Bumbling Through ‘Minecraft’ Got Me Through 2020

Few things have brought me more comfort and joy during the pandemic than a video game beloved by millions of adolescent children. I’m a grown-ass adult who does Very Adult Things, like paying taxes and drinking whiskey straight, and yet Minecraft consumes a not so insignificant portion of my brain space.

You might say my interest in the game is equal parts pandemic-induced boredom and standard millennial escapism, but that’s only a half-truth. In reality, I started playing Minecraft years ago, when my life and sense of self were a nebulous cloud. Minecraft helped give it a shape. For the first time ever, I’d found a way to decompress by actually using my brain instead of failing miserably at trying to turn it off.

Minecraft is known as a sandbox game; players are dropped into a randomized world of varying landscapes made up almost entirely of square blocks. There are no set rules or a hero’s journey to follow. Players are free to do what they want, how they want, in a world where the laws of physics and gravity only sometimes apply, and the slow-moving monsters are vaguely cute. I’d say only 15% of the game mechanics are naturally intuitive; Ikea furniture has more of a user manual than Minecraft. But stumbling through figuring out how to actually play the game is half the joy. It was entirely up to me to turn this sandbox into a zen garden.

It turns out a video game marketed toward children is actually the perfect salve for an existential identity crisis, if not a boot camp for how to survive an apocalypse. (Or maybe that’s just me projecting.) A few years ago, I was burned out and paralyzed by my own ambition. It’s as if I went from being a recklessly carefree twentysomething to an insecure homebody almost overnight. In the process, I became a ghost to everyone I knew, trapped in an extreme social isolation of my own making.

Bumbling my way through Minecraft, constantly discovering novel ways to fall into lava and die, didn’t unlock some magic self-help formula. It simply rewired my mindset by rejecting the idea that rules are made to be followed and games are something to win. Minecraft became a low-stakes outlet for me to feel comfortable with experimentation and, most of all, failure. I can’t remember the last time I’d allowed myself the space to create something dumb and pointless yet completely worthwhile, like an elaborate contraption that automatically kills zombies at the flip of a switch encased in neon purple glass. Because why not?

I made that zombie death machine during the second month of lockdown after watching a 40-minute YouTube tutorial uploaded by what I can only assume to be a bored teenage kid who lives in the Midwest. Minecraft fuels an entire industry of content creators who capitalize on the game’s extreme lack of direction to teach others the basics of how to play. My favorites are the multiplayer servers where a bunch of players show up to build weird stuff and pull childish pranks on their friends, as if they’re Kevin McCallister plotting his anti-burglar traps in Home Alone.

What’s equally amusing, and makes me feel (slightly) less like An Old, is knowing that many of these Minecraft YouTubers are well in their late thirties and forties, some of whom got into the game while helping their kids figure out how to play. With more than 200 million copies sold worldwide, Minecraft is officially the most popular video game of all time, so I’m certainly not alone. And especially during these times, I feel exceptionally grateful to have a sandbox to play in.

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