A Writer’s Detour in Minecraft – Nothing is Misspent

as long as you let it build you.

You’ve heard it before. The stories we tell ourselves have meaning. The stories that shape us most profoundly are the ones we tell ourselves about our own lives.

I have a story I’ve questioned the meaning of for a long time. It’s the story of my time in the game of Minecraft. And because this blog aims to nurture the stories we tell ourselves, I’d like to take a closer look at my story and see if I can’t coax a more hopeful meaning out of it.

So here it is—my twelve-year journey in Minecraft, how it built me, and how it didn’t.

It was January of 2011. It was Winter, I was restless, and a new creative outlet seemed like the perfect thing to shake up my routine—which consisted of reading, writing, chatting with my long-distance Romanian girlfriend, and hanging out with Alice, my cat.

Minecraft is a sandbox game. That means it has no plot (necessarily)—no goal except building whatever you want to build and doing whatever you want to do. You play as Steve or Alex, the two humanoids in a world of monsters and semi-human villagers. There are two game modes. If you play in creative mode, you can do what I just said—exercise boundless creativity without stakes. You’re basically the god of your randomly generated world. But if you play in survival mode, the monsters that turned a blind eye to you before, catch your scent. And you’re no longer immortal. You can die to claws, fangs, drowning, burning, and your own hunger. You have to gather resources, craft tools, build shelter, survive the night, and cross dimensions to fight awful adversaries. The rewards of your conquest will give you dominion over the wilderness.

My Minecraft experience began in survival mode, then turned to creative. I had fun with my early survival builds but soon caught the itch to make something grander—so I googled up creative Minecraft servers. That was when I found Serenity USA, my first-ever Minecraft community.

As a 22-year-old guy with his whole life ahead of him, I didn’t think much about what my first log-in to Serenity could mean for my future. I remember musing, “I’ve spent thousands of hours in games. This might not be the best idea.” But my rationalization kicked in. Minecraft was more than a game. It was a medium. I went all-in.

To start, I built a funky abstract spaceship on a thirty-by-thirty-block square plot. On ranked servers like Serenity, your plot is your application to build in the main world, which has no borders. My plot was approved. I graduated from the flat green plot world to the mountain-studded, tree-carpeted main world, where I began to build the thing I’d been dreaming of—a giant dead tree stump. And when I say giant, I mean three hundred blocks wide by a hundred tall, with exposed roots slithering from its desert valley home into the surrounding biomes—forest, taiga, meadow. The cave under the stump was the dwelling place of Wren, a goddess in the fantasy series I’m still writing to this day.

A server admin, LordGuntaz, saw my efforts and promoted me to the next rank, which gave me the use of special building tools that let me mold large swaths of blocks with the click of an in-game brush. After an arduous week of hand building a small section of the stump, I finished the rest of it in two days.

What a rush—I was well on my way to becoming completely and totally addicted to Minecraft.

Time flew. I was promoted to the highest builder rank, and then to moderator, given supervision over the new builders who were building their application plots. I felt, for the first time, like a respected member of a community. I played on other creative Minecraft servers—Creation Bay, Crysis, and more. I built bigger, wilder things. The projects were endless. I sculpted Augustus, the villain of the same series Wren is from. He’s a giant stag whose severed head has regrown as a petal-necked, weird-eyed bird-dragon-head with a pair of bug-like antennae I couldn’t include due to height limit. Darn. Look at him. So sad and bald.

During my time on the Crysis server (sounds like Crisis Hotline—don’t get it confused), I met someone who built even bigger and weirder stuff than I did. Her name was Circleight.

She was a true artist and visionary—the kind who shatters the game-world by reminding you that blocks, like any other medium, can be a vessel for inspired expression. She was one of Minecraft’s first true geniuses. She passed away in 2020. I will never forget the difficult, fiery discussions we had and the piercing thoughtfulness she put into everything she made—be it a song suggestion, a well-formed essay, or a mega-build like this one—Xehanosia. (God, I love that name.)

There will never be another Circ.

By the time 2014 rolled around, I’d moved from my parents’ house in the USA to live with my Romanian girlfriend. Life was less pampered overseas. I needed money. I was burned out on Minecraft, anyway. The game has a way of making you want to lay it down like a spirit lays an old body to rest. I was eager to “switch bodies” and commit my life to writing. And I was on the verge of it when something surprising happened.

