Way back in May, we tried to teach resident Awesome Dad Curtis Vredenburg to play Minecraft. Both his kids love the game, but they were having no luck getting Curtis to take up the controller.
So we tried our hand at it. It went uh… well, it went. You can watch the whole video below:
What we really wanted to get was an expert opinion on Curtis’ skills. So we asked his son Sebastian and a couple of friends to come into the office and watch the video. Kids are, of course, universally Minecraft Experts.
Their verdict was that I went wayyyyyyyyy too fast! Reeling off all the controls at Curtis and then introducing a ton of crafting combos at him was no bueno. I should have given him more time to get familiar with the controls.
I had thought that maybe I made a mistake playing Survival Mode. They said that was okay, because Survival Mode forces you to take things step by step and really learn the Minecraft basics. Phew.
Despite getting a lot of laughs out of Curtis’ ineptitude, the kids admitted that it’s hard for parents to learn games. In fact, they’ve all tried to teach their own parents to play at one point or another. Claire lamented that when her brother tried to teach her mom to play, her mom couldn’t even remember what Creepers were by the end of the day. But that’s just how parents’ brains are, according to Sebastian.
We also all agreed that teaching parents to play on a computer might be easier. For Curtis, the many, many buttons on the Xbox 360 controller were a big hurdle. But as Elijah pointed out, we all use computers to work. Parents would probably be able to remember more easily what button does what if they’re using a keyboard and mouse.
Elijah also said that playing with parents once and awhile would be cool. In fact, all the kids seemed into the idea. But at the end of the day, Minecraft is something he wants to do with friends, so it’s not like he wants to play with his parents all the time.
So I guess the verdict of this whole thing is, you should totally try playing Minecraft with your kids! Setting aside a time to learn (either with them, or alone) would be best, and then book some of that valuable kid-parent bonding time to explore their Minecraft worlds. All these kids were really excited by the idea of parents playing Minecraft with them, even if they didn’t want to all the time.
Good luck!
