“A Cultural Phenomenon?”

By Scott Hamilton

I made an interesting observation over the weekend when I went to watch “A MineCraft Movie” at the Regal Cinemas in Rolla, Mo. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the movie for you if you have not seen it yet. The observation that I made is that Minecraft seems to have created its own culture around the game and you could see everyone in the area that is involved in that culture at the local theater last weekend. I have not experienced anything like the Minecraft movie in my lifetime and would consider comparing the experience to a mini version of Woodstock. I have children that absolutely love Minecraft and are definitely a large part of the cultural phenomenon surrounding the game.

I have been to a lot of movies over the years, but this was the first time I attended a movie with this much audience reaction. There were several times during the film when the crowd went wild, as the characters in the movie quoted iconic lines from Minecraft Fandom. The whole experience got me thinking about video games in general and I began to wonder, when did life begin to revolve around them? I grew up in the era when video games first came on the scene. My first gaming system was Pong, then the Atari 2600 followed by a Commodore 64 computer, and it was not until the release of the Wii that I bought another system explicitly for gaming.

I grew up in the era when riding bikes, camping in the woods, and staying up all weekend watching horror movies was the thing that teens did. At least until you got a drivers license, and then it was all about cruising around town and working on the $300 junk car you were just sure you could get running again. My life was way more hands-on that anything modern teens seem to experience. We built things with our hands. We broke things trying to make them better. We tried to blow ourselves up building homemade rockets. I see my kids doing the same things, but in the safety of a virtual world.

This led me to wonder, when did we start living in a virtual world? The reaction to “A Minecraft Movie” I experienced in the theater showed me that this virtual reality is as important as the real world to this generation. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I love the concept behind Minecraft and it honestly reminds me of a digital role-playing game, similar in nature to Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) where you interact with an imaginary world, its characters and other players, and I remember friends crying over the death of their DnD characters, just like my kids cry when their pet in Minecraft dies, or something they created gets destroyed by a creeper.

So the question it leaves in my mind is, when did this imaginary world start to become a reality? We know from experiences in the 1980s of kids dying trying to do the things in real life that they imagined in DnD that these virtual worlds invade our thinking at a deep level. Seeing the audience cheer for “Steve” during the movie made me realize that we are living in a blended world, where the imaginary and reality can easily be blurred. I wonder, is this a good thing?

If you don’t know anything about Minecraft, I would still recommend going to see the movie just to experience this cultural phenomenon first hand. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@**********rd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.