Playing Minecraft with My Children

On caves and routines

We used to play video games on Wednesday afternoons. Really we played just one: the most popular game of all time, Minecraft.

I didn’t let them play, at first. Instead, my children, ages four and seven, would sit at either side of me at our round kitchen table, munching cut fruit from bamboo bowls, watching me play. I planned to let them take control eventually, but I needed some time to assuage my concerns about introducing them to video games. I was worried they would become overstimulated, dependent. That it would change them in some way. I wrote about those anxieties back then, here. I don’t know how long we did this routine. Months. Long enough for me to get pretty good. Eventually, I decided to let them play on their own. I did enjoy playing. But I set it aside.

Time moved swiftly, as it does when children are in elementary school. The rhythm of each day was set largely by their extracurricular activities. They grew taller, smarter, more themselves. One day, our boy got into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. His little sister watched the first practice and said, “I want to do that.” Soon we were driving from West Hollywood to a studio in the valley two days a week. Then it was three. Then we added Saturday mornings. Snack, drive, roll, shower, repeat.

They began competing in tournaments around Southern California. In his first competition, our boy came home with a huge silver medal. Our girl came home with bronze. I let them wear the medals to school. We were gaining momentum.

Then, last December, they came home empty-handed from a competition in San Diego. The head of the studio decided to change the schedule. Now there would be an introductory class as well an advanced class. He asked if our kids could attend both. It would add another 45 minutes of grappling onto their day. I said we could do it.

Before this, we’d had a leisurely after-school routine. Over three-quarters of an hour, they ate a snack, did some homework, and wrestled a little before suiting up. Now, they would have to do all this in ten minutes.

Something would have to be cut.

I decided that snack took priority. You can’t do Jiu Jitsu on fumes.

Could they snack while working? No. Beside my general prohibition against multi-tasking, our snacks were messy. You can’t eat wet baby carrots and peanut butter while writing about your favorite mammal. How about homework first, and then snack in the car? Also no. They needed to relax their minds for a moment. And I did not want them getting peanut butter on their gis. And the one time I tried this, tossing them each a banana to eat as we drove up twisting Laurel Canyon Boulevard, Flo threw up on the mat.

So it was settled–we would snack at the table and save homework for later. Still, we would have to move quickly, washing hands as soon as we walked in the door and snacking with focus. My children weren’t naturally inclined to this kind of efficiency, so I would need to grease the wheels if we were going to wash, eat, change, and get to the valley on time. I knew just the grease.

Walking home on the first day of the new schedule, I appraised them of the plan. “Yes!” said Flo. At home, they put away shoes and washed hands. I poured fresh water into two cups, then filled two bowls with pre-made popcorn, an easy snack for our first day. I made myself an espresso, because dad needs a little something, too. I pushed back the vase of dying flowers, set my laptop in the center, and clicked the green Minecraft icon.

It had been months since I’d played. But in the universe of the game, no time had passed. I materialized on a show-covered hill. To my left, a rabbit traveled in playful hops. It seemed real and alive despite being composed of blocks and cubes. I pulled my finger across the track pad, which caused me to turn 180 degrees. All around me, I saw frozen water and blocky, snow-covered hills. On one, there was a structure: an L-shaped building made of glass, marble, and dark oak.

A structure I had built.

Now I remembered. After designing a home on the original island, I had crafted a small boat and started going on sailing expeditions. Together, we discovered buried treasure in shipwrecks, coral reefs, deep mines full of diamonds and abandoned mineshafts. When I had as much treasure as I could carry, I would head back. Sometimes I would get lost, circling the same foreign beaches before finally finding my way. Shaken by these moments, I built tall spires of cobblestone along the coasts to aid myself in the future. But the map was massive. On one excursion, I went too far. The kids grew restless watching me try to find my way back. I gave up and built a new house above the ice. That’s where we were now.

“Let’s look inside,” said Hilton.

I ascended the hill in little hops and opened the iron door. I stood in a glass vestibule that rose upward, toward a roof of dark brown oak, and also down, opening into glass-ceilinged rooms as it descended the hill. Near the entrance, a stone forge sat next to a crafting table. The forge was still running, puffing out tiny cubes of smoke as it processed whatever I had put in there months ago. There were chests in every corner of the room. I opened one, and it was full of gold bars, green emeralds, diamonds, and green spheres called Ender Pearls. “We’re rich!” said Flo.

Outside the glass walls, it began to snow. The flakes were just cubes, but the way they moved, swirling with a convincing randomness, and the way they were lit, changing subtly as they moved through the air, made a fine illusion. Having grown up in Minnesota, I have spent many hours of my life watching snow fall. I could easily imagine the clammy, cold feel of the glass, and the warmth of the torches I had placed along oak pillars. A tingle traveled up my back.

“Did you hear that?” exclaimed Hilton. He often heard sounds before I did. “Dad, go down the stairs.”

I started down and heard it, too. A dog’s bark. Yes, we had a dog! I had forgotten. There it sat, right where we left it, guarding the ground-level back door of our winter home. A lanky animal made of white and grey blocks.

The timer on my cell phone went off; it was time to suit up. “Gis on, kiddos,” I said. While they put on their rash guards and tied the belts of their thick cotton uniforms, I dropped the laptop into a backpack, filled their water bottles, and wiped off my sunglasses. They were already at the door, ready to go, before I had my shoes on.

