“Hey Mom, come play in our world. I’m making you a new house.”
When my son was five we got a secondhand XBox 360, primarily so he could play Minecraft. He immediately got stuck into it and for a while I did not even try to appreciate what was going on, besides how quiet the house had gotten. My brother approvingly called it “digital Legos” and that was good enough for me.
One day he asked me to play with him. And thus began four years of work on a world we call “NewWorld42.” He had created the first 41 NewWorlds with his equally obsessed mates, but NewWorld42 was meant to be for the two of us. Our first house was a dirt igloo covered in different flowers, accessed by a long underground hallway festooned with paintings of all shapes and sizes. Then came the lava fountain at the top of the hill, then a library which he accidentally exploded somehow.
I have always loved video games. Besides modern medicine, they are one of the compensations of living in an overwhelmingly complicated century full of existential worry. My life has paralleled the evolution of the medium; our first console was a Magnavox Odyssey 2 with a game called “Pickaxe Pete” where you had to alternately destroy and avoid rocks. It was at my grandfather’s cabin in the woods, probably initially purchased for my youngest Aunt before she left for University. It kept me and my brother occupied while the grownups first shot, then roasted Thanksgiving dinner.
With summer vacation came weeks of indolence, each day with its own suite of hours to kill before Mom and Dad came home from work. I spent at least 4 or 5 hours each day playing Sega Genesis games notably Sonic the Hedgehog, funky platformer Toejam & Earl, and a role-playing game called Might and Magic. Another hour was spent torturing my kid brother and ensuring he could never get the cordless phone and call Mom. And another hour was often spent trying to bake cookies from what meagre rations were left in the cupboard.
Friends always had better games and cooler consoles. My night-owl nature served me well at sleepovers, because long after my best friend crashed I was up playing Bonk the baby caveman on her Turbografix-16.
Videogames were also there during the raw years of my parents’ divorce. When being shuffled between empty and indifferent houses got too much I could take solace in the fact that my new stepsister had some different games to pass the time. She also introduced me to ska and punk shows and drugs, and for a while videogames weren’t so interesting.
“Time for bed sweetheart. If you leave now I’ll make you a surprise to find in the morning.”
Pacified by this promise, my son could be persuaded to go to bed without fuss. I would use that late-night stamina to build out another corner of our world. Perhaps it was a hollowed-out hillside with a voluminous hideout, or an ultra-modern pad accessed through an adjacent lake. During school holidays, he would do the same for me when I had to go to work. Once he built for me a giant transformer that was like 50 stories tall, and for a while it had “boobies” that inexplicably lit up at night.
When I was nineteen I got a new gameboy and a copy of Pokemon Red. It was the best thing for long stints on a Greyhound Bus across the American west. In case you’re wondering, my main pokemon was a Charizard named Vagina.
This game took on additional significance in University, when I had a group of friends who held regular Pokemon tournaments. Each person’s house was a different stop on the tour - you could win the Monrovia Badge, the San Dimas Badge, the Riverside Badge, and the West Covina Badge. We knew each others’ Pokemon so well that it became a mind game between tactical geniuses, fueled by rum and Coke.
As an adult, I have found video games to offer the kind of cohesive narrative that my work often lacks. I could do a quest in Oblivion and feel satisfaction in completing something, see the development of a character, experience challenging areas becoming easier with leveling up. The more inconclusive and confusing my work gets, the greater the pull toward slashing at orcs in a dungeon somewhere.
When my son was six he went on a massive building spree, making some of his most impressive designs. I took pictures of the screen and filled a two-page spread of that year’s family yearbook with pictures of his creations. Once when we were at the library, he wandered off with a librarian and learned how to request for himself every single book in the system that had anything to do with Minecraft.
I can get carried away too. I loved Katamari Damacy (and every subsequent release) to obsession. It’s a strange Japanese game where your flamboyant and hyper-critical father makes you roll up objects in the world, in order to restore the stars he knocked out of the sky one drunken night. I was able to unglue my eyes from the screen only when I found out that a full 2-CD soundtrack was available, full of deliciously good J-pop.
He eventually moved on to further iterations of NewWorld and I found other things to do instead of pick up the controller. We put some substantial time into Terraria as well, though it was never quite the same. Every once in a while he’d ask me to come back and play, but the game had started to give me vertigo and so I demurred, to his frequent disappointment.
He’s nine now, and tonight he used every ounce of little boy charm on me to play Minecraft with him. “We can go in our old world and you can remember all the stuff we did, come on!” We surveyed all the creations together, the Kelly Tarltons seapark we had been making last time we quit, the New World Supermarket that flooded after he tried to re-stock the shelves with lava, then had to put out the raging fire on aisle six. I see the ruins of the Greek temple I’d made on a hill, which he had deliberately blown up to piss me off one time.
“Mom you totally ragequit after that.”
My church of the rainbow creeper stands grand and beautiful, next to his nightclub with the rainbow glass dance floor (there is a lot of rainbow stained glass in our world). There is a corral full of llamas and a zoo with only ocelots, a mountaintop waterslide and a never-ending stream of lava coming from the sky.
NewWorld42 represents something that we rarely ever get to preserve. It’s the inside of my son’s head when he was five, six, seven years old. It’s a record of our imaginations working together to create memories in a virtual world that exists only on the memory of a decrepit console. Its decrepitude alarms me. Thinking they may have tried to preserve the Minecraft version of Gallipoli they made one year, I asked our museum staff whether they had any advice. I even suggested that preserving virtual creations in videogames like Minecraft was a frontier for heritage conservation - this really got the eyes of my colleagues rolling.
I love that I can share this love of videogames with my son. While I worry like any parent these days about screentime and have had my gripes about the fact that the schools all require ipads now, I hope that this medium continues to enrich his life. And I am going to pioneer Xbox Minecraft file preservation, so that when my son is a middle-aged dork, we can fire that thing up and marvel together at a lost world.
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