Colin Fanning, a curatorial fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, points out that European philosophers have long promoted block-based games as a form of “good” play that cultivates abstract thought. Playing with blocks, it turns out, has deep cultural roots in Europe. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry.” “Children,” the social critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1924, “are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on. What will the Minecraft generation become? Those kids of the ’70s and ’80s grew up to become the architects of our modern digital world, with all its allures and perils. But as Jordan’s experience suggests - and as parents peering over their children’s shoulders sense - Minecraft is a different sort of phenomenon.Īt a time when even the president is urging kids to learn to code, Minecraft has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the pleasures, of computer science. There have been blockbuster games before, of course. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft - and Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind it - for $2.5 billion. There are over 100 million registered players, and it’s now the third-best-selling video game in history, after Tetris and Wii Sports.
Since its release seven years ago, Minecraft has become a global sensation, captivating a generation of children. “My art teacher always says, ‘No games are creative, except for the people who create them.’ But she said, ‘The only exception that I have for that is Minecraft.’ ” He floated over to the maze’s exit, where he had posted a sign for the survivors: The journey matters more than what you get in the end. On-screen, he steered us over to the entrance to the maze, and I peered in at the contraptions chugging away. “It’s like the earth, the world, and you’re the creator of it,” he said. When I visited Jordan at his home in New Jersey, he sat in his family’s living room at dusk, lit by a glowing iMac screen, and mused on Minecraft’s appeal.
He stuck the mooshroom inside, where it would totter on and off the plates in an irregular pattern. He built a pen out of gray stones and installed “pressure plates” on the floor that triggered a trap inside the maze. Jordan realized he could harness the animal’s movement to produce randomness. One, a red-and-white cowlike critter called a mooshroom, is known for moseying about aimlessly. Then it hit him: the animals! Minecraft contains a menagerie of virtual creatures, some of which players can kill and eat (or tame, if they want pets).
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How to do it, though? He obsessed over the problem. That would really throw his friends off guard. But what he really wanted was a trap that behaved unpredictably. Jordan built a variety of obstacles, including a deluge of water and walls that collapsed inward, Indiana Jones-style. He recently read “The Maze Runner,” a sci-fi thriller in which teenagers live inside a booby-trapped labyrinth, and was inspired to concoct his own version - something he then would challenge his friends to navigate. Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap.Īn 11-year-old in dark horn-rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities.
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