“Car is on the right,” I said. They trundled out. Through the window, I heard them argue about which way to go. But they were already seated, smiling at me through the dust-covered windows, when I got there.

Flo took gold at our next tournament. Hilton didn’t medal. He managed this loss as gracefully as might be expected, asserting that he was fine, that it was not a big deal, while adopting a sardonic attitude for the rest of the day. We ate ice cream overlooking the water in Long Beach.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we did our new routine. I began exploring the caves around our winter home and became fabulously wealthy, weighed down to the ground with diamonds and iron ore. Deep in one cave, behind one of the building-sized geodes that occasionally form underground, I discovered a wall made of copper. “It’s a trial chamber!” shouted Hilton. I bashed my way through the wall and fought off dozens of skeletal warriors, hopping slimes, and wind spirits, amassing treasure and magical items.

When I first played the game, I died frequently. This didn’t mean the end. You could “respawn” wherever you had last slept. After dying, I would reappear next to the bed in my home, and then I’d venture out to find my body. There it would be, a blocky form lying motionless in the grass, surrounded by all the items I had been carrying–my armor, weapons, and treasures. I would scoop these up and move on. Eventually, I was so knowledgeable about the game’s dangers, and so well-armored, that I did not worry any longer about dying. I couldn’t remember the last time it happened.

I was even less worried now. I began searching for rarer delights, using magic to plumb the ocean, delving even deeper into the ground. On one expedition, I dug all the way down until my tools became useless, striking against blocks with distinctive black and white lines. This was bedrock, one of the virtual world’s only boundaries. I changed directions, tunneling quickly with my diamond-coated tools, and found myself in a huge underground chamber.

The only light came from dim-glowing mosses and a stream of lava, falling far in the distance. In front of me, it was dark. Normally, I would have been prepared to explore such a cave by setting dozens of torches around its perimeter. But I had been underground so long that I’d run out of coal, which was needed to make the torches, of which I had only a few dozen remaining. It was not enough to light even a fraction of the cave, but I was not worried. With my enchanted tools, I could tunnel up and out of the underworld whenever I wanted.

I set a few torches on the walls nearby. I saw that I was high up, on a vast precipice. “There’s water,” said Hilton. I listened. Yes, I could hear water moving below.

“I’ll check this area for diamonds, and then I’ll start back home,” I said to the kids. And there were diamonds! Though I had more than enough, it was still exciting to see them glittering in the rock, placed there by one of the game’s algorithms to be both hidden and discoverable. After gathering these treasures, I turned up the brightness on my laptop and peered over the precipice, curious to know what was down there. I took a sip of espresso.

Suddenly, I was being attacked. It was a tall black form, moving incredibly fast. It made a roar that was genuinely frightening. Flo looked on in horror.

“Enderman!” said Hilton. He began giving me advice, talking fast, his voice shaking.

“I can’t listen right now,” I said tersely. The Enderman was much stronger than anything else in the game, and they could teleport to any point instantaneously. They only attacked if you looked into their glowing purple eyes. I must have accidentally done so while standing at the precipice. These creatures had only one weakness: water. If I could find the source of the trickling I’d heard earlier, I’d be safe.

But it was dark. I ran in the direction of the sound and fell. I didn’t fall far, but it was now pitch-black. There was a moment of silence, and then the Enderman was back, making a wet sound as it hit me. Hilton continued talking, but I couldn’t hear him. I ran blindly, searching for the water, unwilling to believe this was happening.

And then I was dead. All sound stopped, and two options appeared on the screen. Did I want to go back to the main menu? Or did I want to respawn at my last save point? I felt the adrenaline wane in my body.

I looked at the kids. “Wow, can you believe that, guys? I can’t believe it.”

“You should have gone home,” said Flo stonily.

“Yearh. You will never find your body,” said Hilton.

“You’re right,” I said. “But I’ll be okay. I left plenty of supplies at the house.” I clicked on “Respawn.”

Instead of appearing in the bedroom of my winter home, however, I came to in a sunny field. There was no snow, no ice-covered sea. Instead, there were features I recognized: a large cavern, a rocky spire from which blue water spilled. Could it be? Pulling my finger across the track pad, I saw the proof: twin spires made of cobbled stone. The algorithm of the game would not have created these; only a player would have. Me. I had put them there almost two years ago.

“Guys, we’re back on the original island.” I ventured down the island’s slope, sure now where I was going, and there, on the coast, was the house I had built when the children were younger. There was the moat I had created, and the marble wall, dotted with iron lanterns. There, too, was my daughter’s foot on my leg, and my boy full of comments, both of them so fresh, their hair short and clean. I felt the breeze coming through the window off the front patio, heard the cars slipping past each other, honking pre-emptively at the corner. It was like the twenty minutes Flo and I used to spend each week sitting on metal chairs, eating soup dumplings before we got groceries, or the half hour I would spend walking with Hilton back from day care, sitting down on every stoop and exposed root, talking about the trees and colors, and the shapes in his heart. Places that could be revisited, in my mind, because routine had made them durable.

It was time to put on our gis and go to Jiu Jitsu. I closed the laptop. In the car, winding up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, I reached back to squeeze Hilton’s leg, and then Flo’s, which is something I do every time we drive. That way, when they’re older, they can go to that back seat of a 2004 Saturn Ion, if they need to, where they are safe, warm and protected in their gis, the radio is playing songs they still know, and we’re together.