The Kids Who Create (and Blow Up) Worlds (and Cover Them With Lava)

“Okay..Mr. Leif, the first thing you have to do is make a shelter. If you don’t make a shelter, the mobs will kill you (creepers, most likely, but ghasts, zombies, spiders, slime, and silverfish are also out there). Just use your pick to dig through the trees, and grab the logs when they appear. Use those logs to make sticks. Use those sticks to make a crafting table.“

“And remember, Mr. Leif, you have to kill a cow. If you don’t kill a cow, you’re not going to have food, which means you’ll starve. Also, you’re going to need the the leather that you can make from the dead cow.”

These are the exact words spoken by one of my students during seventh grade lunch recess, which takes place during seventh period (that would be 12:36 to 1:20, for those who don’t have our school schedule memorized). 

This student was trying to help me stay alive. I was, after all, playing the “Survival Mode” of Minecraft, not the “Creative Mode,” which, for some reason, all of my students tell me to avoid at all costs. 

So it’s survival mode. Yes. I must survive.

And I’m realizing that it’s going to take a long, long time for me to have the slightest idea how to survive. 

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. For those you who know about Minecraft, just…just skip a whole bunch of paragraphs. You don’t need to read it. Go play whatever video game your parents let you play.

Okay, now…for those of you who’ve never heard of Minecraft (meaning, I’m going to guess, an awful lot of parents who are utterly bewildered by their child’s fascination with Minecraft):

“Minecraft” is a low res game (the graphics are blocky, as if this is a game from the late 1980s), and it’s a first person game in which you build things as opposed to shoot at them. You start out with a simple tool, and with this tool—with which you dig resources, starting with wood—you gradually build more tools. Having then built tools, you build a dwelling, and as you keep doing this, you start acquiring tools that allow you to collect ever more specialized resources, which in turn allow you to build more specialized things. 

Or, to put it another way:

Minecraft is a game where you go from prehistoric to civilized human, and, once you’re there, gives you vast power over the world you’ve built.

I still haven’t really played “Minecraft,” but I’ve watched my seventh graders play it, and I’ve watched them explore it, and I’ve watched them establish domination over their world, and furnish it with incredible structures (there are single-player versions, where you’re the only settler, and, therefore, God). 

I find this incredibly cool, but I must point out something: 

Every boy who plays this game likes to blow things up, and/or cover everything with lava.  

Every last one of them. 

Yes, you can create gunpowder in this world, and it seems that once boys have built their virtual palace and gathered all of their earthly needs, their legacy, when people in this Minecraft World write about them, will be “He was a cruel God who blew up endless things, and covered whole cities with lava.” 

Yes, I have seen an entire mountain covered in lava. 

I believe the student who did this said something like “Mr. Leif, come over and look at the mountain that I covered in lava.” 

This is what middle school boys would do to the world if they had dominion over it. 

Which is why I think girls should play Minecraft. 

To be sure, I know that many girls enjoy blowing things up, and probably enjoy the prospect of covering the earth with lava. 


It's just that I think girls would do other things besides blow things up and cover them with lava. I'm sure they would create certain zones in this world where you could blow things up (and cover them in lava), but then have other parts of this world in which people exchanged ideas on such topics as “what else is there to do besides blow things up and cover the world with lava?”

Soon girls would, I don't know, be organizing virtual dances in these worlds, and everyone would immediately feel comfortable dancing, no one would be awkward. Every style of dancing would be in fashion at these dances, so even jumping up and down would be an acceptable dance move. 

In this virtual world, many male and female Minecraft players would meet while jumping up and down at one of these virtual dances. Then they would each think that the other looked cool just jumping up and down, and would subsequently start to hang out together in the real world as well. Aw...

Then they each build worlds in which, from a distance, you would see that the entire world was a carefully designed mosaic portrait of that person they met at that virtual dance, a portrait that you could only see when you traveled through virtual outer space. 

And of course, by this point, having created space travel in this virtual world instead of blowing things up, girls would create whole galaxies of worlds whose inhabitants live in harmony and dress well. 

And the boys in these worlds do other things besides blow things up and cover them in lava. 

So now, perhaps in this other place, girls would finally get a chance to show a guy the right way to build a world.