Things I Have Learned from Minecraft

If you haven’t heard about the PC/Xbox/iPad game Minecraft, none of this will make any sense. That’s okay. It’s just one of the greatest games of the last decade. Think Legos with zombies.

Naturally, it’s also sweeping the ranks of kids as one of the latest craze, though in my experience too many of their parents are letting them get away with playing on Creative mode. If you are one of these, toughen them up. Make them play on Survival mode or not at all.

Minecraft is a world of its own, and it has some very, very strange rules of life and physics.

These are the lessons I have learned in my journeys through the lands of Minecraft:

1. If you punch a tree hard enough, it drops wood.
2. It is impossible to fall from a cliff as long as you crouch down.
3. Eating an entire loaf of bread all at once is a great way to heal from falling a hundred feet and almost dying.
4. Destroying things actually takes a lot longer than building them. Unless you use explosives.
5. Horses get hot and bothered if you feed them gold.
6. Walking quietly behind people and whispering, “Ssssssssss…” is a great way of discovering which of your friends play Minecraft.
7. If you try hard enough, you can swim up waterfalls.
8. Zombie children are far more terrifying than grown-up zombies.
9. “The chicken or the egg” is actually a very legitimate question.
10. Throwing chicken eggs at walls is a great way to make baby chickens.
11. Compasses don’t actually point north; they point towards the last bed you slept in. Possibly handy for one night stands.
12. The world is as big as your RAM disk.
13. Nothing is more terrifying than giant flying marshmallows. Nothing.
14. Things really do go bump in the night. Well, more like moan in the night. And not in a sexy way. Unless you’re into rotten meat…not judging.
15. You can carry 2308 things. They can be of any size at all, so long as there are only 2308.
16. If you fall to your death or burn up trying to swim in lava, you will just wake up in bed, like it was all a dream, except you’re strangely naked and all your shit is gone.
17. Gravity is actually kind of optional if you’re talking about dirt, clay, stone, wood or wool. Sand, shale or you, though, well, that’s a different story.
18. Horses run faster than trains.
19. Torches burn forever.
20. Pigs take quite readily to being saddled.
21. Pumpkins are amazingly effective at performing ancient Judaic Kabbalistic magic.
22. The fastest way to reconstitute a rail line into transportable track sections is to pour a bucket of water on it.
23. Conservation of mass does not apply when seeing how many head of cattle you can stuff in a 4×4 stockyard.
24. Metal doors can only be opened with electronics.
25. It is absolutely possible to build a tower of any height simply by repeatedly jumping and throwing dirt at your feet.
26. Dipping apples in molten gold and then eating the resulting confection will heal you of any wounds up to and including missing limbs and organs dangling by a mere tendon from your body cavity.
27. Skeletons like riding spiders.

I think this could form a great basis for a new drinking game – see how many of these things you can test in real life.

What, wondering where the drinking comes in? Come on, that should be obvious – that’s what you have to do before you think that is somehow a good idea.