Well, I truly never thought that I would write that title at the top of any page, but the unthinkable has happened. Recently, our instructor introduced us to Minecraft and we played around with it in the class computer lab.
I have zero interest in video games and have remained willfully ignorant of them since their advent during my lifetime. Nonetheless, some video game names are familiar to me through overheard conversations, marketing that has somehow reached me, and mentions on the radio and in the press.
Besides its mere name, my only prior knowledge of Minecraft came a few years ago when I was seated in an airplane next to my daughter. Through the gap in the seats in front of us, we glimpsed a little girl, younger than my daughter, who was playing something on a device. From our vantage point, we could see the screen filled with rows of cartoon bricks in varied but astoundingly drab tones of grey and brown. The girl was selecting them with care. My daughter and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, and burst into silent laughter.
“I think that’s Minecraft,” she whispered.
“That?” I asked in amazement. “It’s so ugly! And what’s she doing with it? Building a wall?!”
Flash forward a few years. I am sitting in my Technology in Education class, my own clunky Minecraft avatar lurching about a garish landscape built entirely from cubes and squares. All those right angles. No curves, nothing soft, no lines recalling the natural world. A crude, pixelated, digital version of Lego. The choices of themed landscapes seem endless, but I want to escape the oppressive boxiness, the heaviness of it all by projecting my avatar upwards into the strangely flat sky, hoping that virtual flying might give me a sense of freedom. It does, but only briefly. Suspended like a drone, my avatar spies on those of my classmates below. Encapsulated in the astronaut-suit-like bodies of their avatars, my friends are building monuments in the shape of their names, blowing up cubey pigs, stacking brickish shapes, boring holes into the ground.
I am having fun, but in an escapist, empty way. I am told that teachers can use Minecraft for educational purposes, but if I wanted my students to construct something, I would rather have them enjoy the physical experience of building with their hands using real materials. That said, I would accept Minecraft creations if some students could not express their understanding through writing, visual art, performance, video, or audio recordings. I would also be curious to see how teachers develop effective lessons using Minecraft in meaningful ways.
I will leave you will this screenshot of my avatar, after a costume and hair change, looking blank and bewildered in a lacklustre virtual landscape.
