My Kid Left Me to Die ... in Minecraft (Well, sort of)

My kid left me to die.

In Minecraft, I mean.

I am not particularly skilled in the realm of video games. I still play every once in a while, mostly MarioKart or some of the Lego games that I can't get very far on without going online for a tutorial. But my oldest has long been a fan of Minecraft and sometimes asks me to play it with her. You fellow parents know that's not an opportunity you can afford to turn down.

I didn't start out very auspiciously. Aside from not being used to the controls, I kept getting hung up on details like why when you break part of a tree trunk with an ax, the upper portion and leaves still float in the air. And while the game does not require the reaction time of say, Halo, it still took some getting used to.

In case you're not familiar with Minecraft but are, like me, of the generation where Atari evolved into Nintendo, Minecraft is basically an entire game made up of doing the stuff you did in older video games instead of pursuing the main objective.

I eventually beat Double Dragon using a boxy joystick on my Tandy 1000, but along the way, I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the surroundings. Why kick and punch a bad guy the requisite number of times when you could knock him off a ledge or onto a conveyor belt rolling into unspecified darkness? One of my favorite parts of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game was using items like road signs or fire hydrant caps to attack Foot Soldiers. On one particular subterranean level in the original Super Mario Bros., I always took the time to break the blue blocks until I spelled out a close approximation of “Luigi.”

And then there was messing with NPCs. On Super Mario Bros. 3, I would often jump around while Toad was inviting me to pick a prize from one of the treasure boxes. I am struggling to remember other examples, so I'll steal one from a friend who found his son had wiped out just about everyone in a village while playing Skyrim. I'm sure I did stuff like that in less advanced games. The appeal was the idea of going against the expectations of the game, not a secret desire to do harm to anyone in the real world, honest.

In Minecraft, these distractions are the main attraction. Pretty much everything in the open world is breakable and rebuildable. Destroying a tree or a door isn't a visual bonus; it's encouraged.

I did have to wrestle with some of my past virtual behavior when I found my oldest liked to skip ahead in the construction process by stealing items from villagers' houses, then demolishing their homes and rebuilding them to her liking. She usually doesn't kill the villagers though. Sometimes she rounds them up in a pit until she can finish her extreme makeover of their settlement.

My daughter is more into the building and designing aspects. Sometimes she just plays it on creative mode. I'm the same way with sports games, spending more time making rosters and editing players than actually playing the games. But I like more action and challenge in Minecraft – despite being bad at it.

One of my earliest victories came when we were trying to collect enough supplies for a shelter. Until then we had to dig into the dirt and cover up the hole when night fell, because even on the easiest mode, a lot of creatures spawn in darkness on Minecraft. They burn up when the sun rises, unless they can find shade.

That's why a skeleton was still shooting arrows at me when I emerged from our bunker. I had no weapons and no way to face him head on, and even then the odds would not have been in my favor. So I circled around behind him and dug up the dirt block under which he was hiding. He went up in flames.

I bragged about that to show my Minecraft cred. My daughter was not impressed.

Since then, I have gotten more adept at acquiring weapons and defending myself, though I still perish more often than my daughter likes or can understand. My reaction time is about as good as my vertical jump. Sometimes she gets frustrated with me for unexpectedly dying and losing a whole bunch of items.

On our latest world, she was building a house while I was gathering raw materials, including trying to mine for iron without tunneling my way into a monster-filled or monster-spawning cavern every five minutes. And I was doing all right. I won't say I never died, but the fatalities were few and far between. With the right settings, you can pop right back to life in the vicinity of where you died or at a set respawn point. You can even make it so you keep the items you were carrying, but she agreed to play this world without “keep inventory” checked. As Abraham Lincoln once said, you're never going to learn not to die if there aren't consequences.*

The other night we were playing and she finished up the house and decided to log off and call a friend before turning in. I was still terraforming and doing a couple of things, so I continued playing, one of the first instances I'd spent much, if any time, on the game without her guidance.

