Watching Minecraft

Minecraft is an ingenious game, appealing to both the treasure hunter and Lego builder in me. Essentially you are dropped into a randomly generated world, which you can gather blocks from and the place these blocks to make your own creations. Additionally, you gear up. Loot! You start with bare hands, then you knock down a tree and craft some wood tools. From there you gather stone, then iron and finally, when you dig down to the bedrock of the world, you can have diamonds.

In the time I have played my friends and I have built castles, inns, trade centers, road, railways and even churches and towers. To do this, though, you need to get your tools, iron and diamond. So, when I start playing I waste no time getting my mine going.

After months of try to convey how fun this game is, I finally convinced my wife to play. Ok. That's not true. After I worked for months trying to get her to give this a try, her sister started playing, so she decided she would give it a try. I'd like to pretend it was me, but I'd only be fooling myself.

"Why do I need to use W,A,S and D to move she asks?". She wants the controls to feel like World of Warcraft, but they don't. Her moves are awkward because she is not used to the controls and doesn't even know how to do anything yet. I sit to the right of her, blanket around me because the room is cold, and tell her the recipes and advise her to build a shelter, before the skeletons and zombies come out. As a note, I was not messing with her, at night these monsters spawn across the landscape.

I instruct her how to convert wood to charcoal and then how to make torches. I show her how to convert six planks into a door, so she can more easily open and close the door to her small home and starter mine. Night falls on the land, but she is safely inside. I talk her through building a sword, just in case. It does not ease her mind. She takes her stone pickaxe and makes an ever deeper shaft into the earth.

"What was that?". Her eyes have gotten wide and she is frozen. "It growled at me,". "Probably a zombie," I casually respond, "It'll burn away when the sun comes up.". She climbs out of the shaft she has been working on to see it.

I can hear through her headphones a sound she has never heard before. "wham, wham, wham.". The zombie is beating on the door an arm thrust through the window. My wife, my lovely wife screams. I can't help myself, I laugh before telling her it's nothing to worry about.

"I don't like that," she says.

She quickly gets away from the door and goes back to work on her mine shaft. She should stumble into some iron soon. I am excited for her. She knocks blocks down, carves her steps, places her torches. Deeper and deeper.

She knocks a block away and it drops into the cavern open beneath her stair. Into the dark. I love these moments. Exposed ore and coal, maybe an abandoned mine, this is the basis of adventure. I am again excited for her.

This is not mirrored by me wife. "Nope" she says, and proceeds to fill the hole with cobblestone. Perhaps we'll get iron another day.

When we start working on things together, I don't know what we'll build, but I'm pretty sure I know who will be investigating the dark.