I remember lego. Do you remember lego? When I was a kid my family took a big piece of canvas and painted a world on it. I made buildings all over this world and lego figurines (minifigs—look it up) endlessly warred. A pirate ship sailed the two seas. That canvas is folded in the closet of my childhood room somewhere. At some point I forgot about lego, wooden blocks, and pillowforts. I stopped building. I haven’t touched those things in a decade.

And I don’t need to. I have minecraft now. 

Minecraft is lego without the minifigs (which were just silly anyways) and without the need to follow faux ikea instructions (those scandinavians sure like their pictographic instruction books!). This independantly developed computer game drops you into a proceedurally generated world (it’s different every time for every person) made from thousands of cubes arranged to look like mountains, rivers, and forests. You are given no goals, and aren’t pointed in any direction. At first I didn’t know what to do and set about building a little house. Then nighttime fell as I was halfway through building my house. The groans which are the universal callsign for frightening monsters began to be audible. Then louder. Then a blocky green abomination appeared out of nowhere and the message “you died” appeared on the screen. Next time I built the house a little faster, and hid inside until morning.

I figured out how the basics went in minecraft: how to survive and how to synthesize ingredients you need. I mined endlessly to get the components for swords, axes, torches, and outfits for my character (which couldn’t even be seen). Then I got bored. That’s when minecraft got good. I had all these cobblestones and nothing to do with them. Throwing them away seemed like a waste, so I built myself a castle. This was also a necessity, as I had failed to understand how to properly light my cave and I was forcibly evicted from my home by exploding people doused in green paint.

I constructed an island in a water where I was safe from dangerous spiders and on top of this island I built a high wall. I ran out of building supplies, and sprinted over to the nearby mountain while I still had daylight. I blocked myself in and dug and dug. Not searching for anything, but merely seeking to excavate as much raw material as possible. I was remaking the world in my desired image. I built the castle to protect myself, but soon it became an obsession. It had four walls, but it needed more… I built a long covered hallway from my island to the mine, so that I could go between them at night, and dug deeper and deeper. I excavated great big rooms like I’d always imagined dwarves from middle-earth doing. This was more of a thrill than any movie or photorealistic videogame could accomplish. I was doing this myself. I was taking a working vacation, building things I’d never imagined.

Next I built an extension for my castle, a two story house suspended over the water. Nice! And from the top of the house I built a tower, with a winding staircase lit by torches at each turn. No one taught me to do this, I was just playing with blocks to bring what I imagined to life. At the top of the tower I built a glass viewing area and lit it brightly. When I stand on the top of the nearby mountain, I can see the tower rising from the fog. A beacon of my presense in this world. What was becoming my world.

Children build—they touch, they feel, they move, they allow themselves to impact their world in small, controlled ways—and that’s how they learn. At what point did we stop doing this? I’m buying all my friends copies of minecraft in the hope that for the price of a single set of lego, I can begin to show them everything they can make with their mind.

Now excuse me, I think it’s about time I started working on my glass city beneath the ocean.