Minecraft, Bewitched, and Creative Mode

We used to play video games. Now we play one video game.

Minecraft got its blocks under my skin about four years ago, and I don't want to work out how many hours I've probably spent mining, farming, and exploring its cubist landscapes because the math would strain the arithmatic capabilities of this old laptop.

Suffice it to say: it's a lot.

Anyone with kids already knows what Minecraft is. But the charm of this game is it appeals to all ages. Even couples in their forties looking for something fun to do together.

Minecraft is an open-ended, "sandbox" game. You begin in a limitless world with nothing but your bare hands. You gater resources, make tools, build shelter, grow food, and work out how you're going to survive. If you haven't found a safe place to stay by sunset, you'll be attacked by zombies, spiders, and explosive green creepers. Terrifying. But once you've worked out the basics, you can build elaborate houses, engineer complex machines with electric circuits, brew potions, open a portal into another dimension (it happens to be Hell) and take on a powerful dragon.

There are lots of ways to die, at which point you're re-born empty-handed. But you can build on the achievements of your ancestors. In this way, the game encapsulates the advance of civilization: from fashioning crude tools to technology indistinguishable from magic.

But there's another way to play Minecraft. Instead of this "survival mode," you can play in "creative mode," where there is no chance of dying. Creative mode lets you fly anywhere you like, break blocks with no effort, and build with an unlimited supply of any the resources that exist in the game. You don't hvae to working to acquire them first. It essentially turns the simulated space of Minecraft into a post-scarcity world. The only challenge is to conceive of something and then build it.

This is where a marriage can get into trouble.

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Travel back through the cultural landscape for a couple generations and you'll discover a television program called Bewitched. It told the story of Darren and Samantha. Darren was a hard-working advertising executive. He married Samantha, a witch descended from an aristocratic line of magical beings. Samantha could get whatever she wanted just by twitching her. Her family felt nothing but contempt for her normal husband. They considered him a crippled fool, far beneath her.

Most of the show's dramatic tension arose from Darren's insistence that Samantha not use her magical powers. They made the neighbors suspicious, for one thing. You didn't want to go around raising eyebrows in the era of the cold war and the red scare, I guess. Anyway, appearances were just so damned important back then.

But Darren's bigger problem was that magic rendered him unnecessary. What was the point of all his hard work if Samantha could keep the lights on and put food on the table just by wiggling her nose? Why should he spend all day schmoozing with clients and kissing up to his condescending boss?

What was the point, indeed? The show never really makes clear what Samantha sees in Darren. But I know one thing for certain. If I had a wife who could teleport us anywhere in the world, who could pop anything she wanted into existence, who could change into any shape she liked, and who could freeze time, and if for some reason this remarkable woman wanted to marry ordinary old me, I wouldn't bully her into changing the baby's diapers and washing the damn dishes by hand. I'd have her magic us up some money and a nice 60' sailing ship, and then teleport the lot of us to the Mediterranean. Then we could sail where we wanted with dial-to-order tailwinds. If I got bored I'd worked on a novel without worrying about marketing or selling it. Maybe (even worse) I'd write a book of poetry.

Darren, on the other hand, just wanted to prove that he was the big man of the family. For some reason he wanted to suffer in a demeaning job and put up with humiliations and misunderstandings week after week, just to maintain a middle class quality of life equivalent to his nosy neighbors'.

Much has been made in TV criticism of the class-structure subtext going on here. Samantha and her family were upper-class, obviously. They had the resources to do anything they liked. Substitute money for magic and you could make the same show. They were today's one-percenters.

Meanwhile Darren, the middle-class chump, wanted to prove he can make it without his in-laws' help. Samantha's whole family was effete, condescending, and unlikable, mirroring the contempt the working classes have always felt for the wealthy. It's no wonder he didn't want any part of their shenanigans. But he always struck me as sort of a prick for standing in Samantha's way. What a jackass.

This blew up in my face when The Wife and I started playing Minecraft.

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Minecraft is more fun when you play on a multiplayer server. It's even more fun when you're joined by someone you liked enough to marry. You can find a couple of horses and go riding together, exploring the countryside. Or you can hunt the undead at night, and then grind up their bones for fertilizer and spread it on your garden. You can put on fire-proof armor, descend into hell, and carry back the treasures you discover there. (In the old days, childless couple might play cribbage or watch TV in the evenings. I would argue that Minecraft is a bit more fun.)

But here's the problem. I get my satisfaction by starting from nothing, building a shelter, gathering seeds and planting crops. Then I dig for coal and iron. Go deeper, get diamonds. Set up a serious mining operation. Scoop up buckets of lava and use them to smelt minerals. (You've got to set your own goals in this game, and there's lots of things to do.) Tame the landscape, keep the monsters at bay, build a house. Look around and say, everything good around here, I made it happen.

Consider how I felt when I spent half an hour down at the bedrock, risking life and limb to gather enough iron to build her a shiny new suit of armor. Then I come back up to the surface to discover a mansion built of minerals that didn't even exist in our current dimension. This place put Buckingham Palace to shame. And there was a stable full of horses. We hadn't even gone off on our adventure to tame the horses yet. That's what I was making the armor for.

"How did you get all this stuff?" I asked her.

"Oh," she said. "I googled a way to turn creative mode on for me. You don't mind, do you?"

"But I made you this armor."

"Oh, that's okay. I don't need it. I'm immortal now!"

Darren and Samantha, playing two different games in the same world. Now who felt like the prick?

The Wife is a hell of a lot more creative than me. I'm not ashamed to admit it. She'll build her palace and her stables and then be on to the next thing, spreading architecture across the landscape like Frank Lloyd Wright with a magic wand and better taste. When I switch into creative mode, I look at the unlimited resources in my inventory, and think, well, I guess I could run a railroad line between all of her palaces.

Dullsville.

I think of Darren, who wanted nothing more than to come home with his paycheck and slap it down on the table and be told something more than, "That's nice, dear."

I wasn't going to tell her she couldn't use her magical powers in our shared world. But for some reason we took a break from playing together after that. It just didn't seem like fun any more.

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We go through phases, with this game. We play a lot in the winter. We play a lot when life gets tumultuous and we can't see a way to fix it. We play a lot when the body is tired but the mind is hungry (but not hungry enough to read a book). For me, Minecraft provides the illusion that simple and sustained efforts can lead to profit and security. For her, the illusion that she has unlimited powers and can teleport and build anything she wants just by thinking about it.

It's a credit to the game that it can address so many psychological hungers.

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When Spring comes and the real world is mild and generous, the yard beckons. I'm back to trimming brush and mowing the lawn. The bittersweet vines around here will take over everything if we let them, and if poison ivy were a cash crop, we'd be billionaires. The barn is still half-full of my grandparents' hoarding, and I keep picking away at that, taking one Prius load to the dump at a time. I'm mining through their tunnels of garbage and finding a few choice treasures. Meanwhile she plants her gardens and tends her chickens and puts in borders and water features.

I mend the fence. The other day I re-set the post for the mailbox, which has been leaning sideways since my grandfather drove in to it three years ago.

This house is starting to look like a place people should live. It's coming back together, one block at a time.

We'd been trying to decide what to do with the family boat. Should get it into the water again? It would take a tremendous amount of work and a good deal of money, but look at everything else we've accomplished around here! There are possibilities.

Then a storm hits and knocks it into the rocks.

This is when I want creative mode. This is when I want Samantha.