I’d been posting my work on a website called Planet Minecraft for a few months. I was an “organics” builder. That’s the Minecraft community’s term for an insane person who molds blocks into gigantic, curvaceous sculptures—basically a 3d pixel artist. Building a large organic can – and in some cases must – involve cutting away the landscape to access the entire 256-block space from void below to height limit above. Back to the point—I’d posted some of my organics on Planet Minecraft. My coolest one was called Flight—a big white androgynous dancer leaping through space. (That’s quite the demographic.)

A young man named James Delaney messaged me privately, asking if I’d like to join his professional Minecraft build team, BlockWorks.

That one message set me on a skyward trajectory that would crash and burn by the end of 2015, only to be revived as a tattered legacy—but we’ll get to that.

Until I got in contact with James, my experience with build teams had been—let’s say limited. I’d built a giant crystal ball-holding wizard for a guy who’d promised to pay me fifty bucks. But instead of paying me, he’d rug pulled his whole server. That counts, right? Yeah—that was my whole experience with pro building. But James was different. James was legit. BlockWorks had a website. They had reach in the community. Its members had made some of the highest-level creations to be found at the time. I’d been a fan of one of BlockWorks’ founding members, BlockFortress, since before I’d met Circleight. That guy’s dragons were gorgeous. Look—look at this dragon.

The messy textures and flat colors are a bit dated by today’s standards, but you’ll see that with a lot of old builds. And that’s what we’re here for.

Anyway—after consulting with my girlfriend on the matter, I joined BlockWorks—30% to meet BlockFortress, 30% to further feed my addiction, and 40% to justify that feeding with financial gain.

Again, time flew. James the businessman, BlockFortress the organics master, BloodFall the child prodigy architect, NytDwellur the text artist, Mollo the class clown who did a bit of everything, and several others—everyone pulled their weight and had fun doing it. What was our business model? We built on commission for large Minecraft servers. If you were a Minecraft server owner in 2014 who wanted money, you set up a cool-looking environment that offered mini-games, player vs. player fights, role-play adventures, and cosmetic perks—and you monetized the whole thing like you would a theme park. But first, you had a professional build team build it all. That was where BlockWorks came in. We were the best build team on the market. For the first time, I got real money for a service. I was paid $800 for a Minecraft rendering of the Colossus of Rhodes. Like—what?

I moved back home to the US in late 2014. In January of 2015, with a strong number of Minecraft commissions under my belt, I took a job that would change my life. This was the skyward trajectory I mentioned. This was when I got a glimpse of what I could be at my best—and at my worst.

Enter Mianite, a Twitch-streamed Minecraft series created by 16BitDec, TomSyndicate, CaptainSparklez, and a few other big streamer personalities. BlockWorks’ task was to run the series’ second season, serving as builders, writers, role-players, and general behind-the-scenes people while the streamers played our Minecraft map like a digital Dungeons & Dragons game.

This was my shit.

Knowing me to be an aspiring novelist, James asked me to lead the writing team. I leapt at the opportunity. The aforementioned streamers had a combined audience of over 10 million people. This was my chance to show the internet my writing chops, get a foot in the door of the content creation scene, and make connections—all rare gifts which I appreciated all too poorly as a twenty-five-year-old kid who placed too little value in relationships.

The season got off to a great start. Fans loved one of the big characters I acted – Prince Andor – and his friendship with CaptainSparklez. It was a strange dynamic we had with the streamers. They lived half in the real world, interacting with their Twitch chats, and half in the server world – called Ruxomar – having adventures with our characters, who knew nothing of the meta-world beyond the server. There was a prophecy in Ruxomar that one day four “sky people” would arrive. The sky people were the streamers. That’s the thing with Mianite—it breaks the fourth wall, and we milked it. But I won’t get into the story. That’s a whole novel.

Soon enough, we realized that the scope of the project was creeping out of control. We needed more people. I went on Reddit to recruit volunteers from the fan base. Three great ones cropped up—LadyKrystine, MrMadSpy, and X33N. All of them did everything except build. (Well, they sort of built, but not like BlockWorks.) I’m convinced to this day that Notch himself (creator and “god” of Minecraft) sent those three from Heaven. All of a sudden, Mianite – Season Two was a well-oiled machine. We blazed our way toward the spring months, gathering fans as we went. I was known in the Minecraft world as Chimalus, by the way. I forgot to mention that.

