This past Sunday morning began like many other Sunday mornings in recent memory. The kids got up early and slinked around the house in an uncharacteristically quiet manner. Voices were low, footsteps were muffled. The four of them are generally at odds but on Sunday morning they unite in a common mission – to allow Mom and Dad to oversleep long enough to miss church.
As is usually the case, the mission failed. And so began the next phase of the typical Sunday morning ritual, attempting to pry my two boys away from their latest computer obsession, Minecraft.
Minecraft is a game in which the user creates a 3D world using textured cubical blocks to build just about anything he can imagine, including dwellings, animals, crops and weapons. It is as creative as it is addictive and I think we’re at the point that an intervention followed by rehab may be in order.
In any event, our progress on this particular Sunday was further delayed by screaming, tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth. To put it bluntly, things were not going particularly well in Minecraft world.
People have been building structures, from humble abodes to soaring edifices, for some time now. As varied as the structures, so too are the materials used to build them. Brick, wood, stone, mud and straw – just some of the many things people have used throughout the years and still today. At some point during the history of construction, it was established that building structures out of explosives is not a very good idea.
Knowing my 6-year-old son and his propensity to tread the path untrodden, it should have come as no surprise that Miles would choose to build his entire Minecraft house out of dynamite.
Miles worked hard on his structure and it was truly a marvel of creative ingenuity. For good measure, he even included a few dozen Snow Golems in the vicinity. For those unschooled in such matters, a Snow Golem is a teetering biped with the lower body of a snowman and the upper body of a jack-o-lantern. I’m not sure what is more surprising to me – that my 6-year-old knows what Snow Golems are or that I have gone my entire life without once coming across even so much as a reference to them.
Be that as it may, there it was – Miles’s mansion made of dynamite and his newly minted army of Snow Golems. Enough to make any mother proud.
As the story goes, Miles enlisted Jacob’s help to build some machine guns to protect his house from the monsters that come out at night in Minecraft world. Jacob began pulling together the raw materials for his project, including a substance called “redstone dust.” As luck would have it, the redstone dust got too close to the dynamite dwelling, which unfortunately was NOT surrounded by the appropriate amount of bedrock and obsidian.
Then . . . disaster. In an instant, Miles’s entire structure exploded, leaving nothing but ashes and some hideously injured Snow Golems in its wake.
The remainder of our Sunday was spent trying to console the inconsolable. We tried to explain the obvious drawbacks of using dynamite as a building material, but to no avail.
“Miles,” I pleaded, “please listen to me. I could call every builder in the Northern hemisphere, maybe even the entire world, and I can guarantee that every one of them would recommend AGAINST using dynamite to build a house. It’s simply not a wise choice. Forget the redstone dust. What if someone got a hankering for S’mores and lit up a small bonfire in the backyard? Then what?”
Both Miles and Jacob looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind.
“THERE ARE NO S’MORES IN MINECRAFT, MOM!!!” Their outburst was followed by wild arm movements, exasperated sighs and eye rolling.
“So what are you going to do next?” their Dad added helpfully. “Make doorknobs out of cherry bombs and the windows out of firecrackers?”
“THERE ARE NO CHERRY BOMBS AND FIRECRACKERS IN MINECRAFT, DAD!!!!” More hostile motions and irritated groans.
I had almost forgotten that as parents, we don’t know anything.
To prove his superior knowledge of construction, Miles has now rebuilt his house, again entirely out of TNT. We’ll see if the additional layers of bedrock and obsidian are enough to prevent what I consider an inevitable fiery outcome.
Personally, I would go for the safer, more commercially accepted materials. I’d want the structure I’d spent hours on to survive. But Jacob tells me tragedy is par for the course in Minecraft.
“It’s not like Miles is the only person to ever suffer a setback. My whole village burned down.” What? That’s terrible! What happened?
“Oh,” Jacob replied nonchalantly. “I was trying to manufacture my own obsidian from a bucket of molten lava. I knocked over the bucket.”
Huh. Dynamite, TNT, obsidian, molten lava? I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m not sure home construction is in my boys’ future.
