Jews, the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik observed, were given the Torah at Sinai not as mere passive recipients but as builders of worlds, as partners with the Almighty in the act of creation.
It’s a profound theological observation. It’s also, as it turns out, a pretty good blueprint for coming up with the best-selling video game of all time, which has now been turned into a blockbuster movie that is changing the way young Americans, those notoriously slothful and passive consumers of on-screen entertainment, interact with cinema and with each other.
In case you’re not familiar with the joyous phenomenon that is Minecraft, a brief primer is in order. Created in 2009 by Swedish programmer Markus Persson, the game took a wildly different approach to computer-mediated entertainment. Instead of relying on tightly controlled storylines that force players to press buttons, slog through the motions, and complete neatly scripted quests, Minecraft functioned as an enormous digital sandbox that allowed players to build whatever they please. A true-to-life replica of the SS Augusta Victoria? Anfield Stadium, home of the Liverpool Football Club? King Kong fighting a T-Rex? The Acropolis? If you had enough imagination and enough free time, you could build whatever virtual Xanadu you wish and roam it to your heart’s content.
Unlike other game developers—these days, a thicket of soulless international conglomerates releasing endless iterations of the same tired franchises and charging more and more money for less and less fun—Persson invited players to share their thoughts, and he regularly updated the game based on their feedback. Players were grateful for the attention: It took Minecraft one month to reach a million registered users and six additional months to hit the ten million mark. Four years later, Persson sold his game and his company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
It was only a matter of time before Hollywood came knocking. Starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, A Minecraft Movie was released in early April of this year, and it didn’t need more than a couple of weeks to make three quarters of a billion dollars at the box office.
Having watched the film, I can report that anyone seeking a successor to Citizen Kane or The Godfather will be sorely disappointed. The film is 101 minutes of sheer, exuberant silliness, with gags, jokes, and preposterous twists piling on in rapid succession, making it physically impossible to wipe that goofy grin off your face for long enough to ponder the nearly nonexistent plot.
Or, to put it differently, the Minecraft movie is a lot like the Minecraft game, calling for a creative community to come together and let its imagination run wild.
And wild it runs: The film’s fans have taken to watching it in theaters again and again and again, shouting some of their favorite catchphrases along with the characters onscreen, cheering and dancing and yowling at key points, and turning each showing into a massive, rowdy party. Fans in Provo, Utah, for example, snuck a live chicken into the multiplex and waved it high up in the air as one of the film’s animated characters rode a pixelated chicken. Others have tossed popcorn buckets at one another, doused each other in flour, and set off a fire extinguisher. More than once, theater management has had to summon the police or otherwise strive to keep the merriment down to a minimum.
It’s a shame. For once, the kids are showing precisely the zest for life that surly graybeards like me have accused them of losing long ago as they wallow in their iPhones and their social media accounts. They’re congregating together, in person, in a place other than their classrooms or bedrooms. They’re devising their own rituals, raucous as they may be. And they’re doing it all under the aegis of an entertainment behemoth erected on the simple idea that there’s no better use of our time than answering our divinely ordained calling to become not guileless consumers of readymade realities but builders of braver and better and happier new worlds.
You needn’t have any special insight into human psychology to guess what kind of childhood experience led Persson to forge his digital kingdom. His parents divorced when he was a young boy; his father suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism, and his mother often lacked the means to support her family, which meant she and her children frequently went hungry. But Persson had the woods near his house as his refuge, and when his father, a computer nerd, introduced him to programming, he ventured to build on his computer screen the same vast and wonderful expanses he had known in the Swedish countryside.
He did not seek to supplant reality. He wanted to liberate it. When so much of social life had become a theater of strictly observed gestures, interactions proceeding according to pre-approved scripts and censored by zealous commissars of virtue and vice, Persson gave us a world where possibilities prevailed. A young American may no longer be able to let her imagination run wild in college without being accused of a litany of thought crimes, but she could still log on to Minecraft and explore whatever ideas spark her interest. This increasingly rare freedom inspired then-senator Marco Rubio to quip, in 2015, that Minecraft was an excellent training ground for America’s future leaders, focused, as it is, not on grievances and power plays but on the perennial American passion to break new ground everywhere from the earth to the moon to cyberspace.
Obviously, then, Persson had to be curbed, especially as he frequently took to social media to question progressive dogma. In 2019, Microsoft scrubbed several mentions of Persson from the history of the game he had created and did not invite him to Minecraft’s massive ten-year anniversary celebration, stating that Persson’s views “do not reflect” those of the corporation. But as anyone could tell just by walking into a screening of the Minecraft movie and hearing the crowd go wild, the spirit Persson had unleashed could not be buried, not even by one of the world’s most omnipotent companies.
And that, to anyone sniffing for omens of a rosy future, is a very promising sign.
The adolescents stumbling out of their solitude to huddle together and holler at the screen are telling us that they’re craving a different kind of experience. They’re telling us they want the comfort of community and the pleasure of creativity, that they desire intricate rituals and are ready to take their place as builders of worlds, online or, as the kids say these days, IRL (in real life). They’re showing us that they’re filled with that unbeatable American spirit of wonder, the same spirit that moved two curious brothers in North Carolina to grab some spruce wood, cotton muslin, and a sprocket chain drive and build the world’s first airplane.
Here’s my advice: Join them! Instead of another evening of doomscrolling on your phone or yelling at cable news, consider spending a few hours in the Overworld, Minecraft’s in-game universe of infinite possibilities. Craft yourself a pretty church, or a lovely little house, or a hulking recreation of Nero’s Rome—anything goes. Watch the Minecraft movie and have some fun soaking in its actors’ sense of pure, uninterrupted joy—so far removed from, say, the sour ministering of actress Rachel Zegler, who sank Disney’s live action remake of Snow White by telling anyone who would listen how much she disliked the original, condemning its storyline as insufficiently woke. And then, when you’re done, turn those screens off and, together with throngs of other Minecraft enthusiasts of all ages, get busy.
The film itself compels you to return to real life with zest. It won’t be much of a spoiler to report that, in the very last scene, its protagonist, Jack Black’s rambunctious Steve, must make a choice. He can stay in the Overworld and continue to indulge in his virtual fantasies, or he can step out into the real world where communities and enterprises are harder to build but much more rewarding. He doesn’t have to think for too long. One big bounce and he’s out there, back in reality, making friends and growing a business and proving, once again, that there’s no greater thrill or duty for a human being than being God’s partner in creation.
