Tech-savvy kids

Image by Łukasz Jasionowski from Pixabay

This weekend I had a big wow experience. I introduced my five-year-old son to Minecraft. I just put a gamepad in his hands, and a short time later, I glanced at the screen and stopped in my tracks. He had just built a little house with a kitchen and a library, with an additional lookout tower complete with an internal ladder to get to the top. To keep the monsters away, there were some bonfires and torches. The learning curve will never cease to amaze me. It is not too long ago that he was pushing the go pedal in Mario Kart straight into a wall. Fast-forward 1-2 years and he beats me. And now he’s creating things in Minecraft. Playing a first- or third-person game is more challenging than understanding a racing game. It is mind-boggling how fast it happened.

There are certain memories in gaming that are so epic that they will stay with you. I will always remember my first night in Minecraft. And I think many can attest to the same thing. You start out with two empty hands, and you know that before nightfall you must find some raw materials to create a source of light. Monsters spawn in darkness, so light is your most important friend. And in the early game you don’t have any armor or weapons so simply put; you are in a very bad situation. The key was to find coal ASAP, so you can start crafting torches. I was searching for coal in full panic mode and didn’t find anything as the sun started setting. With my heart pounding through my chest, I started to dig a small hole in a hillside large enough for one person, to make sure that there was no space over where monsters could spawn. And then it was pitch-black darkness throughout the night. I could hear the zombies, skeletons and spiders making scary noises outside of my little emergency hut. At one point, I removed one block just to have a look outside and the monsters came for me immediately, and I put the block back and hid again until sunrise, with my heart beating like a fast metronome.

I am old and played the OG alpha version when the game had just been released. We were a bunch of friends who set up a server and we had an insane amount of fun just creating stuff. I remember one episode where I installed a Sauna – built of wood of course – in our big castle. Unfortunately, I managed to set the whole thing on fire when I was trying to ignite the furnace. Wood burns very good. And we ran with water buckets and tried to put out the fire in full panic and save the structure. Good times. It will be amazing to do that journey once again with my kids this time. I have already set up separate accounts for us so we can play together on LAN or online.

However, there is also significant risk involved with tech-savvy kids. I imagine it is only a matter of time before he figures out how to use my credit card and buy in-game purchases for a small fortune. Or that he manages to connect to our file server and messes something up badly when experimenting. Consequently, I invested a couple of hours and started to configure parental accounts and parental locks on our house PC. To have a five-year-old with administrator rights in front of an unsupervised computer is without a doubt a disaster waiting to happen. I hope my efforts this weekend will be enough. The kids will probably run figures of eight around me when it comes to technology in a couple of years, and thus I must do my best to keep up. Now I know what my parents felt like some thirty years ago.

Minecraft was the most wonderful wakeup call I have had.