Flying Pig to Mountain Top Roller Coaster

I replaced the carpet in my striped house – it’s far more muted and tasteful now, although still pretty goddamn wacky - and then I couldn’t really think of anything much else to do. I thought about building fences around my floating island to safeguard the farm animals but, guilty as I feel about the way they keep plunging to their deaths, I do reap the benefits of raw pork chops and chunks of leather every morning when I float downstairs. I was thinking about all this when a friend of my son’s came in and asked about Minecraft. “Yay!” I said excitedly, because if there’s one thing us addicts like, it’s an innocent to corrupt, “Let me show you my roller coaster.” I went off to World 3, which is actually my first world and my first roller coaster. He was suitably impressed and even got to see me first put some squids who had spawned in a puddle out of their misery and then nearly die in a creeper incident. After I had explained about the completely unfair way skeletons will shoot you right through your own front door and he’d gone off to have some lunch I had to fix the creeper damage and now I am contemplating sticking around in World 3 for a bit. I have a rather excellent house there, nestled into a charming little bay, and then there’s my mountain house, hanging in space over a waterfall in the center of a roller coaster.

My first world actually sucked. It was a mineral poor chain of tiny, monster infested islands. It’s amazing that I ever kept on playing, actually, because I never did anything but die slowly in that world. The original World 2 was little better: endless swamps full of reeds and zombies, reminding me uncomfortably of my South Carolina adolescence. Finally I moved on to another world, World 3, which is a world of steep mountains and cavernous valleys where I feel at home. I like World 3 and I wish I could find all the houses I’ve built there, beginning with my first hollowed mountainside behind a waterfall, but alas, they are mostly lost forever. I did come across one on a recent ramble and it was not as good as I had been remembering it, as is so often the problem with nostalgia. I am trying to pretend that it was nothing more than a temporary house but I suspect it may have been a main dwelling for my early, stone tool days. Somewhere on World 3 are a couple of huge, fortified towers and an underwater glass house: I hadn’t yet figured out bulding roads to my spawn point and so when I died – have I mentioned my loathing for creepers yet? – they were gone forever. I haven’t replaced them: underwater glass houses, while pretty, aren’t actually very practical. Who knew?

Minecraft can be a narrative of loss, sometimes. “I had a diamond pickaxe and golden boots and a house with a heated bathtub overhung by a painting of a creeper and then it all went away,” I might say, like a Wall Street banker talking about the last crash. Nobody on Earth is sympathetic to these losses, though. “Jesus,” my daughter says, “You play too much Minecraft.” “MINECRAFT!” my son yells in a faux Germanic accent like a prison guard on Hogan’s Heroes. “MINECRAFT!”

The last house I lost was going to be amazing. I had decided to make a vague replica of an Earth house I loved and lost, a 1920s bungalow that I lived in during the early years of this century. It was going to be an exact replica except it would have two stories, because everything is better in Minecraft than on Earth. In Minecraft, for one thing, it doesn’t matter that charming rented 1920s brick bungalows have no insulation and you freeze the winter through. Therefore I was determined to make a more or less – probably more less than more more, because, in the immortal words of talking Barbie, math is hard – scale model of my old house, despite knowing that this always turns out badly. Back in the 90s I made a scale model of my house and my family in the Sims. That was a big mistake. It creeped us all out so badly, waiting for a fire or drowning or something else awful to happen first to our digital analogues and then, inevitably, to ourselves, that we had to destroy it, offering silent prayers to the forces of order and chaos all the while. Soon after that my relationship ended and I moved 500 miles away, so, you see, it is chancy to fuck with doppelgangers of your life.

Creepers took me out before I could finish the bungalow, which was frighteningly vast. It turns out that while lots of people on Minecraft make enormous bunkers and giant castles and so on, I seem to be most comfortable in tiny cozy houses. If you use scale, most of my Minecraft houses are less than 800 square feet. The bungalow I used to live in was about 1500 square feet, which is not large -although certainly large enough to conceal your car keys, hats and gloves for amazing periods of time – but when I went to build it in Minecraft it seemed gigantic and overpowering. This may have something to do with my lack of math. One never knows. Alas, it is gone like Yorick and will never be finished. I’m back to one room houses that would not be unfamiliar to Laura Ingalls and family.