Like many people, I play games. I often feel like I need to make an excuse to play games, because it often feels like I’m playing them when I should be doing something else. And really, I often don’t play games during months when I’m doing well and having fun with work or making comics. But, playing games is an important part of the human experience, and no one should have to make an excuse for playing them when they can. And anyway, when I do play them I usually walk away with a significant learning experience, which is part of the point.
Lately, I’ve been playing Minecraft. And by lately, I mean since last December, about, perhaps earlier. It hasn’t been an entirely continuous game, but close enough. It’s been on a Feed the Beast server with some friends, and we’ve been playing in survival mode with the Direwold20 modpack. For those of you who don’t play minecraft, that means it has lots of things the regular game doesn’t. And survival mode means we’re doing it the hard way. Below is an areal screen shot of my property. There’s one thing on it that I didn’t build, the glowy green thing in the lower left corner. And there are a few things off screen that I’ve built too:
Two important things to note for this lesson: That didn’t all happen over night, and none of those buildings is finished. They look finished, but they’ve really got several months more work to go on them at the pace I’m going.
The lessons is that it is possible to work on several projects at once — or, more importantly, how. I can’t really put it into words, but think of a game like Minecraft as an isolated, accelerated simulation of a section of life. To make games fun, it has to be easier and faster to gain rewards. But also, there have to be setbacks and challenges. In Minecraft, you can be killed by all sorts of monsters and lose all your stuff (we have terrain damage turned off so creepers can’t destroy our work — another way of accelerating reward that’s optional). Also, in survival mode, you don’t have all the materials you need to build what you want right away, you’ve got to earn it. So, supporting all these buildings is a network of mines below the surface. Not all the material here came from mines, though, a lot of it was grown. The big gigantic tree, for instance, is being built from harvesting smaller trees and using their wood and leaves to create it. So, I’ve got a birch farm that needs tending occasionally. There’s a minecart track I’m building through the river to connect my jungle fortress with my friend’s fortified village, Worrytown. In the very lower left corner, I’m building a casino. It will have a representation of nearly everything the public sees in a casino, and maybe some things that they don’t. I just remembered it needs a vault… It will eventually have a slot machine that I will have programmed myself using a language called LUA. In the lower right corner there’s a recreation of ZARDOZ, a big stone head, with chests full of guns. Beneath him will be a gun factory that’s already partially in the works. Under the big tree, there’s a village I’m building and populating, floating above the jungle, with a wooden walkway that goes to a portal to the Nether, or hell, where I’m harvesting netherbrick for the roof of my casino. That goes pretty fast now because I’ve got a Wand of Equal Transference and a lot of glass. It’s a neat mining trick, and if you play Direwolf20 you’ll know enough of what I’m talking about to try it out yourself.
Anyway, I’ve been working on these projects in rotation. Sometimes logging in for ten minutes just to moves some material about before I work on my comics. I’m getting into a rhythm with it and starting to see, as you can see, some real results. I’ve been trying to live my life this way for quite some time, working on several projects at the same time. But it’s a real struggle. Often, I get overwhelmed and the results come too slowly, or the setbacks are so jarring, that I feel like doing what we in the game world call a rage quit. Unlike in the game world, if you rage quit life you can’t log in again, at least not as the same character. So I haven’t. But, that kind of stuttering and stopping and flying about in a panic and sitting there wishing that rage quitting wasn’t so final sort of puts a damper on developing good habits. It’s hard to get in a groove. In the game world, however, it’s a little easier. And I can take a break and think about it and come back later when I have the energy and the time. So, it’s easier to develop those habits. Not the habit of playing the game, but the habits of project management. Of working on the easier things while thinking about the harder things, doing the boring stuff while visualizing the rewarding results, and rotating between each project to coax them along. But also of prioritizing the mining and the crafting, so that the building can be done at all.
The next trick is start looking at my life’s projects in the same way, and to slowly build up the patience to deal with the larger, scarier setbacks.
I’ve played games like this in the past that have taught me similar lessons. None were quite as complex and craft oriented as Minecraft is, though. But also, I wasn’t at a point in my life where I was very receptive to these lessons. I just might be now, though, and here Minecraft is.
What I’m learning from Minecraft originally appeared on Drawing Contraption on 2013/06/30.