Article by Ben Crawford Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg
My cousin waited out the night in a hole dug into the side of a mountain, lit by a single torch, with a crafting table in the corner and a wooden door leading to a cliff face. Outside was only darkness and the sound of rustling bones, hisses, and growls.
On the screen of his 2008 Macbook Pro was an early version of Minecraft Java Edition, the sort of place that I had thought existed only in my dreams. A place that was bigger— infinitely bigger—than the world that I lived in. A place where I could live the adventures I read about in my books. I was nine years old, and I asked my parents if I could download the game as soon as I got home. They said yes.
Sometimes I would play with my cousins and friends, but just as often I would put on my headphones, find an empty room, and play Minecraft for hours on my own. At first, I just played single-player, but when that got boring, I moved on to multiplayer: capture the flag, Hunger Games, factions. On Lord of the Craft, a text-based roleplay server inspired by Lord of the Rings, I played as a cutlass-wielding first mate in a guild of pirates, a thieving street-urchin who eventually became a warlock, and a member of the elite class living with his family in the desert city of Calthazar. Words were our medium. With the right sentences, a Minecraft server, and a stable internet connection, we could be anybody we wanted.
The rest of my life faded away. I dreamed from inside the bodies of my characters, sent messages to online friends on Skype more than to my classmates on iMessage, and my imagination constantly swarmed with elves, orcs, and dwarves. Classroom lectures became a muted drone against the backdrop of my daydreams. Hockey practice was a nuisance. When my big brother and little sisters went outside to play soccer or wiffleball, I stayed inside on my computer. And by the time I got downstairs for dinner most days, the food was cold and the table was empty. That always made me sad, like something important had been taken from me while I wasn’t looking.
But my Minecraft friends always made me feel better. I never saw their faces, never heard their voices, and never knew their real names, but we wrote stories together, built cities together, and developed our own inside jokes and rivalries. There was a couple from Portugal, a high school student from the Caribbean, and a boy from South Africa, and they had usernames like I’mCookiie, Mephistophelian, and Krank2012. I never met them in person, but I could predict the words they would use, the jokes they would tell, and when they would or would not be online.
I haven’t spoken to any of them in seven years. Some of them wrote farewell posts on the server forums, but most just logged off one day and were gone. After I left the server, one of my friends messaged me: where u go? I saw his message but never replied. It wasn’t because I didn’t care about him, I just didn’t know what to say. Back to real life, maybe? But what the hell is real life, anyway?
—
One day it struck me that there were only two people in the world who knew what Lord of the Craft was and had also seen my face: my best friend Daniel and my little sister, Charlotte. Everyone else—my parents, my other siblings, my other friends—had no idea how complex and immersive my online life had become. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this meant that they did not—could not—really know me. And I couldn’t really know them.
The loneliness began to hit me on Sunday nights and summer afternoons when my family wasn’t home, and at school dances where everybody seemed to be playing a different game than I was. There was only one way to make the feeling go away: call Daniel and log onto Lord of the Craft. There, everybody understood, and everybody loved to do what I loved to do.
I didn’t really grow out of Minecraft, but I didn’t exactly quit either. I wanted to stop enjoying it so much, that’s true. I was afraid of how completely the game obsessed me, and I felt that I would never be able to “fit in” if I kept caring more about a roleplaying game than the rest of my life. But Lord of the Craft wasn’t so much abandoned as it was pushed out of the way to make room for another game, one that would eventually dominate my life just as much as Minecraft had.
—
My cousins and I climbed into a green Toyota Sienna after summer camp, just as we had done all month long, and my nanny drove us to our grandmother’s house. When we arrived, laptops, headphones, mouses, and mouse pads emerged from backpacks and we claimed our spots: I was at the desk, Christopher, William, and Breanna were on the couch, and Charlotte, the youngest, sat on the floor. For the rest of the afternoon, the room was full of shouting.
“Should we take drag? Should we take drag?”
“No. They have vision.”
“We could force a teamfight.”
“Let’s just push mid.”
My mom’s voice pierced the study walls: “Dinner!”
“After this game!”
“Pause the game!” she yelled. How many times would we have to explain that you can’t pause League of Legends?
On weekends, if we weren’t already having a sleepover, I would wake up early, log on, and scan my friends list.
Binney: online.
Charlotte2233: online.
dhmg195: online.
Then I would grab a house phone and a bag of grapes, snag the good chair, and call a number I knew by heart. A cousin would pick up and we’d spend the day playing League, taking breaks only when one of our parents needed to use the phone or we had to eat lunch. Sometimes we skipped lunch entirely. If we were lucky, we might even manage to find a “full squad,” filling an entire team with five cousins. I liked to pretend that we were professionals when that happened, competing in front of a packed stadium in the Riot Games Arena, in Los Angeles. For many years, the smell of sunscreen and the hum of AC units reminded me of summers spent playing League.