Here’s a statue of the goddess, Ianite, presiding over Dagrun Port. Prince Andor built it in-character. He was a sculptor. I miss him.

With the passing of time came change. BlockFortress, having built huge portions of the map, dropped off the project. Event prep got longer. The deadline for the season finale kept pushing itself farther and farther off, but we had to keep filling the space with better and better content. As the stakes of the story rose, so did our stress. Twenty-five-year-old me hadn’t felt that kind of stress before. He responded with frustration.

Life was hard but bearable as we came up on our six-month cutoff in the summer. We ran some fantastic episodes. The semi-finale event stands in my memory as the coolest thing we did. My dream of sharing my stories was coming true. They weren’t exactly the stories I wanted to tell – and the main characters were the streamers, not characters my teammates or I had written – but I knew that in the hearts of some fans, characters like Prince Andor would be cherished forever. All those good feelings came to a head in the finale episode. The Season Two team made it through with a few scratches and nicks, but stronger. Here we are as a group. I’m the tree-guy. The guy in the gray hat is James.

In the next few months, the behind-the-scenes crew got a lot of love on Tumblr, YouTube, and all over the place. One fan took an emotional letter my character had written to CaptainSparklez and did a dramatic reading of it in front of her high school theater class. That was my first proof positive that my writing could make waves.

I took some distance from Mianite after the buzz died down—partly to rest and partly to shift focus back to my original stories. To this day, I wonder if that was a mistake. When I took that distance, I noticed a drop in my Tumblr engagement. Hell—I was still writing Mianite content, but it wasn’t live-streamed video. People couldn’t watch it. They had to read it. Herding a video-based audience over to text is a sieve with some pretty wide holes. All but the biggest kernels fall through and are never seen again. Am I implying that readers are more substantial people than non-readers are? No. It’s just a metaphor. But you might be surprised by the things I said at the end of 2015, when I wrestled with the realization that I’d lost the foothold James had given me. I was becoming that word content creators fear – irrelevant – and I wasn’t ready for it.

I’m going to frame my big screw-up as a cautionary tale so it stings a little less. If a fan of your work creates a new version of your heroic character (such as Prince Andor) and paints them as weak and sad, don’t let pride take hold. Don’t go off on your fan. Don’t do what I did. If you’re more emotionally intelligent than I was (which is likely), you might not need the advice.

After a few more mishaps, my Tumblr traffic went down to near-zero. I was angry. I was digging in. By the time I came to my senses, it was over.

My Minecraft life since then has been on-and-off. I spoke on a building panel with BlockWorks at Minecon 2016. At one point during the event, I stood fifty feet from CaptainSparklez but didn’t have the grit to approach him. I wrote an award-winning Minecraft short story that’s been collecting dust in my writing portfolio for the past near-decade. I placed well in a few build competitions. I taught organics classes. I had some sculptures published in a hardcover book, courtesy of James. I kept doing commissions with BlockWorks until about 2017, when the Minecraft Marketplace burst onto the scene and BlockWorks bucked the trend, leaving me to find new teams like Cyclone. The Minecraft Marketplace was (and is) a place where Minecraft creators monetize their content directly through Microsoft, which owns Minecraft now. They sell mini-games, adventure maps, resource packs, skin packs, and more. I’ve done builds, music, sound effects, and dialogue for several Marketplace teams. I stopped doing Marketplace work at the end of 2022.

Here’s a sculpture I made for an organics contest in 2017. She’s a dead tree-lady with a family of desert cardinals nesting in her hollowed-out body.

The last chapter of my Minecraft journey skips back to 2018, when I was deep into my Marketplace career and two years into my exile from the Mianite fandom.

A few fans still liked me, believe it or not. One of them made a Tumblr post about me. Talk about beating a dead horse. It mentioned my flaws, but it also brought up some redeeming qualities, which surprised me. It seemed almost like an appeal to my humanity. Imagine that. Touched by the gesture, I thanked the person in a reply comment and accepted their invitation to play on a Mianite fan server they were involved with. Still in possession of my favorite Mianite character account – Prince Andor – I logged in and started playing.

