The Minecraft Generation - Essay

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

• Source: Clive Thompson
• Tags: #games #education
• Notes:

For one thing, it doesn’t really feel like a game. It’s more like a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or all three put together: a place where kids engineer complex machines, shoot videos of their escapades that they post on YouTube, make art and set up servers, online versions of the game where they can hang out with friends. It’s a world of trial and error and constant discovery, stuffed with byzantine secrets, obscure text commands and hidden recipes. And it runs completely counter to most modern computing trends. ==Where companies like Apple and Microsoft and Google want our computers to be easy to manipulate — designing point-and-click interfaces under the assumption that it’s best to conceal from the average user how the computer works — Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood, break things, fix them and turn mooshrooms into random-­number generators. It invites them to tinker.==

As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, ==Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer.==

“Children,” the social critic Walter Benjamin wrote in 1924, “are particularly fond of ==haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on.== They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry.”

This is what computer scientists call ==computational thinking==, and it turns out to be one of Minecraft’s powerful, if subtle, effects. The game encourages kids to regard logic and if-then statements as fun things to mess around with. It teaches them what computer coders know and wrestle with every day, which is that programs rarely function at first: The work isn’t so much in writing a piece of software but in debugging it, figuring out what you did wrong and coming up with a fix.

Minecraft is thus an ==almost perfect game for our current educational moment==, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater.

Ito points out that when kids delve into this ==hackerlike side of the game== — concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks — they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.

“It’s one of the places where young people are engaging with more expert people who are much older than them,” Ito says. These connections are transformative: ==Kids get a glimpse of a professional path that their schoolwork never illuminates.== “An adult mentor opens up these new worlds that wouldn’t be open to them,” she adds. Of course, critics might worry about kids interacting with adults online in this way, but as Ito notes, when there’s a productive task at hand, ==it’s similar to how guilds have passed on knowledge for ages: knowledgeable adults mentoring young people.==

==Ito has also found that kids’ impulse to tinker with Minecraft pushes them to master real-world technical skills.== One 15-year-old boy I interviewed, Eli, became interested in making “texture packs.” These are the external shells that wrap around 3-D objects in the game, like a drape thrown over a table: Change the pattern on the drape, and you can change what the object looks like. Designing texture packs prompted Eli to develop sophisticated Photoshop skills. He would talk to other texture-­pack designers on Minecraft forums and get them to send him their Photoshop files so he could see how they did things. He also began teaching himself to draw. “I’d be downloading the mod,” he says, “looking at the original texture and saying, ‘O.K., how can I make this a little more cartoony?’ ” Then he would put his own designs up on the forums to get feedback, which, he discovered, was usually very polite and constructive. “The community,” he says, “is very helpful.”

For Ito, this is all a culturally useful part of the experience: ==Kids become more resilient, both practically and philosophically.== “Minecraft is busted, and you’re constantly fixing it,” she says. “It’s that home-brew aesthetic. It’s kind of broken all the time. It’s laggy. The kids get used to the idea that it’s broken and you have to mess with it. You’re not complaining to get the corporate overlord to fix it — you just have to fix it yourself.”

“In Minecraft, ==knowledge becomes social currency==,” says Michael Dezuanni, an associate professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Dezuanni has studied how middle-­school girls play the game, watching as they engaged in nuanced, Talmudic breakdowns of a particular creation. This is, he realized, a significant part of the game’s draw: It offers many opportunities to display expertise, when you uncover a new technique or strategy and share it with peers.

Most online games don’t require kids to manage the technical aspects of how gamers interact…But Minecraft is unusual because Microsoft doesn’t control all the servers where players gather online.

What this means is that ==kids are constantly negotiating what are, at heart, questions of governance.== Will their world be a free-for-all, in which everyone can create and destroy everything? What happens if someone breaks the rules? Should they, like London, employ plug-ins to prevent damage, in effect using software to enforce property rights? There are now hundreds of such governance plug-ins.

Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially, teaching ==civic literacy.==

Running a server becomes a crash course in how to compromise, balance one another’s demands and resolve conflict.

Several parents and academics I interviewed think ==Minecraft servers offer children a crucial “third place” to mature==, where they can gather together outside the scrutiny and authority at home and school. Kids have been using social networks like Instagram or Snapchat as a digital third place for some time, but Minecraft imposes different social demands, because kids have to figure out how to respect one another’s virtual space and how to collaborate on real projects.

His son, Joseph says, is “at home but still getting to be with a friend using technology, going to a place where they get to use pickaxes and they get to use shovels and they get to do that kind of building. I wonder how much Minecraft is meeting that need — that need that all children have.” ==In some respects, Minecraft can be as much social network as game.==

==Just as Minecraft propels kids to master Photoshop or video-­editing, server life often requires kids to acquire complex technical skills.== One 13-year-old girl I interviewed, Lea, was a regular on a server called Total Freedom but became annoyed that its administrators weren’t clamping down on griefing. So she asked if she could become an administrator, and the owners said yes.

Mimi Ito has found that the ==kids who acquire real-world skills from the game — learning logic, administering servers, making YouTube channels — tend to be upper middle class.== Their parents and after-­school programs help them shift from playing with virtual blocks to, say, writing code. So educators have begun trying to do something similar, bringing Minecraft into the classroom to create lessons on everything from math to history. Many libraries are installing Minecraft on their computers.