I know you don’t come to this website for news about my spawn but I can’t help but share this. My eldest son Gabe is almost seven years old now. He is fixated on a few different things. Lego, Minecraft, Adventure Time, and (God help me) iCarly. Gabe plays Minecraft every single day and that’s no joke. For a while I thought maybe I should be limiting his time because that’s what parents do right? They limit “time”. Then I started looking at the shit my son was doing in this game and I could not ask him to stop.
He is building and solving problems in ways that frankly I think are far beyond his years but maybe that’s just becasue I’m his Dad. Either way I think the “game” has been incredibly good for him. He’s learned spelling by making his own signs, some pretty complex math from using his furnace and smelting, How to think of something and then figure out how to build that thing, and then just basic computer skills and the concept of mouse look+WASD.
His fascination with Minecraft has lead him to ask me the other day if there was “something you could look at that would show you how to make things in minecraft.” Up until just the other day he had been discovering all the recipes on his own. He figured out boats, buckets, doors,armor and a ton of other stuff just from trial and fucking error. So I showed him the Minecraft Wiki and its recipe list. I thought his little brain was going to explode when he saw that you could make a bed. After that I noticed him typing minecraft into YouTube and I got a little scared. My baby boy was using the god-damned Internet. Jesus only knows what sick shit he would find out there. As it turned out he found people showing off their Minecraft creations and giving tours of their worlds. This blew him away!
Cut to this afternoon when I get a text with a picture from my wife Kara. “Your son made a “tripod” for his iPhone so he could make a movie of himself playing Minecraft.
We gave Gabe one of our old phones a while back. It is essentially a fancy iPod Touch now but it has a camera and its got a bunch of his favorite games on it. So he built a stand out of Lego to hold the phone while he played. My guess is that when I get home tonight I’ll be helping him put his little movie on the Internet. All of a sudden the web seems like an incredibly scary place.
-Gabe out
