So, Jane’s Xbox (360 – but do I really need to clarify that?) is downstairs, and Lewis has taken to playing Minecraft on it while Ethan watches. At first, a few months ago, it was Skyrim – but after Myrtle saw a person behead another person it was banned while Ethan was awake. I don’t think Lewis realised that I have a slightly more than passing knowledge of Minecraft – it’s one of those games that I would love to play, but the thought of wanting to spend so many damn hours being creative in it makes me sad. I just don’t have the time! I know there’s a creative mode and a survival mode – he insists he plays it on survival as creative mode is “like cheating, cos, like, you can use as many blocks as you want and that” – but when he announced that he had “64 redstone!”, “64 gold!” and “64 diamond!” I knew something was up. You don’t just find the same amount of all those things all at once – especially not that number, that very specific number which is so important in computing.
He likes watching all these YouTube videos where people make big houses, and yes, they are admittedly quite impressive, but they are clearly made in creative mode (even worse on PC where they have short-cuts for things like long lines of blocks, for example), which does make them slightly less impressive. I’m not dissing their imagination or execution, I’m just saying that it’s not a challenge in terms of gameplay to make them in creative mode – it’s basically Microsoft Paint in 3D if you think about it. So knowing that Lewis doesn’t want to admit to playing creative mode, here’s how he reasoned his way out of me catching him flying around in creative mode… Basically, he said he was going down into mines and mining ore blocks, but because they don’t drop in creative, he’s counting how many he’s mining and then adding that many to his inventory via the infinite amounts of every kind of block. That’s not cheating, kind of. Forget that his tools won’t degrade, any block is mined in seconds, he doesn’t have to worry about food, can’t take any damage from monsters, doesn’t have to retreat to his house at night, can’t die from environmental hazards, and that he can fly… That’s not cheating.
