Playing Minecraft for the First Time in My 30s

On a whim, my partner asked me if I wanted to play Minecraft together for the first time. Despite its popularity, I truly didn’t know too much about the game. Eventually, a few other friends got wind of it and joined our server too. The entire time I was playing I was constantly thinking about my younger self and how they would have interacted with the game that is so popular, especially among younger people.

We played classic survival mode on java, which I don’t think I would have had the patience to do solo given that I normally play JRPGs, mostly with turn based combat. It's fun to plan tag team operations and work together to build the base. The game is unforgiving at first, but as you advance you are rewarded with more grace and options. There was such a sense of glee in making advances and discovering materials I didn’t know existed. The game is full of charm and logic. Encounters with new elements like deep snow are exciting but also introduce the continued sense of peril. Its funny to die from fall damage (I did this a lot).

Before our friends joined, it was interesting to just play with 2 people. There was a feeling of vastness and possibility, but also of deep isolation in the seemingly never-ending generated world. I liked this feeling of isolation, as I’m sure sometimes we all feel overly connected in the digital age. 

Again, I spent a lot of the playtime thinking about how younger spoopy would have loved creative mode, as I wasn’t really good at (survival) video games until early adulthood. I picture younger me going buckwild in creative, but never being able to achieve the big builds I probably would have  had in my heart. I didn’t really understand the scope of large projects until I aged, as many do. The game is reminiscent of planning, building and resource management in Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 for me in some ways, as I played it endlessly as a child and continue to revisit it once in a blue moon as an adult. It’s clear to me that this game is an amazing tool for exploring creativity with elements of logic and even physics simultaneously. I’m sure some kids (and adults of course) are out there doing really epic things in this endless sandbox. It was super fun to play with my group, but I fell off after about a month. Back to Atlus games for me! 

Also, what’s the Enderman’s deal? He is cute and also evil and annoying. Who hurt him?

Enjoy some screenshots from our base below: