When I first began playing Minecraft in 2010, I instantly fell in love. In its early, simple form, it was essentially a Lego kit, but one where monsters came out at night. That combination of a freedom to build whatever I wanted, but also the need to find somewhere safe and secure to hide in the dark, was all-consuming for me, and for a while there I wanted to play nothing else. Of course, I drifted away, and over time it’s felt like it’s become someone else’s game, perhaps even the rest of the world’s game. Even as my son has gone through multiple phases of playing, I’ve not found myself motivated to reconnect. That is, until this winter holiday, when he insisted I join him in playing on the Donut SMP. And in doing so, I’ve discovered that original love all over again.
At some point, for me Minecraft became about something other than digging for ores and building a lovely home. In those very early days (the game wasn’t officially released until November 2011), it was uncomplicated. The scope was infinite, but the approach was basic—again, think Lego. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing it, such that when I started dating my now-wife she was quickly introduced to the obsessive nature of the games player, bemused to learn I’d regularly stay up until 2 or 3 a.m. just to dig for diamonds and then attempt to escape from a cave of spiders. Then, I suppose a combination of burnout and the political misery in which the game became embroiled saw me move on.
Taking things down a Notch
Before that, however, things became even more complicated for me as I got to know its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson. I first interviewed Persson in November 2010, when Minecraft had became a hot property through word-of-mouth and downloaded java files. Then, in March 2011 I sort of invited myself over to visit Mojang, the fledgling developer Persson had created to continue the development of the game. A sweet Swedish guy who’d only just moved his business operations out of his mom’s basement, he’d made his first $10 million at this point, and the small team were literally moving into their first office when I arrived. The only exterior sign on the building was a torn sheet of file paper with “MojangAB” scrawled on it in green pen, taped to the inside of the door. Business developer Daniel Kaplan showed me around, at one point announcing, “This is the conference room,” as we entered a completely bare room but for an upturned cardboard box in one corner. “It still needs some work,” he added.
While there, I again interviewed Persson, and again spoke to a very modest, very bemused man, who rather sweetly believed that the game had already sold more copies than it would after going gold later that year (it had sold about one million at that point, it’s now at well over 350 million). We got on well. It was a good time. I would go on to be one of Persson’s regular targets of online harassment when everything went bad.
And it was not long after, in fact, that things started to sour. It’s tempting to pinpoint this to when Microsoft bought Minecraft for an astonishing $2.5 billion, with at least $2 billion of that going directly to Persson, in 2014. But Persson had been through a lot of personal tragedy from the end of 2011 onward, and his online behavior had already begun to shift. By 2014 GamerGate had started, and while Persson began as a decent voice against that movement, it didn’t last. Given that I repeatedly had Notch’s over one million Twitter followers sicced upon me, I felt the shift very personally. Minecraft began to stink of that, of Persson’s revolting comments against feminism and LGBTQ rights, and then his complete collapse into QAnon. By 2019 I kinda hated the game.
I have this cursed object in my house, a totem of all this: a cardboard Steve head signed by Persson in early 2011. God knows if it’s valuable—it precedes any official Mojang merch having been made, instead created by some local Swedish company Persson had commissioned. It sits in the cupboard above the water tank, covered in dust, this peculiar emblem of that incredible time of optimistic joy for indie gaming.
Doing Donuts
Donut SMP is one of the most popular public “Survival MultiPlayer” servers Minecraft players can join, seeing a peak of nearly 46,000 players in the last 24 hours, where anyone can log in for free and start exploring its enormous world. It’s the creation of high-profile Minecraft YouTuber DrDonut (known to his mom as Nate Filson), and offers players a space to build, craft, raid and, perhaps more than anything else, generate in-game income. An intricate in-game market where anyone can buy and sell resources and crafted items (and again, I stress, for free) encourages new players to start making money by selling the basic resources needed by the long-term super-rich players who can’t be bothered to mine them for themselves. Quickly, enterprising kids can start raking in cash, allowing them to buy coveted powerful tools in order to craft impressive bases, or more likely, start running their own farms to profit even further.
Before the Christmas break, my 11-year-old son asked about getting a Minecraft Realm. These are essentially rented spaces on a server that allow up to 10 people to simultaneously play in the same Minecraft world. It’s pretty cheap, so I said sure, and the boy began inviting his classmates to join him. And it was, for maybe three weeks, glorious! It was incredible to see these kids come together, building wonderful bases, designing amazing XP farms, and then cooperating on adventures for resources. Then, factions developed, people made “alliances” that were rapidly broken, betrayal was felt, and revenge was sought. Those wonderful bases would be sabotaged, even blown up by one child who felt aggrieved with the rest. One kid started killing the others indiscriminately and stealing their prized items. In-game anger became real-world anger, friendships were harmed at school, and eventually my son didn’t want to go back. It was too sad in there now. But, instead, he asked if it might be possible to join the server he had spent countless hours watching others play in on YouTube.
It turns out, joining servers on a Nintendo Switch is no easy task. It involves editing DNS settings, then spoofing server access to force the console build of the game to let you enter server addresses, and the whole thing is fraught with crashing and errors. But, once figured out, the boy got in and immediately knew what he was doing. And given it was the holidays and I wasn’t chained to my desk, he asked if I would join him too.
Farming joy
I was reluctant because, as I say, my relationship with Minecraft had become fraught. I’ve played with him in local multiplayer a bunch over the years, but it’s never really clicked for us; all I ever want to do is dig down and find diamonds, while he wants to do far more interesting and complicated things like farm skeletons or investigate other arcane mysteries. But here, in DonutSMP, our desires matched perfectly! To get started, we needed to make money, and to make money we needed someone to dig stupid amounts of resources, and someone who knew how to craft them into something worthwhile. Together we’re the perfect team!
We now have the most extraordinary secret base, in which my son has figured out how to use redstone to build contraptions that automatically harvest sugarcane and cacti, then push them into channels of water that sort them into chests. And I really mean he figured it out—rather than following a guide, or copying a YouTuber, he somehow intuited the method of observers and pistons needed to automate all this. He informs me that he’s equally surprised at his own discovered skills. I randomly teleport away to try to gather some rails or cobwebs, while he deftly battles mobs that spawn above us and designs increasingly clever new machines. Then it’s his turn to explore great distances away where he inevitably finds something incredible like an ancient underground city, or the half-looted remains of another player’s base.
Oh, and that’s the constant threat. DonutSMP is, ultimately, a hostile place. Funnily enough, in many ways it’s like Arc Raiders in the sense of a PvE world that contains the constant threat of unexpected PvP. The 40,000 people playing are spread across so much space that it’s very unlikely to see someone else at any point—I never have—but you’ll see signs of other players everywhere. The ground often bears the scars of battles, or peculiar towers of blocks stretching impossibly into the sky, giving this sense of an abandoned world in which you’re scraping to survive, yet one constantly belied by the menu-based market in which other players greedily buy your stacks of iron bars or enchanted shears. (Seriously, no one copy me, but I’ve made a fortune selling Unbreaking III shears for ridiculous prices!) But all the time, we’re surrounded by the existential fear that another player might stumble upon our underground realm, most likely when we’re not playing, and take everything from us. Or perhaps even just wantonly vandalize our hours of labor. (Hence our location being blurred out in all the screenshots!)
Those markets have also been the most extraordinary introduction to the perils and cruel machinations of capitalism for the boy. Seriously, this should be used in schools to explain the concept of supply and demand. There we are, bringing in $50,000 a stack for our piles of crafted rails, when some bastard gets on and starts listing the same for $15,000. What to do? Reduce our prices to compete? Wait until those bargain tracks are gone and hope the market recovers? Or, as I cannot resist, buying up everything the twerp is selling, then relisting it on the store at a sensible price. The speed with which it mimics (satirizes, even) the stock markets is chilling and hilarious.
And through all of this, I’ve realized I’ve rediscovered that first love. Once again, there’s a purpose and a reason for me to dig down for diamonds, just now with the bonus ending of crafting pickaxes we can then enchant and sell for $150,000 to someone who can’t be bothered to make them for themselves. Between us, me and the boy have made millions, and perhaps far more importantly, we’ve had a brilliant time together in this equalizing environment during cold wintry mornings.
Everything I loved about Minecraft is relevant here, with that infinite possibility given a deeper, more resonant meaning through both the vulnerability and the sense of a shared space with the person I love most in the world. I can forget all that grimness of the mid-2010s and return to this splendid game in a way that feels meaningful, and rather more importantly, enormously fun. That weird Steve head sits sadly in the cupboard, this adumbration of a lost time, but it can be forgotten. I’ve got shears to enchant.