Do you speak Minecraft?

“I’ve got the gold leggings”

These were the words I heard my eleven year old son shrieking yesterday afternoon. My other son and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and then fell about laughing.

My son has not suddenly taken a fancy for shiny leg wear, it is a part of his much-loved Minecraft (apparently) or at least I hope so.

Minecraft is his ‘thing’.  It is the cause of many disagreements between the tween and myself as it is evidently more than addictive.  You know those “can you come off now”, “I just need to finish this game/level” conversations you have with your beloved offspring?  Well this takes it to a whole new level.  Minecraft games can last lifetimes.

In fact, I was so fed up just before Christmas, I ended up banning Minecraft for a whole month and it was bliss.  I had my son back for a while and he even found other, more interesting things to do.

If you are new the whole world of Minecraft, my rather limited understanding of it is that it is a video game that places players into a randomly generated world where they can build all sorts of things out of cubes.  Because of the different skills that players use throughout the game; reading, writing, geometry, numeracy, history and even music,  it is educational and is even being used in schools as it is a virtual landscape where anything is possible with a little imagination.  Once you have built your ‘world’, you can use different modes which enable different types of game play and you can of course, play against other people around the world.

It is available as an app, for games consoles and on the PC.  The PC version is the tween’s device of choice according the Minecraft website nearly 19 million people have bought the PC/Mac version which is a lot of pairs of gold leggings.

The tween will happily spend hours in his little Minecraft world and he likes to play with a group of friends from school.  One friend in particular he talks to via Skype whilst playing and it is through their conversations that I get a glimpse into this strange and wondrous world.  So I have been listening in and asking a few questions in appropriate places and now people I am down with the kids and I speak Minecraft (well kind of).  Here are a few of the highlights;

The gold leggings are apparently part of a special suit of armour that can help protect players and there are not only gold leggings available, oh no, there are also chain mail, diamond, iron and leather.  Leather leggings?  Now that would be an interesting sight wouldn’t it?

An Enderman is not Danny Dyer, not any other member of the cast of Eastenders.  Disappointingly they are strange-looking tall black things that vaguely look like men and give off purple particles when they teleport (which makes them even weirder).

This one made me chuckle.  There are cows called Mooshrooms.  Moo shrooms, get it?  They can be clicked on to be turned into a bowl of mushroom stew, which my mushroom hating son says is a very useful thing indeed and apparently the mooshroom does actually moo and likes jumping off high cliffs which sounds very entertaining.

There are spider jockeys; skeletons riding spiders. These are very exciting as they are a bit of a challenge to defeat and you don’t see them very often.  Zombie Pigmen also made me chuckle and the tween assures me that these are not a good thing and most definitely not a laughing matter.

I was slightly concerned by the sound of the term ‘spelunking’ as I thought it sounded rather rude.  No, not rude at all simply a term used to describe the act of exploring and mining caves.

It goes on and on with mods, mobs, skins and spawning it really does sound like the tween is talking a different language.  He looks at me with a raised eyebrow when I ask him what things are as if everyone should know but luckily the internet is a great resource for parents lacking information on these very important topics.

Nothing about how to get them off the damn game though.  Shame.