My mechanical pencil rushed across the paper as I continued to complete all of my calculus homework for the weekend. I see my laptop in my peripheral vision, waiting for the touch of my fingers on its black matte keyboard. The moment my mechanical pencil lifted from the chains of my homework, I rushed to my laptop.
I hopped on Discord and chatted “get on minecraft bros” to my cousins. We all agreed and got on the voice channel while we launched Minecraft.
“What are you guys going to do today?” I asked my cousins.
One said that they are going to finish their modern Italian village that lay among the yellow blanketed sunflower fields. Another said that they are going to decorate their spruce-oak chancellery that sat in a mountainous valley with tropical fish. My youngest cousin said that he would do a strip mining session for diamonds. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.
Minecraft is a simple game that’s filled with pixelated blocks and plain-colored animals, but the creativity travels beyond the simplicities that flavored the surface. There was so much to do. The variety of biomes fueled my urge to explore. The complexities of redstone made me want to construct a large scale contraption that allowed room for automated farms. The different types of woods and stones inspired the combination of different color schemes to create a vast spruce village in my taiga biome.
I am not a speedrunner who finishes the game in record speed, nor a hardcore programmer that understands the quasi-connectivity of redstone, nor a detailed-oriented architecture who makes sure that each window has a shader next to it. I am simply an average person playing Minecraft with my cousins.
Every time I get on Minecraft, it would be a family reunion, but without our parents. I enjoyed all the content that Minecraft offers, but the main joy is talking to my cousins. We talked about school, complain about our parents, and mock how flawed the system is, all the while we connected with our Vietnamese heritage. I grew closer to my culture because I talked to my cousins over a video game that we all enjoyed.
While it might take up til the next summer for that amazing cave update, me and my cousins will grind on Wizard101 in the meantime. We gotta relive our childhood before the maturity of adulthood consumes us.
