First of all, don’t panic.
There’s a full schedule of support groups, a network for getting them clean…
actually, there isn’t. You’re on your own, I just thought that might make you feel better. But if you’re a parent with a child who can talk and think of nothing but minecraft it might well help to know there are a lot of us out here.
Minecraft is, from the outside, a peculiar game. A step back from awesome graphics, it’s a game composed of blocks, looking like nothing more than a world constructed by living lego. And it’s incredibly addictive. The problems come though, when they start wanting to mod the world.
Mods, in minecraft terminology are addons. To load them on you’re likely to need a modloader – my own personal minecraft addict tells me that forge mod loader is a good starting place. He has a lot of mods, and has been on a steep learning curve – there were tears the first time minecraft updated and half (at least) of his mods wouldn’t work again. Living in a house where both parents are IT professionals he didn’t get an awful lot of sympathy I’m afraid, and anyone who has ever upgraded wordpress and suffered with an incompatible plugin will have experienced his pain.
However, before he’d experienced minecraft, we’d despaired of ever getting him to learn anything about the computer that he lives on daily. Now he knows how to explore, find folders, copy them, and disentangle his installation if it all goes horribly wrong. Minecraft *is* educational, and on those grounds I highly recommend it.
So, once your child gets beyond basic minecraft and starts wanting to add mods, there are some things you’re going to need to know.
Small strongly recommends replicating your .minecraft folder (it’ll be in your appdata folder he says) as many mods completely overhaul your minecraft world, so you can save a copy and use a separate profile to be able to access your previous worlds once a new mod is in. Pixelmod (a pokemon mod) will do this – you have been warned.
What else has he learned? Well, for our recent homeed day out, he printed out a load of nets of a variety of minecraft characters and stuff, and led an activity that saw lots of children sitting around, cutting things out and sticking them together. He did this completely independently of me, which I think points to a whole load of useful skills being acquired.
I don’t like all of the world around minecraft. I do not understand the fascination of watching other people play on endless youtube videos (and why the people narrating them don’t have full grasp of the English language and thus restrict themselves to language usually banned in this house is completely mystifying. Small has been warned the first time he comes out with anything from any of them is the last time he watches any of the videos. (No, it’s not horrendous language, but worse than we use. Certainly no worse than he hears at his swimming lessons or cub sessions though.))
But given that I can see the educational opportunities all around, and knowing that this learning is going on autonomously, I’m going to say to you, don’t worry too much. It’ll all come right in the end. We need children with tech skills for the future, and minecraft could well be one way they get them. So, celebrate your little minecraft addict. They could be the IT saviours of the world.
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