Senior, Lucinda Dorrance, as a child, picking strawberries in a field. Photo by Lucinda Dorrance.
Take me back to the spring of 2016.
I’m nine. The latest update for Minecraft had just come out, and my love for video games was finally starting to take off.
Of all the games I was starting to explore, Minecraft especially caught my attention—not just because of its popularity at the time, but because of its vast world and the endless ways you can play the game.
My friends and I would spend all day exploring the creek between our homes. We would create pathways, homes, worlds among the dense bamboo that grew. Then we’d come back to the house dirty and tired, only to curl up on the couch with our Kindle Fires and do the exact same thing in our shared Minecraft world.
It was there that I first got a taste of what complete freedom to create feels like, and I was hooked.
The entire world of Minecraft is entirely made up of just large pixels. Small, simple squares of color that come together to make an image, yet when playing it, it never feels small or simple. Every single block, item, and element in the game can be collected, stored in your inventory, placed back down again, or destroyed.
There is no overarching narrative you’re bound to, no clear objectives or goals you’re forced
to complete, and no pre-existing civilization you have to navigate. The only thing you’re expected to do is explore and create entirely at your own pace, with no excessive handholding from the developers.
I have played Minecraft for over 291 full days (at the moment I’m writing this, that is roughly 4.3% of my entire lived existence), and never once have I been bored doing so.
Reflecting back on my time in high school, and the many different realms and worlds of Mine craft I played through in that time, it reminds me of the impact and control you can have over your own life. I spent so much of my time at Riverside chasing after what I thought I should have instead of what I wanted. I took every AP I could, signed up for the engineering program simply because I thought that was expected of me, and was so busy I couldn’t make time for myself or my hobbies.
In doing so I exhausted myself; I started to resent the people around me and hate school because they represented what I felt was being taken away from me, not what I was being given.
The longest-running study on human happiness—that followed 724 people since they were teenagers in 1938 found that the most consistent and most attainable source of happiness, regardless of circumstance or any other factors, is our ability to create. Games like Minecraft give me a taste of that feeling. I can get immersed into a world with the primary objective to simply exist and create.
