Things In Minecraft You Only Notice As An Adult

In 2009, a bored computer programmer and video game designer named Magnus Persson — soon to be better known by his alias, "Notch" — quietly released a charmingly low-resolution project called Minecraft. It combined adventure and role-playing elements with building blocks to create what's now referred to as a "sandbox" game. Like playing in a sandbox, in which a player's only limit is the depths of their imagination, there's no set story or goal in Minecraft. Instead, players control a regular guy named Steve or a regular gal named Alex as he or she mines for materials and uses them to build structures across an array of terrains and biomes — while looking out for deadly and destructive villains like skeletons, zombies, and a horde of green monsters called "Creepers."

In just a few years, Minecraft became one of the most downloaded and played games in history. Perhaps because of its friendly look and anyone-can-play sensibility, it's been hugely successful with kids...which means their parents have had to endure an untold number of conversations about Minecraft and having to watch their kids play the game. Naturally, adults have a very different take on the game — they may see things that only time, experience, and an aged, world-weary eye can reveal. Here's a look at some of the silly, dark, and just plain weird things in Minecraft that only adults notice.

Minecraft was born in Sweden, but it's popular all over the world now. That speaks to the universality of some of the game's elements, like the human imperatives to build shelter, find food, and survive...and how reanimated skeletons are an unsettling presence. These walking, flesh-free assemblies of bone in a vaguely humanoid form are bad guys in Minecraft, taking aim against those they oppose with a bow and arrow. 

To kids who regularly play video games, this is no big deal — monstrous bad guys are a common occurrence in the digital world, be they aliens, zombies, ninjas, or barrel-throwing primates. But there's something about the more-realistic-than-fantastical world of Minecraft that makes these skeletons ominous — and there are just so many of them that an adult who thinks too much or too hard can't help but wonder about their origin. After all, if they're skeletons, they used to be people, and now they're dead. Are they haunting and stalking the game's protagonist because he was their murderer? Did he come to a remote, undeveloped terrain to escape them? Or maybe they were here before Steve, and he's building his many structures atop an unmarked graveyard? 

While designed to be background music, some of the melodies from video games past have legitimately grown into some of the most memorable tunes in the western canon — for example, the opening music to Pac-Man, the main theme from Super Mario Bros., and "Korobeiniki," an old Russian folk song most famous for being the music from Tetris. These melodies help propel the narrative of the game and get the player pumped up, level after level. But Minecraft is not like most video games. It's about building stuff, wandering around, and living and existing in a virtual world. Reflecting that chill, exploratory tone is Minecraft's music, which is just as slow and hypnotic as the gameplay. Electronic and ambient, it really helps a parent hanging out with their kid playing Minecraft on the couch unwind...and probably fall asleep. The game's noises — stacking bricks, synthesized animal sounds — add to the wall of soothing noise and the notion that Minecraft might as well be titled ASMR: The Video Game.

Maybe kids who spend a lot of time in church, Sunday School, or reading Dante know what's up, but the common images of Hell — or Hades, or the Underworld, or whatever you want to call it — aren't generally as fearsomely ingrained in the mind of a child as they are in an adult. Parents have been alive a lot longer than kids, and are far more able to picture the worst-case scenarios for eternity after we die. Fire, brimstone, darkness, torture, horrific demons running the show — that's the Western idea of eternal torment. And gosh, it looks and feels an awful lot like one of the strangest, most unsettling, and subsequently well-titled biomes in all of Minecraft: The End. Some similarities between The End and "the end": It's Minecraft's final dimension, one has to go through a special portal to get there (as real people go "through" the act of dying), and it's surrounded by a black void and encased in darkness. Monsters like the Enderman, Shulkers, and the Ender Dragon live there, too.

Adults are by definition mature, but only physically. Mentally, they can still be childish or have a puerile, juvenile sense of humor. This means some adult gamers or observers can't help but notice and laugh at even the most mildly titillating-seeming elements of Minecraft.

Sure, a Creeper looks like the male reproductive organ, but also, the Villagers in Minecraft were once labeled (and are still often referred to by players) as "Testificates." They're the "extra" of Minecraft — neutral, non-playable background characters pre-loaded by the game in some modes. They just hang out in their little towns and eke out a living, only for human players to gawk at their silly names that sound just like the name of the thing that a Creeper's feet resemble. Sure, that name is probably just programmer language, playing off of how they were once a "test" feature in early versions of the game back in the day, but still — whether their name was intentionally meant to be sort of dirty or not, it's still funny.