Minecraft's creator will always be a hero to me, he gave my autistic son a voice
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Version 0 of 1. The billionaire creator of Minecraft has a $70m mansion in Beverly Hills complete with iPad-controlled fountains and a 16-car garage. He wastes his days making silly jokes in an empty “office” and his nights burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas casinos. He doesn’t need to create anymore; he could spend the rest of his life throwing handfuls of cash off his balcony into the balmy LA night. He may sound like a self-indulgent one-hit wonder, but Markus “Notch” Persson is a hero of mine. Persson helped give my son a voice. A new Forbes interview with the coder-turned-playboy-slacker, paints Sweden’s most famous export since Abba in a weird light. For several years, Persson worked on Minecraft with a small team and no budget. It was just another creative sandbox game, a tiny indie project that not many people knew or cared about. But by the time it officially launched in November 2011, it had a large dedicated community of fans. This was a game that put you in a vast blocky world and let you do what you wanted, build what you wanted, and play how you wanted. Word kept spreading. About the same time, 900 miles away, in Frome, Somerset, my wife and I were going through the tortuous dance of securing a diagnosis of autism for our six-year-old son, Zac. He’d always been behind on language development; he’d always had a problem in crowded environments. Noise terrified him, he was socially awkward and withdrawn. Some days I had to carry him to school as he wailed and fought. I was tired and angry and upset all the time. I didn’t know what to do for him. I didn’t know how to make him happy. That’s what you want as a parent, I gradually realised. On the hierarchy of parental needs, happiness is pretty high, higher than any academic ambitions. Way higher than anything you want for yourself. In 2012, Minecraft developer Mojang employed the Scottish company 4J Studios to create an Xbox 360 version of the game. It was a little simpler and clearer, providing instructions on how to craft the game’s many tools and objects (the PC version relied on its huge community to impart wisdom and share tips). It also included a local multiplayer mode, so up to four people could gather around a single TV screen and play together. I’d introduced Zac and his younger brother Albie to a few games beforehand. Zac loved the open-world racer Burnout Paradise, which allowed him to drive freely through a huge city, smashing into things and leaping over ramps. But then I brought the Xbox version of Minecraft home, and watching Zac play, it was like a light switching on. He just got it. He got that he had to mine for materials and chop down trees to make a home; he knew that when night fell he had to get inside to avoid the zombies. Within its clearly defined rules and systems, Minecraft provided a creative structure that freed him. I was elated. People aren’t sure what to think about Notch now. The Forbes piece portrays a sort of tragic figure. He gave up his development role on Minecraft after the launch of the game in 2011 (it is still regularly updated by the Mojang team) and felt a sense of euphoric freedom. But soon his post-Minecraft ideas crumbled under the extraordinary weight of expectation. Then there was the tragedy of his father’s suicide, and the end of his marriage. So much to cope with. But he was still the Minecraft figurehead for the game’s growing army of fanatical devotees. When something went wrong in the Minecraft world, he got their frustration, and now that he was rich, he got their jealousy too. My sons were getting better at the game, creating more ambitious structures. At first they roved Minecraft’s sprawling environments, hunting the cute, blocky pigs and cows that inhabit its sylvan hillsides. But they also talked. They talked and laughed and planned. Zac’s language improved. He learned about all the minerals that you can mine in the game, he built bizarre hut-like structures filled with doors leading nowhere and little dungeons that he crammed with wolves (we tried not to worry about that). Eventually, he and his brother created vast structures of glass and stone, illuminated by a thousand glowing torches. They learned how to channel water and lava, and to make simple machines. When they played, they talked continuously. And when Minecraft passed 30 million in sales, I wrote enthusiastically about Zac and Albie’s experiences in the game. Related: Minecraft at 33 million users – a personal story But most important was the way in which, after talking to each other while playing, they came to talk to us. Zac never really tells us much about what he does at school; his short-term memory isn’t great and a lot of it doesn’t seem to filter through. Or perhaps he doesn’t want us to worry. We know he doesn’t play with other children at break times or lunch, he sits by himself – the other kids grew tired of the fact that he couldn’t deal with team games. But he talks to us about Minecraft. He talks and talks. We were getting bored of it, to be brutally honest, but then my wife read an article that said if you listen to your children when they’re young, they’ll tell you more when they’re older. It’s sort of an investment of care. So we always listen, even though we don’t really get what the ender dragon is, or why it matters. I think people want to see Notch as a tragic figure. Alone in his mansion in Los Angeles, like some fairy tale castaway. He has a new development studio, Rubberbrain, but it seems to be just a hobby, a place to hang-out. “It’s like a day care for us–grown-ups,” he told Forbes. People begrudge him that. Some fans are angry he sold Mojang to Microsoft, the corporate monolith he once seemed to despise. They’re angry at him for responding to Twitter jibes by posting a gif of Woody Harrelson mopping away tears with a wedge of dollar bills. Some people are just angry with him full-stop. But Markus Persson did something pretty extraordinary with Minecraft. Even though his game is by no means unique (early on, people accused him of stealing the idea from the 2009 indie hit Infiniminer) it caught the imagination of thousands, and then harnessed their enthusiasm. Before Minecraft, games were built, marketed for millions of dollars and then launched in a complete form never to be touched again. Mojang however popularised the new ‘early access’ model, releasing Minecraft as an ongoing project then encouraging the community to help shape it. Nowadays that’s how small, risky independent games build fan bases and get released. It’s how some of the risks are mitigated. Minecraft changed the industry for the better. In November 2013, I appeared on Charlie Brooker’s documentary How Video Games Changed the World. We’d been putting Zac through a number of tests and meetings with pediatricians, trying to work out if his array of behavoural difficulties aligned with autism. I’d always fought the idea of giving him a label; I mocked parents who seemed to rush into the latest on-trend diagnosis – anything that could explain why their kids were such a gigantic pain in the ass. I fought it, and then I desperately needed it. That’s another thing about parenthood – it’s amazing how quickly longheld beliefs and stigmas crumble. I wanted to know why we couldn’t make him happy. And when we got the diagnosis earlier in 2013, I had a partial explanation, something to hang on to. I think when I went on that programme, it was at a sort of pivotal moment. I knew Zac better, I understood him a little. He was telling us more. Minecraft seemed to have given him both a vocabulary and the confidence to use it. So when the documentary producer asked me about that game, I just gushed; I talked about how it was being used in schools to help teach kids everything from physics to architecture, but most of all I talked about how it created a safe and creative space for a lot of children who may struggle to find safe and creative spaces elsewhere. “I’d love to shake the hand of the guy who designed that game,” I said. I think the emotion behind that sentiment was palpable on screen. And then they stopped filming, and I suppose I was crying a little bit. So yeah, no schadenfreude from me. I don’t buy into the unhappy billionaire fantasy and even if I did, it would give me no comfort. Markus Persson had one chance to change my son’s life and he took it. He didn’t know it, but that’s what he did. He will always be a goddam hero to me. |