Minecraft Therapy

I’ve found a new video game that I really enjoy playing… in my 30-odd years of playing, I’ve never found another like it. It reminds me of certain stream-of-consciousness games I’ve heard about in sci-fi books like Ender’s Game or Lucky Wander Boy. It’s called Minecraft, and is one of a group of what are collectively being termed “sandbox games”, as in, here’s a whole world for you to play in, do what you want.

A primer, for those who don’t know what it is: Minecraft is a first-person game where you’re dropped into a simplistic virtual world, filled with randomly-created mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and caves. There’s no real goal in mind; you just walk around, foraging for food and supplies, building a place to live so that you can be protected from the various monsters that come out when the sun goes down. As time goes on, you can build armor and better tools to dig for better materials, build a better house, cook food to keep your health points up, and basically just explore.

That’s if you play the normal version of the game. But there’s also a “creative” mode, where you can call up just about any object or material the game has at will, and you can ignore the creatures because they ignore you. There’s no health points, you can just spend your time building, excavating, whatever you like. Oh, and you can fly too.

That’s the mode that I’ve been working in ever since I got the full version of the game for Christmas. The first thing I did was to explore an elaborate network of caves that just happened to breach the surface near where I started. I’m still not done trying to clean it up and map it out. After a while I built the foundation for a house overlooking a bend in a large river, and a road that leads to the openings to the cave network.

I moved on to some nearby mountains, building a stairway up to the top of one (where I hope to build a castle soon), and then I moved on to a large hollow space under a nearby land bridge. I started clearing away all the exposed stone, eventually making my way back and under a hill until I had created a large cavern. I set up torches all over the place (which never go out, thankfully), so now I’ve got a huge, well-lit area. I’m still clearing out other regions of the cave (I’d like to make it all one flat area), but near one end I found a very deep hole, right next to a natural opening onto a sea. I built a small dock and a large ship (not too bad for a first try at free-form structure building), and then started excavating the hole.

I’m basically using the hole as a guide in making an inverted pyramid, a series of steps descending to the center from all four sides. By the time I write this, I’ve gone down about thirty meters, which means that the sinkhole I’ve created around the original hole is now sixty meters across. I’m following my original rule of not clearing away dirt, just stone, so there are now floating islands of dirt throughout the space (most types of land aren’t affected by gravity in Minecraft). Looks very Avatar-y. I’ve built a simple bridge (which I will later make more elaborate) that stretches from the exit to the sea to the far side of the sinkhole.

So, now that I’ve described what it is, what does it do for me? A few weeks ago, I wrote an entry about control, and how I’m coming to believe that most (if not all) the decisions we make in life are based on keeping or giving up control. I’m at a time in my life when I do have less control than usual, from the direction of my life down to how I spend my time during the day. Having no job and a three-year-old, there’s a lot of outside input determining how I should spend my time. However, in the midst of all this, I’ve found this thing that helps me feel more in control, a little world where I am the sole determining factor in what happens.

I have the ability to shape a virtual world that I can walk, swim, and fly around in. I could build monumental structures, pull down mountains, or dig until I reach the bottom of the world. Patience and strong fingers are all it would take, and I have both. I also love the immediacy of it. Before I drifted off to sleep one night, I happened to think of how I’d like to build a giant glass ceiling over my ship dock, just to keep it from getting snowed and rained on (oh yes, there’s weather in this game as well!). And the next day, I just sat down and did it. I really like how it turned out, and it’s given me some ideas about expanding the shoreline and building more things.

There’s something about making something new out of what surrounds us that has appealed to humans ever since they started making tools, and I feel that this is the primal instinct that I’m tapping into.

Jack and the Master

“Jack of all trades, master of none.” Sometimes I feel like that phrase sums me up. Mind you, these are my thoughts in a time when I’ve been out of work for three months, and even though a recent interview went promisingly, I will probably be at home for at least one more. I’ve never considered myself a person to be defined by my job. It’s something that I talked about in my last entry. A job sets boundaries and stable elements in your life, things you can count on. When there is no job, you’re forced to confront the after-hours version of yourself every minute of every day. I’d like to say that at no time have I found myself tense and irritable because I’m not sure how I should spend my time, but I can’t.

Part of it comes from the fact that I don’t know how long I’m going to be out of work. If I had an end date in sight, or even if knew that I was never going to hold down a job again, I could at least start to rework my world with that in mind. As things stand today, I really don’t know how long it will be before I have to be up at seven o’clock in the morning again. There’s no point in drastically altering who I am or how I perceive myself, because I could get a phone call at any moment that would change it. (I probably won’t, at least not for several weeks, but I *could*.)

I didn’t mean to digress so far… what was I saying? Oh yes, Jack of all trades, etc. Sometimes I feel like a fool because I don’t have more ambition. Folks who have gotten somewhere in their lives, those who have achieved what they wanted to, are all driven by either ambition or passion, or a combination of both. Maybe I’ll just use the term “passion”, because what is ambition anyway but a passion for being in a better place, a better social or economic position?

So I guess what I’m lacking is passion for any one thing. I’ve always been interested in a spectrum of things, not necessarily related, and pursuing any one of them never lasts for long. I tend to go through phases of interest, but there’s no one through-line. It sounds like a bland, directionless existence, doesn’t it? But there are real flashes of passion there. They just don’t last. As a society, we tend to term success as a person who doggedly pursues one thing, through good times and bad, never giving up on it, never ceasing to believe in it, never doubting that it is what they were meant to do. But doesn’t it sound psychotic when you put it that way? To me, it kind of smacks of desperation. Aren’t people, by nature, supposed to grow and change? Aren’t our interests, beliefs, and truths supposed to evolve as we grow and learn? Devoting your life to being only one thing – say, a lawyer or a restaurant owner or a car salesman – and never thinking that you want to be (or *could* be) anything else, starts sounding like self-delusion to me, even a stubborn refusal to grow.

