Instead of creating their own Minecraft worlds, my daughters were starting to spend hours watching other people play the game on YouTube. It was a Saturday evening in late August when my illusions finally shattered. But Minecraft is rich with opportunities for collaboration and creative problem-solving and all the other good stuff experts encourage. Sure, my kids will be in front of screens more. We also bought an Xbox, so they could join their friends for online Minecraft, the hugely popular video game that lets users explore vast digital realms and use animated 3-D blocks to build whatever they can imagine. Recognizing our kids’ growing social isolation, my wife and I tried to compensate by adopting a puppy. “Dad,” my 10-year-old asked one evening as I confronted the dishes, “speaking as a Boomer, is it harder to make friends as you get older?”Īctually, I said, I’m Gen X. Part of what they found so appealing, it turned out, were the storylines, full of revolution and betrayal and shifting alliances.

But for me, middle-aged and increasingly exhausted, time slowed to a crawl, turning each day into trench warfare. For my daughters, stuck at home with their parents and still detached from their social lives, time started to spin faster, shredding their remaining days of childhood. Then extended quarantine started to pull us in separate directions. My younger daughter, 8, and still all elbows and knees, helped me concoct fantastical adventures, forcing her sister’s alter-ego to choose between risking death to save injured goblins or playing it safe to protect her fellow adventures. My older daughter, 10 years old at the time, with new glasses and a growing collection of high-waisted jeans, spent hours crafting an elaborate back story for her character, a moon-elf sorcerer named Glory who was intensely loyal to her friends and harbored a blind hatred of injustice.

My heart nearly burst when my girls fell in love with the role-playing narrative adventure game I had once enjoyed so much. The high point of this period was a weeks-long Dungeons & Dragons quest.

Minecraft youtubers life