With my son in college these days my memories of our time together over the years become ever more poignant.
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Today it was memories of us playing Minecraft together when he first discovered it in early elementary school. I downloaded it to my iPad and he eventually had it on some other device I can’t remember (iPod? Kindle? Laptop?).
He needed me to be in bed with him every night in order to go to sleep and so we would parallel play in the Minecraft world until it was time for lights out. He would then roll to his left side and close his eyes with me on the right side sitting with my back against the headboard and the iPad in my lap building worlds with blocks.
For those who aren’t familiar with Minecraft, it is a virtual world-building game that has trees, grass/dirt, stones, etc, all comprised of blocks that you can break up and use as building materials to make whatever your imagination can come up with. The most common starting point is to build a house for protection from the roaming zombies, skeletons, and giant spiders that typically come out at night when the blocky moon rises in the sky. A “crafting table” is also a necessity to be able to use these materials to make tools and weapons as well.
In my first foray into the world of Minecraft I crafted a pick axe with Elias’s help before he fell off to sleep and I started mining stone to build a house. It takes several seconds of swinging that axe before the stone will crumble into your possession so it does seem like work to some extent, especially on an iPad where your finger is actually tapping away on the screen. I cleared a scenic spot to begin building a house and staggered the walls in a symmetrical pattern that I thought was pretty artsy-fartsy. After all the walls were in place I started seeing a kind of green blip that would appear briefly just above the top of the walls and then disappear. I ignored it until I heard a kind of hissing noise followed by a large explosion that destroyed half my walls and left a crater in the ground. All that work gone! The next day I told Elias about it and he got a good laugh at my expense, “Dad, that was a Creeper bouncing around!” I was not aware that they needed to be killed quickly or they set their fuse to explode when they get close to you.
Sometime later I got the idea to make a chapel on an outcropping from the side of a mountain like the Simonopetra Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece. It was small but its precarious position made it difficult to build and I had to make scaffolding with dirt blocks and then destroy them as the work went on. The ceiling was made of a light wood (birch, apparently), there were stained glass windows, and I built a crypt under it replete with two sarcophagi. I showed it to Elias and vented some frustrations at the time-consuming process. He laughed at me (again) as he shook his head and informed me that I was in “creative mode” which means I can fly and don’t have to build all that scaffolding. Well that was a complete game changer!
And in the coming days, weeks, and months of sitting in his bed at night I worked on this world that I labeled “Monk’s World”. On the beach below the chapel I built a walled fortress of sandstone with a hidden dungeon maze underneath it that took a lot of trial and error because the sand blocks above me kept collapsing into the tunnels as I dug until I figured out how to do it right. On the opposite side of the island I built a massive tree that was hollow, about thirty blocks wide at the base, and reached to the upper limits of the sky where there were clouds. On the backside of the mountain I built a larger church high in the face of the rock and added small monk cells connected to it by torch-lit passageways. On the grassy plains below that I built the large ruins of an old cathedral with missing sections to include the roof and vegetation growing on it along with a flower garden in what must have been its nave. Almost all of this was interconnected with secret passageways tunneled through the mountains and under the ground.
Eventually the upgrades to Minecraft allowed us to be together in the same world with our devices connected and even connect with others via the internet but before that last part could happen there were less straightforward ways to attempt it and rumors on how to do it. We thought we’d figured it out and sent an invite link to Elias’s cousin in Indiana via my sister. We spent a week or two preparing a castle on a hilltop for her to visit and after the invite was sent we would spend a good deal of time making adjustments and looking out into the distance to see if she was coming. At that point I don’t think the internet technology was user-friendly enough for it to actually happen or for us to figure it out, but I’ll never forget those nights we stood vigilant on that castle tower waiting for Lily to arrive to no avail. It was a case of excitement, some prolonged anticipation, and then a growing doubt culminating in a kind of melancholy let-down that it just wasn’t going to happen and we abandoned that world.
Apart from building Monk’s World my favorite memories were of me and Elias finally being able to co-create and even do so in “survival mode” with monsters roaming the land. There were funny moments and mishaps that we still talk about to this day. In Minecraft probably the most precious object you can mine from deep underground is diamonds. Tools and weapons made from it are nearly indestructible. One evening after a long period of intense mining deep in the earth I stumbled upon a cache of diamonds and began mining them as quick as I could before returning to the main tunnel to find Elias and surprise him with them. It was a cathartic moment within that world and we wanted to find more and ended up in a cavern with flowing lava. I got it into my head that I was going to add some blocks to keep us safe from the lava but instead inadvertently destroyed a block where the lava could come through and I suddenly found myself on fire. Elias sees it happen and starts yelling “No! No! No! What did you do?!” Meanwhile my avatar is running in circles on fire and I’m yelling “AAARRGGHH!” until I fall over dead. Elias is in disbelief. “Dad! You just lost all of our diamonds! Are you kidding me?” It took him awhile to forgive me for that and now we just laugh about it.
Another fond memory of our shared worlds was when Elias had heard through the Minecraft grapevine that in some worlds people had stumbled upon secret and fantastical places that they had not created and wasn’t that super cool? Soon thereafter when he was asleep I started a new world and found a large rounded hill that I hollowed out and created a natural looking entrance but with a placard above it: “The Hall of the Hidden King” or something like that. Inside this large domed underground space I created a central fountain with flowing water and several other odd and inexplicable structures and objects that would make it look like it had been part of some ancient civilization. At the entrance I planted a line of flowers that lead back to where one spawns into that world. The next night I got Elias to join me in this new world that I acted like I’d never been to before to explore. At some point I curiously point out the flowers all in a row. “Isn’t that strange, Elias? Do you think we should follow them and see where it goes?” So then I follow him as he discovers the entrance to the cave and gets increasingly excited as we enter and explore it. I came clean with him on that years later.
And my last memory of our Minecraft years involves something that made me very happy but then later very sad. By this time Elias had his own laptop and could explore the internet somewhat with parental controls in place. One night he found me in the house and wanted to show me the house he had created on Minecraft. He seemed very excited about it. The design was really impressive and looked like something from a young Frank Lloyd Wright. He enjoyed my astonishment as he took me on a tour of it and pointed out its salient features. I didn’t want to doubt him, but I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing with what I’d seen him build before. I asked him if he saw this on the internet or in a video and he assured me he made it all by himself with no help. It made me happy and he knew it made me happy, but several years later he admitted to me he had seen a video on how to create it and that he just wanted to make me proud. It made me sad that he felt like he needed to do something like that and I told him I hoped he knew I was proud of him regardless.
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In writing this I think of that meme I saw on Facebook that says something to the effect that there was a day where you played with your friends for the last time but you didn’t know it. It is such a melancholy thought and it makes me wonder when that last day might have been when Minecraft ceased to be a thing between us? When the lights went out on those worlds we’d spent so much time creating and inhabiting never to return and not realizing we’d just flipped off the switch.
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