My kids fear Micro$oft virtual world domination!

On a normal day, when I ramble down stairs from my slumber for my morning cup of coffee, the house is pretty dark and quite with kids droning through the house seeking and gathering up various artefacts before school appearing to resemble those little blockiee gaming characters that appear in the latest versions of Minecraft.

This morning I barely got to the bottom of the stairs where all the kids were waiting for me. They appeared to be bright eyed and quite agitated as I tried to fain a cheesy smile. I grunted out a ‘morning kids’ as my first words from my almost hang-over half slumber state. At which point they verbally attacked me with a question …

“Daddy … daddy have you heard the news?”.

Questions this early in the morning is unheard of in our house unless the question is a simple enquiry as to “Who’s that?” as a challenge to the shadowed figure scrabbling about in the darkness. This must be special morning to bring on such a question, perhaps someone has set the toaster on fire?, maybe its snowed during the night and we are all now snowed in?, perhaps one of the kids found a stranger sitting on the door step?

I wondered what would wake the dead and have all the kids so busy and agitated at this ungodly hour of the morning? Despite my bones screaming at me … ‘For god sake don’t ask … it most likely is not going to be good news by the looks of things’, but I felt compelled to ask …

So I said …

“Morning kids … no, what news?”.

In a long drawn out impatient and sarcastic voice they said “Dad…” which reminds me that I am super old and the kids are more than happy to point out that they know stuff that I don’t and their stuff is cooler than mine.

“So you haven’t heard the news about Minecraft?”

I really regret my next question, because if I had any sense at all at that hour of the morning, I would have said something more deflective like … ‘Yes, but don’t believe everything in the news kids, anyone for toast?’. But no, not me!, I just had to open my big mouth having failed to engage the brain which was only just out of bed, lacking in coffee and now faced with a bunch of wired wide awake kids. I really slipped up and made the fatal mistake of saying …

“No, what news?”.

Now if your not aware of Minecraft (see: https://minecraft.net/ ), I can only assume you are one of the luckiest people in the world this morning because you don’t have access to young children, teenagers, young adolescence or geeky adults who all gather around things called digital devices like smart phones, tablets, smart TVs, laptops or PCs and play block shaped games which are a throw back to the early days of gaming when the Commodore 64 was king.

Minecraft is pretty much a very blocky 3D world which shares a lot in common with the early days of Commander Keen and Wolfenstein crossed with the hobbit and the DS version of animal crossing. Oh yes … and it also has zombies which appear to be mandatory in most things for anyone aged 4 and up these days.

Ok, so Minecraft is the giant online 16 million plus playing users who are globally networked to the same game. This game looks like its still under development but pretty much everyone including the likes of my fellow brummy Ozzy Osbourne and Mr No Nonsense (aka Samuel Jackson) can be found fully immersed playing Minecraft at any hour of the night or early morning. OOOoooo and I nearly forgot to mention that there is no shortage of sheep, pigs and cows roaming free range for you to eat if you fancy a byte!.

Anyway, I stopped to think for a moment as I braced myself for some major news, how did I know it must be major?. I don’t know about your kids, but mine range from 3 to 20 and this is the first time in 20 years that anyone had any interest in the news which make the question that much more shocking to me. Perhaps Minecraft is taking over the world?, had the company gone bust and I would then have to deal with a bunch of screaming kids, depressed and lost in the darkness as we had experienced when Toontown was closed abruptly down (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toontown_Online ), I still wake up sweating in fear late at night over that experience.

Ok, compared to ‘Toontown’ nothing could be that bad! I was almost beginning to get over the shock that the kids could even define something as real News and starting to replace it with personal pride as I thought … perhaps they are not fully lost to the digital world just yet!

I dared to enquire further, but now I was almost excited at the opportunity to explore what intelligent piece of real news had daddy missed but the kids had found?

That’s when they dropped a bombshell on me, complete with the sonic booming sound effect of them shouted back at me as if to say ‘this is really important you dumb ass … the world is about to end and your still half asleep dad!’

What did they shout? … these words I will carry with me for many years as a recurring nightmare …

“Daddy, Micro$oft just bought mine craft for a gazillion (2.5 billion) dollars!”

(See: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/sept14/09-15news.aspx )

… and then there was a long pause for effect as if the kids were waiting for me to offer some intelligent fix or advise as to how we could leave the planet and avoid the impending global disaster that was fast bearing down upon us and could strike the planet at any moment.

So, what did the worlds greatest dad have to say that would instantly instil confidence, reassurance and replace those shocked and frighten looking little faces with a smile? …

“Oh No! … Not again!”

… as I horrific memories of the family crisis that was ‘Toontown’ shocked my brain.

About now I felt a weakness in my legs as the flashbacks to ‘Toontown’ started coming hot and heavy. Toontown was a previous disaster which struck out family, reducing may of the kids to tears when daddy had to explain that ‘Toontown’ was being deserted and would soon be a ghost town following a buyout by Disney. For those old with memories going back far enough this problem was nothing new, but ‘Toontown’ was the first time it had impacted the family as a whole and now we would be face with the takeover of ‘Minecraft’. Would Minecraft go them same way as ‘GEM Desktop’, ‘Fox Pro’ etc… and the countless others who had been competitively challenged or merely bought out by big business like Disney, Micro$oft etc.., only to fade over time into distant fond memories.

This would be one of the very few moments in life where my kids and I would all be on the same page at the same time. Thankfully this time, no one was crying …. Yet! Everyone however was firmly focused on attempting to be very mature about all this because this was indeed a very serious family challenge, which was so much more than mere child’s play.

If you’re a Minecraft fan, which most people aged 3 and up in our world are please consider stepping forward and offer us your best council …Is it as my kids would suggest, the world is in grave danger of coming to its end now that Micro$oft have purchased Minecraft?

Should Minecraft players begin the exodus towards a new private virtual world on some distant independent server and squat in its depths hoping to find some quantum of solus, lags and all?

Or is this all part of the Micro$oft world domination plan to capture the worlds collective network mind and begin a process of innovation which sees the full immersive environment in which players become a collective hive mind and sink deeper into the Micro$oft alternative virtual world and first realisation of ‘The Matrix’?

Does anyone have a number for a good local child psychologist who specialise in therapy for kids who present on mass with Minecraft withdrawal symptoms? …. I figure it maybe a good idea to begin this process as soon as possible! … Please? … anyone? … HELP!

I wonder if Bill can come to the rescue with suggestions as a parent himself?

– THE END –

[Legal]

[AboutMe]