For those of you who don't know, Minecraft is what they call a "sandbox" game, where you play a character in a virtual world with a set of ground rules, and then you're left to do whatever you like. Minecraft takes place in a blocky, lo-res landscape, which you're looking at in first person, through the eyes of an explorer. You can wander the landscape collecting resources, building tools, and digging into the earth to look for treasure in caves. There's no real set goal, just a method of doing whatever it is you like.
Lily loves to build in this world. When you set the game to "creative" mode, you can call up all kinds of building materials at will (instead of having to “mine” and then "craft" them, as the game's name implies) and create whatever kind of structure you want -- gravity is somewhat flexible when it comes to building things. Oh, and you can fly, which is always helpful. We started out playing this game a year ago with her on my lap, watching me move around and build little houses, her serving more as creative director ("Let's put a house made of cheese there! Let's build a zoo!"), but now she's at the point where she knows how to get around, how to pick out new materials to build with, and can whip up a building completely unaided.
Like I said, she's been picking the game up with amazing dexterity for someone who's just learning to write. The controls for the game are a combination of keystrokes and mouse, and she's gotten really adept at getting the game to do what she wants. One time I left her alone with the game for a half an hour, and when I came back she had constructed a three-room jail out of wood and iron bars, complete with doors inside and out. Then another time she asked me to build a tower, and after I did she flew up, built a large box of glass on the top, filled it with glowing lava and declared that she had just made a lighthouse. Of course, that's exactly what she had done!
Now she's moving on to building entire structures on her own routinely. One time I found her trying to make a "store" by making shelves out of small stone slabs attached to a wall, and trying to throw various food items onto them. She did this with no instruction from me, she had never seen it done anywhere else, she just came up with the idea herself. She's impressing me nearly every day with things like this.
She's even helped me figure out some aspects of the game I didn't understand before. We sort of work our way through things in tandem... I mentioned recently that there's actually an end to the "game" portion of Minecraft, and she wanted to see what it was like, so we looked up on the Minecraft online wiki (yes, it has one, what doesn’t these days) how to build something called an "end portal". We made it according to the specifications and were transported to a dark, floating island where you can battle a huge black Ender Dragon and see the end credits of the game. We were in "creative" mode, so we couldn’t be hurt in the fight; it was really just a matter of persistence, but I loved her curiosity about what that part of it was like, and her enthusiasm for figuring out how to do different things in the game.
There's a lot of things you can learn about the real world in Minecraft, as well. Aside from using all kinds of different building materials (I don’t think there are many four-year-olds out there who know what “lapid lazuli” is) and figuring out how to put them together in a way that makes sense, the game comes pre-loaded with different types of "biomes", which means that there are parts of the game where everything's covered in snow and the rivers have frozen over, there are deserts where everything is shifting sand and cactus will prick you if you bump into it. There are also large swaths of inland seas surrounded by beaches, swamps and huge jungles. So she's actually learning about the different kinds of environments there are on Earth through this game.
She's also learning about perseverance and thinking ahead. It's one thing to say that you want to build a hotel with a hundred rooms on the top of a hill, quite another to actually lay out the walls, add doors and windows, etc. At this point, there's only one place where we have actually stuck around long enough to build a complete structure with any kind of complexity, and it's a hotel (Lily is fascinated by the concept of hotels, for some reason) with a library, a restaurant, and a water slide that, before it froze over, ran from the top of the roof down the side and into a small pool we had constructed. Of course, there are some things that are just too much for her to accomplish on her own, and I'm always ready to step in and help, but she's very much the creative force when we play. I know there will be a day when she'll be manufacturing elaborate palaces without any help from me, but for now I'm just fascinated to help her build whatever she can come up with. I try not to shoot down too many ideas; I know that if she comes up with something completely bizarre, she'll probably lose interest once she realizes how hard it's going to be to execute. But her mental stamina is increasing, and every time we play she comes up with some way of putting elements together that I wouldn't have thought of myself.
She's just coming off a phase of building "treasure chests", where she'll plunk storage chests down everywhere she can, and then go about filling them with random inventory items. I'm not sure what it is about the process that she enjoys so much, but I'll definitely let her run with it until she tires of it. We’ve got plenty of time, and there are many more worlds out there for the two of us to build. Earlier this evening, she was talking about going through the End Portal again and digging a bunch of caves in the domain of the (now defeated) Ender Dragon. Sounds like fun!
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