Of course, the problem is that if you never stick to being one thing, you never really excel at it. That’s what I meant by the cliché I started this entry with. I think I’m passably good at a lot of things, and I can pick up new things to competency pretty quickly. I just don’t find many things interesting enough to keep following. I’m a firm believer in artistic self-expression, but it seems like the only kind I’m interested in are those that are mine and mine alone. In high school, I toyed with the idea of being an architect, because I loved the designing process, but when I started to think of all the other people I would have to be involved with in order to get even one building made, I lost interest.

Same with film-making. I’ve always loved films, but the thought of being the one person making decision after decision on a movie set, being the one person everyone is looking to for direction, and the necessary detail that goes into every frame, makes me want to not even get into it. A perfectionist I’m not, and even though I know there are filmmakers who just let the pieces fall where they may, in general those aren’t the films that interest me.

I guess that’s why, for me, it always comes down to writing. It’s one of the forms of artistic expression that are mostly distilled from the mind of one person, to be handed over to one person. There are no extraneous veils in between the creator and the viewer. Just raw words, at its best, one mind talking to another, perfectly silent, perfectly clear.

And the circuit doesn’t even have to be closed that way for the art to have effect. I don’t even know if anyone but me will ever read these words I’m writing now, but they’re already having the desired effect. Even if I highlighted this whole entry and hit delete right now, what I’ve written has already made a change in me. I’ve taken words and ideas and strung them together, and the exercising of the creative muscle will inform what I write tomorrow, and the day after that.

Maybe I’m wrong after all. Maybe passion isn’t just the thing that you cling to. Maybe it’s the thing that keeps finding you, the thing that’s continually changing and fresh in your mind. Maybe, at forty years old, the time to start thinking that I still don’t know what I want is over. Maybe I *am* master of something. And I’ve proven it to myself here, today.

In Fugue

There’s a form of classical music called a fugue. Bach wrote a ton of them, and the most famous pipe organ piece that people can immediately recognize – the one that you might hear in old horror movies, paired with the image of The Phantom of the Opera hunched over the keys – is part of one, technically “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”. Fugues, like most classical pieces, are called that because they follow a certain set of rules.

First, a theme is played by the highest voice performing it… the right hand, if you’re playing it on a keyboard. Then the theme is replayed by the next lowest voice in a different key, while the right goes on to elaborate with a countermelody as it continues. The theme keeps getting repeated in different, lower keys (on the pipe organ, you can also play melodies with your feet) while the other parts add ornamentation above it until it’s been played by every voice. (The most Bach ever did was six, all going at once.)

What’s amazing about a fugue is its restraint, its control. It has one of the most rigid structures in music – once you’ve created the theme, you’re stuck with repeating it until the end – but within that there’s the potential for a lot of elaboration and ornamentation. When the higher voices are done with the theme and they can go off on their own, adding layer upon layer of music, as long as it still fits with everything else.

Now that I’ve had some time off from work, I’m starting to see how the structure of a work day fit into the rest of my life. It was something like a fugue itself… the day was split into work, family life, and my own pursuits, by which I mostly mean entertainment – movies and TV that no one else is interested in, podshows and music to listen to, videogames to play. This latter category was what I usually did after everyone else went to bed. And it all worked very well, I think.

And why? Because it was a way for me to do extracurricular things without having to sacrifice any time with my wife and daughter. If I were trying to find a way to set aside a big chunk of time for myself, I’d be constantly pressured, trying to finagle things to work out the way I want, feeling guilty the whole time I was off doing my own thing, and watching the clock to see how much time I had left. I’m coming to realize that not only did it work for me, I *thrived* on this method, those little pockets of time I could use for other things without giving up anything else (well, except maybe a little sleep), working around the existing structure to add my own little ornamentations, my own little elaborations on the fugue of my life.

Now that the work portion of the day is gone, I’m having a hard time figuring out how all the other pieces should fall. We’re trying to establish a schedule, but without external needs having to be met it’s very easy for things to get out of whack. The other day I slept until almost 10 o’clock, which I honestly didn’t think was possible for me to do. The whole rest of the day felt truncated and off kilter. I find myself constantly trying to figure out how to proceed with the day… if we eat lunch now, then this won’t get done until later, and if that happens, dinner will either be too early or too late. At times it’s exhausting, not having a structure to work around, a theme to follow so that everything’s sure to come together when it’s supposed to.

What it comes down to is that I’m the sort of person who requires stability to be happy. I’ve lived on my own enough to know that I’m far from happy when I have complete control over every minute of my day. I’m apt to lose myself in my casual pursuits, indulging in videogames or movies or the Internet for days on end and then ending up depressed that I haven’t done anything better with my time. I like to know what I should be doing and when, even when it comes to my downtime. It’s quite opposite from my brother – a professional actor who often can’t say whether he’ll be working or what he’ll be doing next month. I just don’t understand that kind of life, not because it’s wrong, but just because it’s so not me. The stress of it would kill me. But that’s why I want a desk job that I know I’m going to go to day after day.

Like I said, this is how my life works for me. Clearly-defined structure, with clearly delineated spots for improvisation. Everyone needs to conduct life (or music for that matter) their own way. I think the key to happiness is finding that method, and aligning yourself with people whose own life-music complements it.