a memoir about Minecraft

I caught sight of it as I was locking up for the day, pulling shut my navy-blue office door, glancing through the window I had decorated with motivational quotes from Stephen Hawking, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and some wholesome, comedic relief from the McElroy brothers. A picture of my friend and I, held up with a round red magnet, was still proudly on display for all my coworkers to see. 

It was a picture from his wedding day. My best friend Eric and his soon-to-be wife were getting their wedding pictures done in a botanical garden in Wisconsin. I smiled under that garden dome, surrounded by tulips and peonies as I waited my turn to get into a picture with him and capture the moment. When I moved into my new office, I wanted to make a little home away from home for myself, and even though I didn’t often print out physical copies of photographs, it felt like my door needed some decorations. But our fluorescent office lights, the ones that never turn off because we’re next to a room essential for manufacturing, had washed out the photo paper. The once-sepia image was now faded, leaving the residue of a happy memory behind.

I met him online, through a video game famous for its zombies and virtual building blocks. It was a fragile time for me– I was shipping off to college, a new part of a map discovered that I’d have to explore, and since my highschool sweetheart and I were on break, I’d have to explore it alone. It was no surprise, then, when I clung to the first online community I found, and we had a great sense of camaraderie for, you know, a bunch of strangers playing Minecraft together. Eric was definitely an anomaly, a twenty-five year old homebody from Wisconsin, and an obvious fit for a server moderator, given that most of our players were twelve and not equipped for such responsibility. But we just clicked. We were both a little socially-awkward, loved marching band and video games, and as two adults surrounded by rowdy teenagers, our friendship made sense. For some reason, the current server owner wanted to play matchmaker, and Eric and I played along for a bit, messaging back and forth on Facebook, even exchanging numbers. We spent a few months getting to know each other closely and tried our hand at a relationship. It was the first time I had even seen the clock read 2:00 AM on a school night. But once I realized I wasn’t over my last relationship, I stepped back and shifted our gears toward friendship. I can’t say there were no hurt feelings, and things were tense for a bit. As soon as I was promoted to server moderator, we realized we weren’t going to be able to avoid each other, and smoothed things over to be friends again.

He and I turned a group of ragtag kids playing Minecraft, a pure sandbox, into something with more structure. We built towns block by block where players could join and add their own house, or secret base, or rocket ship– anything they had the prerogative to build would fit right in. We came up with reasonable rules that people would have to follow if they wanted to play with us, things like “don’t break things that aren’t yours” and “don’t steal from others” and yes, at times, it felt like we were taking on the role of a kindergarten teacher, but without pay. I sat in my college dorm room on my green plaid sheets, a large bowl of buttery popcorn up on my top bunk with me, and my laptop, hot to the touch, cushioned on my thighs with some blankets as we built up cities and railroads, and created elaborate buildings to impress newcomers. Lots of people oo’ed and ahh’ed over my work, and as a chemistry major landing B’s and C’s, it was a validation that I wasn’t getting anywhere else. Any time I didn’t have class, that’s where I would be.

When I joined the server for the first time it was run by a fifteen year old kid in Texas who knew way more about computer programming than I could ever hope, but leaned a bit too far right for my tastes. By my second year of college, he grew bored with running the server, as teenagers do, and asked Eric if he wanted to take over. They left Skype up and running in the background for a few days to transfer everything, the girth of the files straining on his optical network as they trickled in, our entire little world sent with one mouse click. The era of pyraetos was over, and it was time, now, for the era of Azurago to begin. I was elated when he asked me to step up and become his right-hand; a head admin; a co-owner.

Together, we put more effort into the server than the previous owner had ever been willing to. It was a brand new world map, untouched and waiting to be discovered together as we flew over the blocky mountains and around canopied forests, across oceans and through square desert ravines. I’m surprised my grades didn’t begin to slip with how much of my spare time was dedicated to this game. I was on first thing in the morning to check on our players from Australia, mint still lingering in my mouth from brushing my teeth, hoping I still had time to dash across campus and make it to my 8:00 AM. I was on in the middle of the day between lecture and lab helping settle silly disputes, with my green plastic cafeteria take-out box loaded with sliced pork loin, shoestring french fries, and macaroni and cheese sitting on my desk, barely touched, next to my laptop. I was on well past quiet hours, my dorm room only illuminated by the dim Netflix “are you still watching” notification on my roommate’s Smart TV and my laptop screen, building things for myself, like castle replicas, or a dream house, or a new spawn location. We had started advertising our server on other websites and showcasing our building projects, drawing a good amount of attention from new players and growing our community. As an estimate, there were maybe a hundred different people playing, usually twenty at any given time. And I began to get to know some of them, too.

