Creative or Survival
Things I've learned from watching my son play Minecraft
I never played video games as a child. When I was a first-grader in Tokyo, my father was gifted a Nintendo that came with the Mario game. My parents and I struggled to get past the first level, and none of us could understand its appeal. It felt like we were simply set up to fail. My father often joked that he had butter fingers, which I’m convinced I’ve inherited. Eventually, the big gray console collected dust, and we ended up giving the whole thing away.
A few decades later, I find myself struggling once again with the tiny buttons and functions of the Nintendo, which our 6-year-old son has navigated with ease ever since he received the Switch for Christmas. I joke that he must have inherited his gaming skills from his father, who, after all, was a computer science major. In some of our early dates, I would watch my then-boyfriend push every correct button on the Beat Mania game at the arcade and wonder how a human brain could interpret all those flashing lights so quickly. I look away for a few minutes, and when my son says, “Look, Mama,” he has already built two shelters, a road, and a gigantic monument with a glass elevator in a game called Minecraft.
Minecraft was created by a Swedish game designer in 2011, and the concept is simple: you spawn in a natural biome, and you mine for raw material, which you craft into tools, which you can then use to mine more materials, and so on. One of the first decisions you make is whether you want to play in Survival Mode—where you must eat and sleep to keep living, and there are monsters like zombies that can hurt you and destroy your creations—or play in Creative Mode, where you never have to eat or sleep, and monsters exist but never hurt you. (My son usually plays the latter.) In Creative Mode, you never even have to mine for raw materials; you have an infinite inventory of blocks that are practical or decorative. Like LEGO, children and adults can enjoy building all kinds of things. Some people have built entire cities and recreated their favorite fictional worlds this way. The background music is calming and beautiful, so much so that we bought the piano sheet music to practice together. For our shy and sensitive kindergartener, this game has been his way of decompressing after school—and I have loved watching him build and explore in this digital space.
After coming back from my writing residency in Maine, he immediately went into Minecraft and built me a version of what I had described:
He gave me a single bed, a chest full of foods and goods, and a desk, with a scenic view of the yard. In an interesting twist, he summoned a monster called a Wither into this world, so the whole place feels a bit haunted now.
I admit, I’ve been in a creative rut recently. It doesn’t help that we continue to have such patchy childcare ever since November due to a combination of holidays, sick days, snow days, and work travel staggered between me and my husband. Whatever creations I make are directly tied to my productivity, either for work or family. When I do manage to write or look at my drafted pages, I can’t help but feel that they’re worthless, and I find myself going in a downward spiral. Who’s going to want to read this? I’m not skilled enough. ChatGPT is getting better by the day. What’s the point? The world is burning.
What I’ve come to realize is that for the last several months, I’ve been in my own kind of Survival Mode. I put in the work hours, and the pay disappears into preschool, babysitters, groceries, kid shoes, birthday presents, summer camp deposits… After the kids go to sleep, I can either relax and get a full night of sleep, or spend those hours on my creative projects, and pay for them the next day with fatigue and expensive coffees. So, more often than not, I choose to sleep to escape the demons. What a luxury it would be, to live purely creatively.
I suppose that’s what writing residencies are, even if they’re temporary. I’ll be attending another one in April. I’ve been told that someone will drop off all three meals and a snack every day. I’ll be there, alone in a cabin. I’ll really be free to write all day for a whole week. I just wish there was a way to balance survival and creativity in the same world. Maybe the game creators knew. If you want to build something beautiful, you can’t do it in a world threatened by monsters.
On Thursday, March 28, I’ll be giving the Mitsui Lecture via the Japan-America Society of Tennessee, on the cherry blossom motif in Japanese literature. I’ll offer excerpts from The Tale of Genji, The Makioka Sisters, and The Housekeeper and the Professor. No need to have read the books beforehand. This lecture will be held at The Bookshop (and the coffee shop next door), and there will be time to mingle and go shopping for books afterwards. The Japanese Consulate will record the lecture and post it on YouTube. Register here!
The Porch (where I work as Director of Education) is gearing up for its annual fundraiser on Friday, April 5 at Green Door Gourmet, featuring Ross Gay (in conversation with Tiana Clark), with music by Langhorne Slim. Join us for this evening of delight!