From there, I joined a small Discord server for Mianite fans, where I got back into Mianite writing. I role-played on Mianite fan servers. I hung out with fans in a normal, human way. I made lasting friendships. I met the love of my life and let them (they/them pronouns) start the slow work of soothing my inflamed ego.

In that phase, I did a lot of apologizing. I faced up to the ways I’d hurt people—ways I wouldn’t have known, had I not come back to see the damage. I was, dare I say, starting to appreciate the value of human life. (That’s a really weird thing to say.) And dare I say, I’ve continued the process. I’m still fiery and short-sighted, but I’m forgiven. I’m loved. I’m a little more careful than I was. And what I lost in a professional foothold, I gained in humility. Yes, I realize that’s sort of a humble brag, but how do you avoid it? How? I really don’t know.

Nowadays, I can’t spend more than thirty minutes in Minecraft without getting a hot, stifled sensation all through my chest, neck, and head. I haven’t had a strong desire to play since June of 2023, when I wrapped up my final Mianite role-play with my SO’s group. My Marketplace work has tapered off. I’m turning my eyes – like I did in Romania – from the blocky terrain below to a horizon of pure words. I want to write. But this time, there’s no James to call me back to the cube-world. This time, I’m moving on. I always knew what I wanted to do. My Mianite fans don’t know it, but I began work on my novels seven years before Minecraft was a thought in my head.

Here’s me and my SO’s Mianite role-play group sitting under Fate’s charred tree, having told a damn good story. (Possibly better than Season Two.) I’m in the black robe. My SO is in blue.

My fallout with the Mianite fandom made me softer to the hearts of people. That alone would be enough to give meaning to my Minecraft journey. But is there anything else? Did I gain anything aside from a much-needed wake-up call? And making lifelong friends? And meeting my soulmate?

Maybe. Let’s see—I’ve just finished an important draft of my first (publishable) novel. When I read it, I wonder how much my build team experience is to thank for the artful structures and landscapes that show up in my original world. I wonder if the playful main character, Nils – who makes the reading easy – was inspired by the Mianite streamers, who invited the viewer in. I wonder if the awe-inspiring majesty of my story’s “big moments” take a page from Circleight’s book.

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then I’ve really outdone myself.

But if I’m being honest, those affirmations don’t cross my mind as often as I’d like. When I reflect on how my years in Minecraft built me (or didn’t), more common thoughts are…

Would I be further along in life if my twelve years in the cube-world had been more focused on reading and writing?

Where would I be if I hadn’t gotten a taste of fame before I was ready?

Where would I be if I had been ready? What if I’d understood the opportunity Mianite presented and ridden the wave gracefully?

And a real zinger—did I peak at twenty-five?

Those questions are chronic death. I can’t stand them, but they never let up. Maybe I’ll have some peace when I achieve my goal of sharing my original work on a wide scale. I know I can do it—and that’s not just my parents’ formative praise talking. Those twelve years gave me something special. They made me a better writer than I would’ve been otherwise.

Yeah—Minecraft made me a better writer than I would’ve been if I’d done nothing but pore over books and type my ass off for twelve years.

Because writing is more than writing. Writing is seeing. Writing is shaping. Writing is defining. Giving weight. Catching the eye. Leaving negative space. It’s the principle of making your tools invisible. Minecraft sculpting makes blocks disappear; writing makes words disappear.

That’s how my mind works. In the Ayurvedic tradition, I’m a Vata—a wind-type mind. I cycle between activities and I learn about one thing by doing another. That’s how I connect my aspects and grow as a whole.

And maybe I’m in a better place than I would be if I’d ridden the Mianite wave. Maybe, by cutting those ties and keeping my name out of future productions, I avoided the artistic decay of the content creation scene. Maybe I did the right thing for my stories.

There. I’ve drawn new meaning from my Minecraft journey. It sounds like another rationalization, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. But it gives me hope—hope that I can still salvage my dream.

Twelve years in Minecraft. Would I spend them again? No. But I’m glad I did.

Do you have a strange diversion like mine? A “twelve years in Minecraft?” What part of your life do you suspect was wasted? If a bell chimes, consider doing a thought exercise like I just did. Find the parts of your story that have built the you of today – even if you aren’t who you wanted to be – and see how you stack up against the old plan. The comments await your heartfelt thoughts.

Also, take a listen to the Iron Maiden song, “Wasted Years.” It might give you some solace that my words can’t.