I made a lot of close friends out of people who chose to join our family, from all walks of life– Skirvy, who’s now 20 and working his way up through a metal plate-making program and paying off the one year of college he attended before deciding it wasn’t for him; Fireshadow, a bright-as-hell and endearingly awkward guy who recently started college, plays piano recitals, and coaches soccer; TKDMaddox, a younger kid from the south who is a high school graduate on his way to the Marines and can’t spell worth a damn; Parisa, a woman from Georgia, my age, who also loves Dungeons and Dragons and is a great artist and graphic designer; Rosiesunny, a high schooler from California who is about as meek as they come with a voice like a baby quail, but the sweetest and friendliest. They helped us run the server, among many others. People came and went, but it always stung when they disappeared– our server, which we rebranded as Cirrus, was near and dear to my heart, and to watch people walk off into the sunset without a word was difficult. I wondered if these people mattered more to me than I did to them.

Eric and I spent hours, days, and months creating amazing projects that were quite ambitious, getting other players involved, delegating tasks, letting each person add their own voice, and we had a lot to show for it. We made a gorgeous, postcard-worthy replica of Peles Castle from Romania, detailed inside and out with just about every kind of square block in the game. We made a floating castle in the sky, hovering on spherical grass islands, connected with intricate wooden suspension bridges, and overlooking a full city beneath. We tested our players’ creative potential with tons of themed competitions, posting the winning creations online for the world to see. The whole server came together and built a nautical Dubai-inspired theme park, which was Eric’s idea, and we placed 8th on the largest Minecraft site’s contest, out of a few hundred entries. We eventually created a fully-working role playing game map, a game within a game with a fully fleshed out progression system and story, where players could work together to survive and build up their own faction, as well as prepare for battle against the final boss. As someone with budding anxiety, for once, I felt confident in what I had made. But by early 2017, our small server had shrunk more; we went from fifteen to maybe five players on at a time, and too many lulls with nobody around in between.

Maybe we got burnt out, putting the effort of a part-time job into this hobby, something that was only ever meant for fun and not work. I loved everything about what we did, and felt like we had created a sanctuary for people, something to provide shade from the hot sun of daily life. Maybe we felt like we built everything we wanted to build. As I look at this photo on my office door, it’s 2018, now, and I haven’t been online for over a month on a server I’m supposedly co-running, and I haven’t played regularly since I moved to upstate New York. Eric is the same way; we both hop online from time to time, but it’s disheartening to see zero out of twenty-five players online, twenty-four hours a day. I can’t help but look back at those five years of my life, during formative years, and crave that sense of belonging and fulfillment that I just don’t get out of the game anymore. And even worse, there wasn’t some fiery moment surrounded in ash and brimstone that declared to me you have outgrown this, no explosions to shake me to my core, no angry eruption of spewed emotions that melted me and reduced me to bone. It was a slow fade from my life, like an overexposed photograph left out under a fluorescent bulb. 

My friendship with Eric has changed, too; we share in this joined melancholy that the game just isn’t the same as it used to be, that it’s a peg that no longer completely fills the hole in our hearts. We still chat on a daily basis, usually griping about the current politics of the world and the petulant child sitting as President, or talking about weekend plans, checking up, even confiding our pain in each other when life burns us, and yet I’m still afraid that much like the other players on the server, one day he’ll turn around and walk out of my life, and I’ll slowly fade from his memory until he no longer remembers the name redJAZZangel.

If I had to describe the faded photograph, I’d call it bitterly nostalgic. The essence of the image is there, but the details are missing. The trees in the frame are patchy, my smile has faded to white, the trellis above us is washed away, Eric’s eyes are erased. It’s not the same. Is this where our story ends?

No.

Who would have thought that six years from when I started writing this memoir, I’d have an entire photo album of fresh, new memories of playing video games – not just with Eric, but now with Eric, my partner, and even my mom? And again, it wasn’t this dramatic moment of rebirth, a phoenix immolating from its ashes in a column of flames that made us realize we didn’t want our friendship to fade away. It was a gradual warmth of a computer screen slowly waking back up, the pixels in the picture slowly coming back into focus, a reminder that even if the physical photograph was damaged from the droll, dim lights of a 9 to 5 office life, that the picture was still there, still real, backed up in its original glory, on my laptop. There’s probably some deeper metaphor in here about analog versus digital, and making online friends in a fast-growing digital world. If you find it, let me know. In the meantime, Eric and I will be playing games together, like nothing’s ever changed.