Monday, April 14, 2025

This is the twenty-first installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Currently the wind is blowing toward the topic of scarcity.

I used to play a lot of Minecraft back in the day. My kids recently went through a bout of playing it as well, which always makes me smile because I first started playing it when my son was one year old, and he’s fifteen now. It’s been around for a while! The recently released A Minecraft Movie (yes, that’s what it’s called) got me thinking about all the adventures I’ve had in that crazy game, both on my own and with my family too. When we first got it, Creative Mode¹ wasn’t an option, so I would spend my free time mining and collecting and my wife would spend her time (no multiplayer, we only had one computer) building and decorating. We pretty much always used Peaceful Mode² , too, since there was enough to worry about without having to fend off monsters at the same time.

An endless, infinite game like Minceraft doesn’t seem like much of a source of scarcity, but it ended up that way regardless. After mining all the diamonds I could ever want and getting pretty bored with trying to get into the End and actually finish the game, I decided to complicate things by adding mods, extra blocks and items that let you do new, exciting things in the game. One of my favorites was a factory system that automated a lot of complicated tasks. I ended up spending so much time fiddling with the machinery, though, that I barely had time to explore or dig anymore. Each mod added new things that were in short supply, and I had to work even harder to get enough to keep up with the factory.

But wait, let’s not forget that Minecraft is just a video game. You can have thousands of cubic meters of stone in your pocket, and still room for more. Recently my kids were playing together and one of them fell in the lava. This is a common occurrence, and while your character respawns to play again, all of the equipment and items they were carrying are destroyed. This caused them some amount of distress, until I pointed out that they could just give themselves everything that they had just lost with a few commands. Now, some may argue that this is cheating, since it goes against the design of the game. But if the game world is truly infinite, then resources can come from anywhere, not just the ground or a tree.

There’s enough to stress about in real life, why fret and worry ourselves over a video game that ultimately comes to nothing in the end? More tomorrow.

That wasn’t the daily question. This is: have you ever found yourself worrying over a video game more than your actual state in life?

1  Creative Mode is focused on building and design, and all resources are infinitely available. The player character is also invulnerable and can fly!

2  In Peaceful Mode, there are no monsters or hostile entities, though the character can still die from environmental hazards like falling or lava. It makes progressing in the game properly impossible, since certain resources are only available through fighting monsters. There are mods to help alleviate that, though.