Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Minecraft

The appeal of Minecraft can be difficult to describe to others. As of the current beta, players are not given an overall goal to achieve. There is a "score" being kept, but no one bothers to compare or brag, or even care what it means. In fact, I wasn't really sure why I keep coming back to my virtual block worlds until an epiphany presented itself during a recent discussion with my girlfriend:

Being in Minecraft feels kind of like my summer vacations when I was a kid.

"Good parents" today seem determined to plan out their children's time out of school. Family road trips get bookended by sports leagues, lessons, and activity camps. As a preteen, I remember having long stretches of unstructured playtime during the summer. And that playtime was outside.

Sure, we'd play some ball, but even then they were always just unsupervised pickup games among ourselves on the neighborhood streets. What really consumed our daylight hours was simply heading out exploring. Living in what was then exurbia, several square miles of surrounding forest and cattle pasture beckoned us to come out and simply pass time.

Where there was a flood control ditch, there was the chance to discover the channelization of water and the living things in it. Tromping under a forest canopy challenged our skills at not getting lost and sometimes our ingenuity at constructing a tree fort worth defending from random scraps of found lumber. And finding a large hole in the ground was an occasion to stop, peer into the darkness and wonder what dangers or even evil creatures lay within, before racing out to beat the late onset of dusk and make it back home in time for dinner.

We weren't out to "win" summer vacation. We were outside to experiment and experience. And it's in this way that Minecraft doesn't demand that you accomplish any one thing. Instead, this literal "sandbox" game invites us to come up with our goal for the day and explore everything. It's a virtual open-ended LEGO set in a time when actual LEGO sets are sold in boxes that tell children what they're supposed to be building.

P.S. If Minecraft creator "Notch" happens to be reading this: Please consider adding the ability to craft Bikes as a locomotion option in the game. And they should do wheelies too. Just sayin'. I'll even take them with coaster brakes and banana seats.