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.