I quit League half a dozen times in high school, but I always came back. I loved the game too much to stay away: the strategy, the mechanics, the streamers, the updates, the competition. I loved watching the World Championships and feeling like I was a fan of something, just like my brother and my Dad were fans of the Red Sox, and I loved playing with my friends on Friday and Saturday nights. Even if I wished my passion was baseball, playing guitar, or Geo Bees, it wasn’t. Even if I wish my passion involved face-to-face interaction, physical exercise, or just a shred of social capital, it didn’t. I liked video games. And barring an act of God, I was never going to be done with them.
—
By the end of the pandemic, I knew loneliness in all of its flavors. Desperate, quiet, dogged, angry. Its contours, its slipperiness, its jagged edges. But for a while, video games protected me from that. After all, since high school had begun, all I had ever wished for was to return to the days when I could spend entire weekends playing video games without any consequences. At first, quarantine seemed like a dream come true.
For eighteen months, my friends and I played old classics— Minecraft, Call of Duty, League of Legends— and experimented with new titles— Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, Among Us. We didn’t have sports or plays or Model UN anymore, and school had become preposterously easy, so free time appeared out of nowhere. Enough free time to drown us. When one game got boring, we moved on to another. By the end of the first month, I was sick of every game I had ever played. But there was nothing else. So we kept gaming.
I was ten years old the first time a video game made me cry. I had built a dirt hut next to a lake in Minecraft, complete with a bed and chests, and then decided to go adventuring— but no matter how long I spent looking, I couldn’t find my way back home. My parents had no idea how to stop me from sobbing on the floor for the next two hours. The last time a video game made me cry, I was nineteen and I had just returned from my first semester at college. I had made plans to play Fortnite with my two high school best friends, and at 10 pm I put on my headset and joined the Xbox party chat. We played a few games, but I kept dying because I was looking at my phone during the game.
“You aight, Ben?” James asked.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said. “Just tired.”
Jake and James went on talking about an anime they were watching. They seemed fine. Totally fine. Why wasn’t I?
“I gotta go,” I said.
“Already?” Jake asked. “Bro, we just got on.”
“I can’t play right now. Sorry.”
“Alright, man,” James said. “Whatever.”
I made sure my microphone was off and then began to sob into the couch cushions. I wasn’t sure why I was crying, but I knew that I never wanted to touch a controller again. I didn’t want to put on a headset or hear the chime of an Xbox or Playstation turning on, didn’t want to talk about the latest updates and releases, didn’t want to hear somebody’s voice and not see their face. I hated that basement, the study upstairs, my computer, my consoles, my Nintendo and Gameboy, my Switch, and the Wii buried in a box in the back of the furnace room. Part of me even hated those two friends.
For two years I didn’t play a single video game.
—
Have you ever been to the gaming lounge in the basement of Palmer Hall? It’s hard not to picture yourself playing in front of a sold-out stadium when you sit in one of those leather chairs with CC logos emblazoned on the back. That room helps me get through delicate moments. Moments that are like crossing a chasm on a tightrope, only you can’t see the bottom. If you fall, maybe you’ll hit the ground in two seconds, or maybe you’ll just keep falling, falling, falling.
I broke my two-year video game hiatus in that room. It was a simple thing. A friend from home invited me to play a new game with him, and instead of feeling disgusted, I thought to myself, sure, why not? I think I even felt a little bit excited. Since then, video games have crept back into my life. I taught my girlfriend how to play Fortnite. I reactivated an old Minecraft realm. And after one all-day gaming session, I remembered why I used to wish I had a different hobby.
I don’t play as many video games as I used to, though. These days, I write stories instead. But I guess it’s the same thing I was doing when I was twelve: leaving behind my day-to-day life for a more interesting one. I’m still desperate to share my fantasy worlds with the people around me, only now they’re words on a page instead of pixels on a screen.
A few nights ago I downloaded a game called Outer Wilds, a single-player space-exploration game. So far, I’ve just found a lot of new ways to die: blackholes, suffocation, being crushed by a massive pillar of sand. Twice the sun has exploded — not exactly sure how I’m supposed to avoid that one. I don’t really have to, though, because each time that I find a new way to die, the game plays a timelapse of my latest play-through and I respawn on my home planet like none of it happened. The other characters don’t even remember that I ever left in the first place. The game gives you the option to interact with them:
“I keep dying up there, man, what’s going on?” I ask the launch technician.
“You’re crazy, man — you’re lucky you already passed flight school!” they respond.
So, with nothing else to do, I climb back into my cobbled-together spaceship, press the right trigger to launch, and pick a star to explore. Maybe one I’ve never visited before; maybe the very same one that killed me last time. But what am I supposed to do, stay at home just because the sun might explode? Where’s the fun in that?