Not far from the property we'd staked out, there was a huge chasm leading to an underground area that probably connected to all the caves I'd been accidentally uncovering. I noticed the annoying Wandering Trader and his llamas down there. I've never traded with the guy, but my daughter assures me he offers bad deals.

Soon I heard the sounds of someone being attacked and saw that, even though it was daylight, zombies were emerging from the chasm and attacking the trader and his llamas. We had developed an OK system for dealing with the creatures at night, and they would probably burn up before they posed a threat, but I decided to be proactive and seal off the chasm.

I don't know the technical definition of “chasm” but I chose it because this opening was really big and really deep. I picked a spot that looked manageable and set about sealing it off with cobblestone. Then I ran out of the cobblestone I had on hand and started cutting some out of the hillside. Eventually, I noticed the sun was going down and figured I should start heading back to base and log off.

At some point, the zombies had gotten one of the llamas and the trader. A couple got the drop on me, because my situational awareness in these 360-degree worlds is not great.** I started swinging with my sword, but it wasn't looking good. With just half a heart of health left before I died and dropped the not-insignificant amount of tools and material I was carrying, someone intervened.

It wasn't my daughter, although she had walked through while talking to her friend on the phone and informed her I was a goner. No, it was the surviving llama! He spit at the zombie, which actually does damage, and it gave me the chance to get away and dig a hidey hole, just like back in the early stages of the game.

But I couldn't go to sleep because I didn't have a bed or the materials to make one. So I had to wait out the night. Well, I could have just saved the game and quit, then restarted it when my daughter could join and she could sleep through the night. It only takes half the players doing so, under the settings we chose, to turn night into day.

But no, I figured. I'd survived this long. I'm an experienced... whatever they call Minecraft players. I had not noted the coordinates of the house or dug-out bunker we'd been using, but I knew sort of where they were. I would just keep digging in that general direction, filling in the spaces behind me because I couldn't remember how big a darkened space is required for “mobs” to spawn and even a little slime could probably take me out in my weakened state. I could even collect dirt and cobblestone to keep expanding our territory and block off the chasm.

Sometimes I would break through to the surface, then quickly plug the hole. It was a little tedious, but here was the challenge and danger I'd been looking for! OK, sort of. I wasn't building a Nether Portal to fight an Ender Dragon,*** but I was facing a problem and solving it.

Eventually I broke through and saw sunlight. I did it! I survived the night! All I had to do now was get my bearings, find our base, save the game and log off. Hey, what's that thing?

If you're familiar with Minecraft, you already know. If you're not, that's a Creeper. And instead of just running into you and draining energy, when they get close enough for long enough, they explode, doing significant damage to you and your surroundings. I had no time to spare. I had to get away and--

It exploded. Before even my kid's reflexes could have reacted, I was dead. Great. That meant I would have to go gather up all my equipment lest it disappear before I could save and log off.

Except a little dialogue box on the screen informed me that my respawn point – the bed – had been moved or blocked. So instead it dropped me somewhere else in the open world.

Here's a tip that veteran players of Minecraft won't need, but you parents wanting to play the game with your kids might: Write down the coordinates of your base.

I asked my daughter if she knew them. She did not. She said to just save and quit and she could gather the stuff up and help me out the next time we play. She couldn't do it then because she had to go to sleep at a decent hour since it was a school night.

The nerve.

Ok, so she didn't exactly leave me to die. But she left. And I died.

Remember, folks, never try to seal off a zombie-spewing, or even zombie-trickling, chasm without backup. And kids should listen to their parents, but parents, at least when it comes to Minecraft, don't forget to listen to your kids.

* - Or maybe that was Professor X, during the Krakoan era.

** - Which, honestly, makes it very lifelike.

*** - I checked with my daughter to make sure I was using those terms correctly. She informed me I was not.