Until the middle of his seventh grade year, my son was not into video games. We’d had our run with Zelda, but the computer games didn’t do anything for him. The problem, the influence, was his mom and my mom, saying, “Video games will rot your brain.”
Um, science today says, “No, video games are actually great for kid’s brains.” Within reason.
On Thanksgiving of that year, I forced my son to examine Minecraft with me. The rest is history.
Right up to this point in time, this moment, today. He’s living with me, carless, jobless, schoolless, and moping. Today, this morning, he awakened just before 6 am. “I’m ready to be awake today,” he said.
“Wow, that’s great.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m out of milk so I couldn’t make my coffee.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“Oh, sorry. I said fuck when I remembered I couldn’t make my morning coffee until the grocery store opens at 6am. We could go to Jim’s?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
New day, new beginning, new challenges.
At breakfast, he was lamenting his lack of a car again. “I don’t know. It’s a long way back, man. I’m seriously considering enlisting.”
“I’ll drive you to the recruiting office,” I said.
“I’ve got a recruiter.”
“Well, if you need a ride…”
I told him about my Apocolypse Now moment as a senior in high school. I started the process to enlist in a Warrant Officer program to fly helicopters in the Army. I got through the personality test and the initial physical. Then I was given a ride, in the Army sedan, to a San Antonio base where I was given a more complete exam. Turns out, I have an astigmatism in my left eye. A no-no for pilots. I washed up before I began.
I went on.
And then, after the divorce, when I was living with my sister. I really could not see how I was going to climb out of my hole. I had two kids, an angry ex-wife, no job, no place to live. “I couldn’t see my path forward. The climb seemed insurmountable.”
Years ago, when I was still married and the kids were probably 3 and 5, I got into Myst, an online game that changed everything. I became obsessed. It was a Thanksgiving holiday when I discovered and purchased the dvd. I played the entire long weekend. I did family stuff too, but I was preoccupied with some of the riddles. The most amazing part of Myst, no people. Only the notes and diaries they left behind. An entire series of islands and not one living person. It’s a great story. I was amazed at how consumed my mind was for the escape and adventure in this moody, rainy, quiet land filled with stories and sadness and creepy music.
I understood my own love of gaming. Years later, I pushed my son to try Minecraft. We were a Mac family, so it was easy to show him how it worked and get it installed on his computer. Then we lost my son.
He became the Pied Piper of his cohort of miners. 5 or 6 friends who also jumped into Minecraft and became a gang. My son was the loudest and thus demanded they build one of his projects. The others gladly followed the leadership, and my son was good at crafting stories around why they were building some project. He’d send one group off to mine redstone, while another group began assembling the structures or gathering other resources.
By the end of the school year, my son had a graduation Minecraft party IN-PERSON at my house. Five kids screaming at each other, in the same room. I had to reboot my router a couple of times after their wifi traffic blew it up.
On into high school, my son aced his computer science classes. In Minecraft, he soon began hosting his own Minecraft servers. His dad, me, started a website minecraftschool.com. I figured if it worked for my son, it would work for any kid. Minecraft > redstone crafting > hosting > coding > college > high-paying job.
My son is merely stuck on the final level. Two electives to go for his degree. A boss battle is keeping him from his final release from “hell.”
“I want to be out of here. Get a job. And not live with either of my parents, no offense.”
While I was working my magic at the advertising agency, spinning up the first “interactive group” in Austin, Texas, I was auditing a class on entrepreneurism at the University of Texas. I assembled a group for a game I created using Sam Hurt’s Eyebeam as the context. It was going to be a Leisure Suit Larry concept but set in college. Co-eds, drinking, Hank the hallucination, Sally the girlfriend, and of course, Eyebeam. My group won the business plan and pitch competition for our class. Had we been a regular MBA class, our project would’ve gone on from UT to compete in the MOOT Corp nationwide competition.
I still have Sam on speed dial. There’s still time.
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