There are so many worse things they could be into.

They haven’t been bugging me for new Fortnite skins or running up a Roblox bill or learning racist slurs from the Internet. Instead, they just like to build farms and villages and chill.

And it’s very easy to chill. Minecraft is a great way to decompress. You just relax and put your chaotic world into order. Like when I made a movie theater.

That was a relaxing evening, just me, my podcasts, and a few hours of Minecraft. The result looks halfway passable and has some kind of para-environmental effect where I know we can’t actually go to a physical theater just yet, but I can kind of remind myself how it used to feel.

But like any good therapy, Minecraft is not simply an escape from the real world; it is a surrogate where one can learn coping mechanisms. Like when my daughters took said movie theater and filled it with cats and pandas.

In a lesser game, you’d be taught to scream into your headset and throw a shit-fit, and your drive to play, which was at one point simple joy, is swapped out with cold revenge. But Minecraft isn’t some dumbass competition where you rack up kills. Not unless you’re an idiot about it.

No, in Minecraft, you have two choices. You can cordon off your world and make it totally private and restricted from other players, which leaves you with a tomblike impression of reality where you’ve struggled to erase all imperfections and in the process purge any semblance of humanity. Or, you can just accept that your movie theater screens movies for cats and pandas, and help your daughter give them a better bamboo farm.

Not to say I won’t boot their friends off our Realms account if they act like shitheads. Some people are just driven to fuck things up. Good thing my kids aren’t.