Minecraft – The Mediterranean Newspaper

I follow.

Something similar happens with books. «My girl is that she does not read anything; glued to the screen all day”, a friend tells me shortly before commenting that on TwitterArturo Perez-Reverte He has just messed with the Minister of Equality again and “look what a funniest meme”. I shut up. Of course your girl doesn’t read, how much do you read if she isn’t on her mobile? Now, now… What happens is that we want the girl, the boy, to read so that she is better than us. It seems very commendable to me to prefer that the offspring improve us, but that thing about leading by example seems to have been completely forgotten. Children imitate us: “If dad, if mom, loves to do this or that, something will be interesting”, the little ones in the house are supposed to think. So, how many emulate their progenitors who are seasoned readers of novels? Proust or poems of garcia lorca? Three, three in the entire province, and stop counting.

Then we see the little ones headed to the happy screens and we tear our clothes. Maybe we should take a look at what they see there before we get nervous. Perhaps it turns out that the world has changed and we are managing this from an outdated, obsolete perspective. Maybe we are looking from the wrong place.

Let’s look at Minecraft. A game in which, in an environment with simple graphics, the player must worry about creating a shelter that protects him from the zombies that lurk at night. It is not about killing them but about hiding, protecting oneself. To do this you must build, not destroy: either you go into a cave you have dug or you create a refuge where the attackers cannot access. Then there is another way, the creative one, where the threat disappears. There you just have to “create things”. Just like when I was little and I made houses with pieces of wood and stones, or with Lego. All very developer of abstract ideas, management of space and resources. Everything like a gigantic meccano with infinite pieces, where imagination is the only limit. It is true that the physical component is lost, touching the pieces, interacting with reality. Everything is managed in a virtual space.

Hours glued to the television

In the seventies, in the eighties, with television becoming a mass phenomenon, children probably spent, we spent, too many hours glued to it. It worried our parents. I think that in the long run it has not had too pernicious effects… Or yes, who knows.

The world advances, technologically, at a devilish speed. It is difficult to foresee how things will be in a couple of decades. Perhaps it will even change the economic paradigm. We are, without even realizing it, in the midst of a revolution, perhaps as important or even more important than the industrial one that took place in the 19th century. The world sheds its skin so quickly that we can scarcely reflect on its novelties; even these are so changeable that it is not worth it because in no time they will cease to exist. Perhaps the screens are just the prelude to the changes. Life in the metaverse. What do I know

Editor of The Red Bow Tie