Down Down, Deep Underground
Just when you think you've found a blogger that appears to write thoughtful posts you can relate to, he goes and writes a post about Minecraft. This blog is like Forrest Gump's box of chocolatesyou never know what you're going to get (and this has nothing to do with me having nothing in particular to write about, honest).
I reminded the kids that Minecraft is on the computer last night. It's been on there for the last couple of years, and they were obsessed with it for a timebut as with all children, their attention was eventually stolen by something else, and the little icon sat there in the corner of the desktop, unclicked. Until last night.
One of the big problems of being a parent is knowing just enough about the things your children play with to either fix them when broken, or to get them started with “how to do this”, or “how to do that”. The dangerespecially with games like Minecraftis that you start out by helping out, and then before you know it you've been up half the night digging holes in the ground, and building a pretend subterranean city that nobody either knows about, will ever see, or ever visit. You can't even talk to anybody about it, because it falls into the Micky Flanagan “Thomas the Tank Engine” trap (watch it on YouTube).
So yeah at midnight last night I caught myself beginning to architect the beginnings of a vast underground empire, with halls, tunnels, corridors, stairways, and panoramic views out across the surrounding forest. I hit ALT+F4 in the nick of time, and edged carefully away from the computer. It turned the lamp off, walked from the room, and thought of it no more.
And then this morning I got up at 6:30am, switched the computer on, and carried on where I left off.