How Minecraft Saved My Life

This is probably the most personal thing I've ever written (and for Destructoid.com, the first thing I've ever written. Lookit me, ma!), but because of the blog post "How Max Payne saved me from myself" (which you can read here: http://www.destructoid.com/promoted-blog-how-max-payne-saved-me-from-myself-236114.phtml) by Destructoid user 'vApathyv' I felt the need to share a story of my own.

I'm pretty sure I've always been an awkward guy. I have low self-esteem, I'm not particularly bright or handsome, I'm bad at small talk, stuff like that. As a kid, I was never into sports and most other things that little boys did. I didn't like climbing trees, I was a wimp, I never liked running around in the forest and it took a while until I started to love riding my bike. What I loved was LEGO, books, movies and games. A lot of games. I think it all started when I was about five or six. One of my aunts gave me her old NES that she used to have as a kid and my uncle, who's about the same age as my aunt, gave me his old Gameboy. I loved playing games like Super Mario Bros., Clu-Clu Land, Batman and TMNT on the NES. I loved plenty of Gameboy games as well, but sadly I can't remember their names.



A while later, my dad bought the at the time almost brand new Playstation 2, mostly for the DVD player. That only made me love gaming more. For a while, the only games we had were Metal Gear Solid 2 (what little I saw of that game terrified me as a kid, I thought it was some obscure horror game before I recognized the cover art a few years later!) and the demo disc that came with the console. Me, my sister and our best friends played the demo disc so much that the menu song and the weird little videos are permantly etched into my mind.
Also around the same time, my parents started letting me use the computer. I mostly played some kid games on it, then my parents introduced me to the internet. That was one of the defining moments of my live. Gaming and the internet became the most important things to me. It was actually through them that I started to learn english, several years before we were taught it in school.

Middle school was a cakewalk for me. We didn't have much homework and when we did I could often do them in about half an hour (except math, math can go screw itself). That left me ample time to game and surf the internet. In hindsight, I should've probably spent that time on making friends. I was never completely lonely, though. I had some friends from kindergarten and was on good terms with the other boys in class. One thing that was odd about our class was that it was split into two different groups, each with different teachers, classrooms and recess times. During the third or fourth year, they combined the classes. And that was when I met my two current best friends. I'll call them Al and Tim. We were, and still are, basically identical. We all loved gaming, we all loved movies and we all loved playing with LEGO. During middle school, we became inseparable. But, unfortunately, good things don't last forever.

The shift to junior high was not kind to me. First, Al and Tim chose another program than me, which meant that we would not be in the same class or even study the same things. The summer before my start at junior high was a sad and confused one. I started to wonder if they didn't like me and I realized that my childhood was disappearing right under my feet. I desperately grabbed onto anything nostalgic in the vain hope that I'd feel like I was back in middle school without a care in the world. When school started again, most of the boys from middle school who chose the same program and ended up in the same class as me basically abandoned me to be with the new classmates. That made me wonder about their relationship to me. Did they only spend time with me because they were basically forced to do it? The I realized that it was all my fault. I had an infinite number of opportunities where I could've reached out to them and try to become better friends with them during middle school, but instead I wasted them in front of a computer screen. My bad habit had evaporated my social skills, along with my physical health. I was miserable through almost the entire first year of junior high, cementing my place as the weird loner of the class. Nobody wanted to sit next to me. People often didn't talk to me unless they had to. Most of the time I just kind of tagged along the others, hoping they'd laugh at my jokes or talk to me in general. I started to stay home from school a lot, pretending that I was sick. My grades were slipping. Sometimes, during especially dark moments, I had thoughts of running away or even committing suicide.



Eventually I found a very good friend in one classmate, but I still felt really lonely. I missed Al and Tim, who I barely interacted with outside of greeting them in the hallways and occassionally chatting with Al on Steam. One day, I heard about this guy Notch, and some game he had made called Minecraft. I looked the game up on Youtube and thought it looked pretty fun, so I hopped over to Minecraft's website and tried the free multiplayer version.

Eventually I told Al about it and we messed around with the game for a bit. After a while, we both decided to buy the full game, in the final hours before the beta version was launched in fact. We were both blow away by the full game. We hopped from server to server, creating cool buildings and gathering materials. We felt like we needed another player and thought that Tim might enjoy the game. Tim was a console gamer who didn't own either a gaming PC or a current-gen console, but the laptops we received from school allowed him to play less requiring games like, well, Minecraft. We told him about it and let him try it, eventually leading to him buying it. And right there, we were all hooked. I can't tell you how many hours we've spent together in Minecraft. Our most incredible creation was no doubt an enormous G1 Optimus Prime statue which Tim, a huge Transformers fan, helped make as accurate as possible, block by block. We stayed awake entire nights, toiling away at the huge robot and talking about whatever the hell we felt like talking about, and as cliché as it might sound, it felt just like the good ol' days again.



Just as we started to grow a bit tired of Minecraft, I saw that Steam was having a sale on the game Transformers: War for Cybertron. I wasn't too interested myself, but I thought "Hey, this has three player co-op, and Tim'd probably like a Transformers game!". I convinced Tim and Al to buy the game, Tim creating a Steam account in the process. Now this is where it really took off. Tim's school laptop could fortunately handle the game, and to date we've played the campaign and Escalation Mode several times over (Tim's sunken about 80-90 hours into it). This, along with a few other games, led to Tim acquiring both a brand spankin' new gaming PC and a PS3. Now, gaming became a huge part of his life too! During all this, things were slowly getting better at school. It was the second year, and I was a happier man now thanks to gaming with Al and Tim. I started talking to classmates more and more, getting to know them better. I learned that another guy in class was a fellow cinephile, which lead to us becoming good friends. I also started talking to the other quiet guy of the class who turned out to be a pretty funny dude. Life was slowly getting better (except the math, it can still screw itself).

I realized that it wasn't that hard to get to know people and do better in school, I had just been a lazy, introverted prick. During the spring and summer vacation between the second and third year (that's now!), I started to work hard on improving my life. I rode my bike several kilometers per day, I talked more to my friends, I went outside more (not drastically so, but still) and the change was noticeable (puberty kicking into overdrive didn't hurt either). Now, I've never away from school a single day, my grades are improved and I'm both healthier and happier. I've rekindled my friendship with Al and Tim and I've even made some new friends. Me, Al and Tim have spent many hours together in games like Saints Row: The Third, Magicka, Slender (horror game nights with buddies are amazingly fun), Portal 2, Trine 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Terraria, Borderlands (currently playing the second game, in fact) and many others.



So, to whoever is reading this, I have this to say: Just because you can postpone something doesn't mean you should do it. I used to think "Nah, I won't call my friends now, they'll be there later!". That lead to me ending up nearly friendless and miserable. So please, don't pass up on opportunities like that, because you never know when they might disappear.

The shadow of high school is currently looming over me, and I know that no matter what I choose I'll once again be separated from Tim and Al, this time by entirely different schools and possibly different cities. But this time, I feel pretty good about it, because I know that no matter what happens, we'll always have time to sit down for a few hours, play some games and laugh with (and at) each other over Skype.



(Without these people/companies I know I would currently be in a much darker place, so thanks are in order.
Thanks to: Markus 'Notch' Persson, Mojang, Arrowhead Studios, Paradox Interactive, High Moon Studios, Activision, Gearbox Software, 2K Games, Volition Inc., THQ, Frozenbyte Studios, Valve, Re-Logic, Bungie, Parsec Productions
Special thanks to: 'vApathyv', Destructoid.com, Co-Optimus.com and you, the reader, for taking some time out to read this rambling mess of a text)