Let’s go back to a place where everything is made of blocks.
Long gone are the days of eagerly anticipating the theatrical release of Madagascar 2. Instead of counting down the days to when your mum will drive you to the cinema, you’re trying to stretch them out as the last assignment before mid-sem break looms; due in two days, worth 60% of your grade and a determining factor in whether or not you graduate. Now there’s talks of an HBO live-action remake of Madagascar with Chris Pratt voicing Alex the Lion. And what you thought were deeply personal childhood experiences—hiding under bed sheets with your Nintendo DS pressed up to your face, getting a virus on the family computer while trying to install a custom sparkly mouse cursor, or the distinct sound of Kim Possible’s notification tone—are all being exploited by men in boardrooms, repackaging your memories and selling them back to you.
In the media, we’ve seen the rise of tactically trying to pull on the “hey, remember when?” chord of our heartstrings. And it works. Because especially in times as volatile as now, we find ourselves trying to find gripping on an era of youth when things felt so much easier—where our biggest concern was building a dirt shack before night fell in Minecraft. And that’s partially what draws us into attempting to relive parts of our past—simplicity and comfort from something familiar. Which leads us to 2:34AM, on a Friday, mere hours before the previously mentioned 60% of grade assessment is due, and I get a message from Emily that reads: “bitch idc what you’re doing, we’re starting a minecraft realm.”
birch wood floors
Honestly, I’m not too sure where the Minecraft realm idea came from. The game itself has been on my desktop ever since I got my computer. The little grass-dirt-block icon sits above Chrome and Spotify; in a position of the utmost importance, yet I haven’t touched it in years. If I squint, I can imagine little motes of dust gathering atop green pixels. At 2:34AM on a Friday, when I have work in six hours, I lie in bed on my phone. The idea springs from browsing an old Instagram highlight. Sometime in 2018, I was playing Minecraft with high school classmates I no longer keep up with. But there is one I still do, and I know he’s cramming a 60% assignment due in the morning. So I sent him the message mentioned above. (It was not that illiterate, either. Seb calls it artistic licence, I call it insulting.)
Seb replies immediately.
“They cost money though.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be fun. We both already have the game anyway. Not like we’re buying it again.” “Literally when do either of us have the time?”
I’m already whipping up a good defence for Emily’s Council of Minecraft when he unhelpfully
points out that it took us about a month to meet up at our favourite sushi place because we were
both busy. We live three streets away from each other, by the way. Then he adds it’s taken me three business days to reply to his last message (something unimportant and along the lines of him being audited by IRD) and I’d again ignored it in favour of the realm.
As if to prove him wrong, I boot up Minecraft right then and there. I tell him that, too. “Have fun,” he says, “I have another 2000 words to write.” Then he goes offline.
My little Macbook Air flares up with the intensity of a NASA rocket as Minecraft automatically
downloads years worth of updates. After I finally get on (and my laptop burns a hole through my
desk) I create a world to play around with the new updates. First of all, what the hell is a warden? Allays? Since when were frogs a thing? It gives me whiplash. I used to eagerly follow along with every Minecraft update. Every new feature was revered, like God had high fived us from the heavens. Minecraft was the fireplace of family gatherings in my year six
classroom. We’d all come to school early to play Minecraft on our class-issued iPads, exploring each other’s survival and creative worlds alike. Then it got banned because I snitched on one of my classmates who stole my world and passed it off as her own with the ‘Copy World’ feature of 2012 Pocket Edition Minecraft. (I’m still bitter. Fuck you Olivia.)
So goes the early morning Minecraft sessions. On my thirteenth birthday, I hound my father for his credit card so I could buy the big, shiny PC version that always seemed $40 out of reach. When Seb and I are fifteen, we play on a server with our friends for hours, and it’s defunct long before we turn sixteen. I’m twenty by the time I find the Instagram highlights, sandwiched between a valley of smiling faces of people whose birthdays I have long forgotten.
headaches in backseats
I spent a lot of time as a child getting headaches in back-seats. Especially on long drives south to see family during the school holidays. My head would often find itself turned upward towards the roof lining, wishing the car sickness away, as the world—a blur of blues, greens, and the occasional powerline would rush past outside.
Arguably, I brought it on myself. My eyes would usually be fixed to a book larger than my head, or a second-hand DVD player that would overheat, burning my legs while watching the same 4 episodes of Peanuts on loop for the whole trip.
One time, I managed to smuggle the DVD of Harold And Kumar Go to White Castle onboard—stealthily taken from a CD wallet case filled with white discs with movie titles written on them in marker, containing an array of raunchy comedies that my parents forbade me from watching. Superbad, The Hangover, Borat, and pretty much anything else you could think of—the El Dorado of what my mother would describe as “filth”.
Somewhat recently, I decided to rewatch a few of the “classics.” Finding that, unsurprisingly, times have changed. But aside from a plethora of poor taste jokes, the main thing I’ve noticed is that white people no longer say “bow chicka wow wow” anymore. Instead, they say “w rizz.”
The End, Part 1
How do you sift and churn through years worth of memories to determine which ones are as
interesting and defining to be written about? Sebastian and I back and forth argue through an Instagram audio call over whose memories take precedence in our article. I suggest a story of my long family drives from Auckland to Tauranga; visiting my nan, my sister and I stuffing the backseat with duvets, our old dog Rosie plodding between us to find the comfiest spot, the shared iPad 2 blasting Train’s Drive By and other Now 40 Hits. Seb, being a closeted narcissist, claims that his story of watching movies on car-rides and then rewatching them as an adult “fits more with the article’s themes” and delegates mine to a sentence. Even now he kicks me off my designated conclusion paragraph and writes his own.
The End, Part 2
It’s difficult to compress the experience of growing up and all the nostalgia that comes with it
Especially when trying to be faithful to entire years of youth, summers that used to feel endless, late nights with friends and time spent alone. But I think it’s important that sometimes we stop and take a look at the road behind us. Which is why I’d recommend you return to something that brought you comfort when you were much smaller than you are now. If it had any grip on you, or you haven’t played in a while, I’d suggest Minecraft. Or if there’s something else that comes to mind, maybe give it a go. Boot up that old world, feed that Tamagotchi, dust off that novel or play that one song. I don’t know you, but hopefully whatever it is acts as testament to how far you’ve grown.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if my Neopets are still alive?