My Son s Minecraft Obsession Is Boring Me To Tears

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A big weird stupid thing goes on when you have kids. A thing where you want them to live their best lives, follow their dreams, grow and develop into their own little people independent of you. 
But you also want them to like the stuff you like. 

Me? I like [/topics/video-games/ video games].

Well, I sorta like video games. Despite spending the vast majority of my working life [/news/three-years-on-im-still-recovering-from-breath-of-the-wild/ writing about video games], I'd call it a love/hate relationship. Video games are an art form unlike any other. They dazzle, inspire, empower.

But video games are also kinda super annoying. 




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They're derivative. Desperate for mainstream critical attention, but burdened with the kind of juvenile writing that makes it mostly impossible to take them seriously. Worse, [ decades of being marketed solely toward young boys] has left games and games culture with a misogyny hangover that can only be described as "problematic." 

Do I want to share my love of video games with my children? Yes. Do I want them to become stereotypical hermit crabs, locked inside their room as their bodies decay toward puberty and incel subreddits? Ideally no. 

Apologies in advance for the hyperbole, inborncricketer.blogspot.com but right now I've got problems. Minecraft problems.

In recent years the concept of "games as services" has exploded. Nowadays we don't play games for a month or two, finish them and move on to the next like the "good old days." No, now we're picking one single game and playing it for years. [/news/valorant-riot-games-league-of-legends-followup-launches-june-2/ League of Legends], Fortnite, [/news/world-of-warcraft-classic-launches-in-summer-2019/ World of Warcraft] … [/news/amid-covid-19-minecraft-sees-sharp-spikes-over-126m-players-a-month/ Minecraft].

That's the dark path my oldest son has decided to take. I regret to inform you my 7-year-old has become a "Minecraft guy."

He. Won't. Stop. Playing. Minecraft. 

He won't stop talking about Minecraft, either. He'll wake me up at 6 a.m., [/reviews/nintendo-switch-review/ Nintendo Switch] in hand, to show me the armor he's carefully crafted, or the house he's just built. In the car, driving home from school he'll regale me with blow-by-blow accounts of his graduation from Creative to Survival mode. Questions. Endless questions.