TikToks. We agree to the terms of the hostage situation. It’s more satisfying to find cherry wood after walking 1000 blocks than it is after 10. It’s an exposure I dislike and an exposure I benefit from.
Intense focus and time lapping gently at my heels is a good thing, a helpful thing, up to a certain point. Time does not fly most of the time because I’m not having fun. The communal and immersive world-building in Minecraft is like a drug to me. My desire for it reminds me of my own advice in my first piece:
Putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations makes us happier overall because we reset our dopamine flow. Eating meals without TV, biking to work, or going to the bathroom without our phones balances the motivation-reward relationship.
I’ve been spinning the gumball dispenser on Minecraft and chomping on dopamine. Even though it’s a relatively balanced game, exchanging time and price for benefit, it’s a motivation spiral for me. I’m fascinated by how time snaps by when I fall into deep-wave Minecraft focus.
This might be niche, but I enjoy isolation. I fool my brain with false stand-ins for human connection like sitcoms and social media. It’s ersatz and unfulfilling, but it’s safe. We all know small talk is small, half-hearted, and clumsy. But we can’t “speedrun” getting to know each other. We need to relearn to hear the “intimacy in mundane chatter.” Take a look at the art I’m quoting.
Ultimately, nothing can replace the healing effect of moving out of isolation. Deep and rewarding human connections are dopamine creators. We work for community and it’s pleasurable. It motivates us to continue working for it. I know this is true because of how threatened I feel by it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t cover video games with a blanket of dislike because I’m scared of my own deficiencies.
If you play games on a server2 and feel genuinely bolstered by a community, this may not apply to you. I speak from experience of long nights playing alone followed by disoriented days.
Minecraft feels like the most constructive pleasure activity I’ve engaged in over the past 5 years. It’s second only to reading, but I don’t appreciate how reading is so tied up in moral acclaim that it diminishes other forms of narrative pleasure as a byproduct. If I’m smart and classy for reading my teen fiction novels then I’m smart and classy, but I still don’t watch documentaries. Who doesn’t love to feel like an old soul reading and then later wonder about the disastrous effects of the male gaze on their personal worth and pleasure?
We garner pleasure from avenues that need loose and untied assumptions, like little flopping sneakers. Children’s media is constructive in ways we don’t value. In ways we haven’t tried. We judge things too hard and too often. We do what we enjoy to get by.
[Fin]
I talk more about the draw of fundamental practices and olden roleplaying in my piece, We’re used to butter clothing
What I didn’t know was that he and his friend Mark from Hong Kong had started their own server and created a community, building gothic cathedrals (shown below) and mid-century mansions. They called the server Lionheart and it still exists today.
I’ve never played Minecraft and know nothing about it but now I want to play 👀