This post is about one of most enduring memories of my primary school life.

On a particular day as a young child I had finished an activity early and raised my hand to announce my success. I was told that I could select a book to read from the classroom collection to pass the time until recess. At this point instead of picking a book equal to my reading level I picked one that was sitting in the box for the very beginners. This book was a bit different to what I had become accustomed to in my very brief encounters with the written word. It contained none of them. It was a picture book in every way except that in the place of the words there was blank space. Confused I took the path of any primary school student, I asked the teacher.

My teacher explained that this book was for beginners to help them to learn how to use books and what I was to do was to look at the pictures provided and imagine my own story. Needless to say this book and others like it soon made regular appearances in my free reading time when I was at school. Of the many memories I hold of my educational life this is one of the strongest. I feel that this is the case because that book offered me freedom to participate in the storytelling process in a way I had yet to imagine at such a young age. I was forming my own worlds with a picture or two as my inspiration.

The concepts of character customization and choice  in games provides a similar opportunity for players to write their own stories. The difference here lies in that the  pictures given now are more detailed and our imagination is expressed through play. The limits I find in this process arise because to0 many narrative elements are given that require justification in the story I am telling.  My own experiments with playing certain games as a pacifist have highlighted this difficulty in that I am sometimes unable to move forward in a game that requires a player’s journey to be a violent one. I tend to gravitate towards sandbox games for this very reason in that they allow me to ignore narrative hooks whilst still giving me a picture to imagine from.

I have been conjuring up numerous stories in the last couple of weeks all as a result of finding and falling in love with the a certain game.

This game is Minecraft.

Minecraft is an independently developed sandbox game that randomly generates a world with mountains, oceans and caves for the player to explore and plunder. The world is made up of a staggering number of three dimensional cubes, each which can be removed and replaced somewhere else by the player. Some of these cubes can be altered by the player to craft items that may allow the player to further manipulate the world (pickaxes, swords or spades) or build on the world itself (minecart tracks, ladders, glass blocks). This experience is provided with no explicit story or objective for the player. What results is a compelling process of exploration, collection and manipulation of the world. The thing that draws players into Minecraft is that they are given ownership of this whole experience. Player ownership is first created by surrounding them with a unique world and then reinforced when they take hold and change the world into what they desire. Minecraft is thus a very personal experience which for me provides a means to tell stories without the strong narrative hooks I encounter elsewhere. This freedom of play for me is intoxicating and would probably go some way to explaining the amount of time I have spent with this game.

When playing Minecraft I routinely switch between exploration/mining mode deep in the earth to crafting/building mode on the surface, each serving a different function for my storytelling but neither with any given narrative baggage. In each of these modes I am doing one of two things, going on a journey through my exploration, or shaping the world as a result. I get to imagine my own stories of adventure, digging deep into the earth and then I am able to create monuments from the very blocks I have gathered. Every block I personally place is both an opportunity to tell another type of story and a record of a journeys now complete, an enduring artifact of the stories I am creating. Every tool I craft is converting the success of one journey into the cornerstone of another.

Minecraft grows into a thing of beauty, creating a gameplay storytelling loop where I am constantly creating new narratives within a growing ecosystem. And it is all my own.

Minecraft is a game for me that is the same as that blank picture book with all the freedom it offered a young boy.