Mind Craft? Oh, Minecraft, whatever that is . . .

Minecraft - Pocket Edition

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My 13-year-old son, En-UK, had been immersed in his smart phone for days on end despite my ironic comments. I'd finally had enough and criticized him for wasting his time on mindless games of dubious skill.

He stopped 'playing' long enough to show me what he was doing -- not playing, but instead building stuff, something like what you see in the image above.

More, in fact, than what you see, for one can enter the construction to lumber down long hallways and pass through unexpected rooms, endlessly, I infer, so long as one has interest in continuing to build and explore what has been built.

Here's a video showing sort of how it's done.

En-Uk took me through the house he has been building, and a rather complex one it is. I was impressed out of my irony and complimented him on his construction project.

I concluded that the 'game' was educational enough for him to keep 'playing'-- and I asked what it was called. "Minecraft," he told me, but I heard "Mind Craft," or thought I did, and checked.

"No," he corrected, "Minecraft."

"Oh," I said, "as in 'mine' -- it belongs to me?"

"No," he again corrected, "It's a mine. You have to dig."

"Ah," I said, having an almost-aha moment, "like digging for gold or coal."

"Yeah," he agreed, "except you dig to escape monsters."

That sounded a bit less educational, but as long as he was building a house above ground and mining a deep basement below ground, even if these were for defense against monsters, I figured that he might be incidentally teaching himself some architectural skills, so I supposed I still approved . . .