At the New Yorker, the artist Chris Ware has a graceful reflection on his daughter’s relationship with Minecraft, and how he has occasionally been enjoined to visit her world inside:
Clara has spent hours, days, weeks of the past two years building and making navigable block worlds fuelled from the spun-off fizz of her accreting consciousness: giant ice-cream-layered auditoriums linked to narrow fifty-foot-high hallways over glass-covered lava streams, stairs that descend to underground classrooms, frozen floating wingless airplanes, and my favorite, the tasteful redwood-and-glass “writer’s retreat.” (It has a small pool.) She made a meadow of beds for my wife—a high-school teacher who craves unconsciousness—and a roller coaster to take her there. Though Clara mostly “plays” Minecraft by herself, the game allows her friends to drop into these worlds, too, and I’ve even spent some strange virtual afternoons as a floating block-self, guided by my angelic block-hammer-wielding block-daughter, zipping around a dreamscape that feels, really, less like life and maybe more like death, but in a sweet sort of way. If architecture somehow mirrors the spaces we carve in our memories and make in our minds, then something pretty interesting is going on here.
Ware’s daughter Clara also mods the game, and her thoughts on what is possible (and not) in Minecraft create a touching lens on life for an athletic girl who, at ten, is starting to think about how to make her characters hold hands (when asked about how she “knows” she has a crush on a fellow “hand hockey” player, she replies “Because sometimes I imagine him getting shot and me jumping in front of the bullets to save him”).
It’s a lovely piece and you should read it, and of course his illustration is also excellent: The bright geometric portals to the Minecraft world on children’s screens, vivid and inviting among the natural order of childhood, home and nature.