Column
Thank God for ‘Minecraft’
Everything I’ve been taught about video games as a parent is a lie
As a parent, I’m going to say something I never thought I would: Thank fucking god for video games. I cannot imagine the last few months without them.
Covid hit New York just a few days before my then-9 year old’s two-week Spring break. There was no school — remote or otherwise, a trip to visit her grandparents in California was canceled, and we were on city-wide lockdown. So in the midst of buying masks, canned food, and hand soap, I got my daughter a Nintendo Switch.
She had never played video games before, but she’s an only child who went from seeing dozens of friends a day to none. I knew there were only so many puzzles and board games she would abide, and only so much time that my husband and I could spend entertaining her given our full-time jobs. We figured we’d let her mess around on it an hour a day.
Ha!
A bit of Animal Crossing and Mario Kart got her started, but it was Minecraft — a creative building game — that got her hooked and became her full-time obsession. When she wasn’t playing Minecraft, she was talking about Minecraft, researching how to play Minecraft better, or watching videos of other people playing Minecraft. I didn’t understand it, really, but she was occupied and happy.
Even better, she got her friends interested in the game; soon she would be on FaceTime talking with kids from school at the same time as they built a Minecraft world together.
They were chatting and laughing in the same way they would have in a school yard.
There were moments where I felt guilty: Shouldn’t I be making her read more or do some science experiments in the backyard? But it only took a few days of watching her on the game for that hesitation to dissipate. Everything I’d been taught about video games as a parent — that they make children anti-social, or lazy, for example — was just demonstrably untrue.
My daughter was more social than she ever could have been without video games during the pandemic; she was playing complicated games with multiple friends every day. They were…
