As I scrolled through my Instagram feed, I was happily surprised to come across a Minecraft post. Recognizing the familiar textures of my childhood’s voxelized sandbox game, I swiped past each snapshot of Minecraft’s latest update: wolf variants.
“Long overdue,” I thought to myself, scrolling through the endless wave of comments sharing similar sentiments. With time to kill over Spring Break, my encounter with the Minecraft post was almost diabolically perfect. Propping open my laptop that I spent countless hours playing the game on, I booted up the Minecraft launcher that had been untouched since high school.
After I was greeted by the updated title screen, I clicked on single player, recognizing a jumble of old save files with terribly unoriginal world names: “Survival,” “Creative” and “Hardcore.” Looking at the dates next to each saved file, I was taken aback:
“12/21/2022,” “6/24/2019” and “3/12/2017.”
I was in seventh grade in 2017. So, of course, I had to check my old world out.
Back in 2017, Minecraft released its World of Color update, introducing a brand-new assortment of colorful palettes for blocks and aesthetic accessories, somehow advancing the already boundless design potential Minecraft offered. As I logged into my seven-year-old survival world, I noticed that I had apparently last been equipped with a full set of iron armor, a near-broken iron pickaxe, a bundle of torches, stacks of cobblestone and a whopping two whole diamonds. So much for aesthetics, I guess. To be fair, I had logged off in the middle of a dark mine — clearly not a wise choice by seventh-grade me, but he probably expected to log back in, maybe the next day or the day after. He definitely didn’t expect to log back in seven years later, now a college student — and a much different person. Navigating through my half-forgotten world in a cave filled with zombies, spiders and creepers, I had finally made it out of the mine, basking in the glorious daylight from a terribly quadrate sun. But while the Minecraft sun burns bright, the memories that flooded in burn brighter.
There’s a particular essence of Minecraft that exudes nostalgia; it all comes from the combination of crisp sounds of the game (the sounds of mining blocks, walking over grass or gravel, the tacit, melancholic isolation of single-player mode amid the enormity of the world (a single world is technically larger than Earth!) and the music. Definitely the music. Minecraft music is truly the trademark of Minecraft nostalgia — the cherry on top, the final chef’s kiss. And after hours of aimlessly exploring my almost-abandoned world, Minecraft music began to accompany my travels. Seventh-grade me probably never listened to the music that seeped into my gameplay because it was more of a cue that I was playing way past my bedtime. But listening to every chord and note, I realized that was precisely the appeal. I remembered a time when I was playing Minecraft late at night instead of finishing my college papers; I remembered that time when my only irrational fear was the Bermuda Triangle, not the prospect of job finding and life after graduation. For a moment, I was back at the peak of my Minecraft stardom.
Leaning further back into my chair, I realized, “Ah yes, this was the essence of Minecraft I missed so dearly.”
***
Minecraft has always been a comfort game for me and my friends, experiencing a resurgence over the pandemic. In the middle of our online classes, we’d play together on a survival world or Hypixel — the most popular Minecraft minigame server of all time — while calling each other separately on Google Meets. We occasionally froze at the sound of our teachers cold calling us to answer an obscure physics or English question, in which we would play the classic “my computer was lagging, could you please reask the question?” card, or look to one of our friends who was actually paying attention to bail us out. I often fell victim to my friends feeding me egregiously incorrect answers, though. Then, I would watch as the handful of Zoom grids filled by my friends erupt in muted laughter, while the unmuted Google Meets call erupted in audible laughter. So no, the magnitude for instantaneous velocity is not the same magnitude we use for earthquakes.
Our gaming sessions would follow an unchanging plot. At first, everyone was engrossed in their own activities: mining, crafting (roll credits), or building (failing to build) the most aesthetically pleasing contraptions possible. But over time, as the fatigue and monotony kicked in, it only took one person to veer everyone else off course.
So, naturally, one of my fondest memories was a comical late-night session over Winter Break: Logging into our multiplayer world, we immediately convened in our city’s court. One of my friends, Eric, was on trial for a serious violation — a crime deemed unforgivable in the high court of ridiculously childish high schoolers.
Chasing girls. Eric was on trial in Minecraft for “chasing girls” — in real life — because he chose to skip our previous session of Minecraft over a girl. I must preface that it was 2:49 a.m. and Eric’s trial was extraordinarily brief — he was found guilty in a matter of minutes under a severely biased jury (it was quite literally one person: my buddy Bryan), and we all called it a day. It is truly these memories of Minecraft, inappropriately sprinkled with the goldilocks amount of stupidity and immaturity, that make me revisit the game time and time again.
Good times.
***
Minecraft will forever be “that game.” It was never Call of Duty, CS:GO, League of Legends or any other competitive, ranks-grinding affair. Minecraft just had seemingly unlimited replay value with its sandbox design, emergent gameplay and 300 million sold copies. Minecraft was just always the game my friends and I would run back to. But now, a little more grown up with a new set of priorities in college, I realize that the time has already passed when we have all unknowingly logged onto Minecraft for the last time.
There’s the usual longing and nostalgia for emotional events or memories, like emptying the unfinished food bowl of a recently passed-away pet, throwing out childhood memorabilia or graduating high school. Times were different back then: Maybe we were a little more naive, were worried about things we realize are trivial now — it was a different world. But the nostalgia of Minecraft is seemingly timeless. Once you log out of your single-player or multiplayer world for the last time, it’s not like it goes away. The save file and everything in it is still there, waiting for the next time you might find yourself wandering back. The world will always remain the same; only you will have changed — the world becomes a liminal space, completely frozen in time.
I remember the first time I watched my older brother, Collin, play Minecraft, freshly released, in 2011. Most of the mechanics seen today were virtually nonexistent and yet, it took YouTube by storm. He filmed, narrated and edited his own Minecraft YouTube videos — just like the rest of the big YouTubers seemed to be doing. Minecraft has indiscriminately been there for me, my friends and my siblings — an entire generation. So, who knows, maybe college me is just like seventh-grade me: I will have seemingly logged out of Minecraft for the last time and live out my college years while my Minecraft world will remain perfectly preserved. But maybe after graduation (or an arbitrary number of years down the line), I’ll be back, not only to revisit Minecraft but to catch a glimpse of another version of my youth.
Statement Columnist Philip (Sooyoung) Ham can be reached at philham@umich.edu.