Sometimes you create your own moments.
Father’s Day is arriving soon. Time for more Great Moments in Dad History. We here at MojoFiction have a competitive relationship with our nine-year-old son. This may have led to some bad behavior. For example:
Sometimes our son gets up early in the morning just so he can hide out downstairs and shoot us with the dart gun when we come down. This is not cool; we have not yet had our coffee. On the other hand, we may have started it by getting up early to place a motion detector just outside his bedroom door that makes a loud sound when set off. That is very funny.
Then there was the time he hopped into the car first and snuck a whoopee cushion onto our seat, hoping we wouldn’t see it. We have no further comment on that.
Then there was the open house at his school. When he went to the bathroom we grabbed a sheet of paper, made a quick drawing that only our son would understand, and then hid it in his desk to find the next morning. Apparently the teacher was not thrilled with his verbal reaction to the discovery.
Now there’s Minecraft.
If you are not familiar with Minecraft, first, check your pulse. Alive? Okay. Minecraft is a “sandbox” game based on the ancient Egyptian tradition of making everything out of large blocks, even trees and octopuses. Ancient Egyptians, while they had many gods, firmly did not believe in anti-aliasing or, apparently, high-resolution, which might explain the recent find of 300 unused NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780s in the Valley of the Kings. Basically, though, Minecraft is an advanced form of Lego for the video game generation.
Our son has been smitten by Minecraft and he talks about it incessantly. So we logged in to see what the insanity was all about. Well, the Egyptians were on to something, because in Minecraft you are basically an 16-bit god. With that in mind, we generated a random world and started building stuff. And behold, we saw that it was good. And there was morning and evening the first Minecraft day, and each lasted around 7 minutes or so.
We were so please with ourself that we immediately called our son up to see our creation handiwork:
Our son, obviously proud of us, said something like, “Oh…”
We said, “What? It was our first try. We officially get 7 days of this stuff.”
He said, “Can I show you my first try?”
We said, “We dare you to.”
He logged on to his world and:
“Well that’s very nice,” we said.
Later that night, after everyone was asleep, we snuck into the office and got back to work. The next morning we woke our son up and said, “Look at this!”
“Hey, you’re getting better,” he said.
“Duh,” we said.
“Can I show you what I made last week?” he asked.
“Okay…”
So he pulled up a second world (he has a lot of worlds) and:
All right, we could see where this was going, so we decided to play the dad-card. See, in Minecraft, there is a little something called “seeding,” whereby a user enters a code prior to creating their world. The code directs Minecraft to create a special world. For example, if you type in “Avatar,” you get a world built around James Cameron’s head.
So this time, we got clever. With our son sitting there, we typed in the seed for a new world. We typed in “dad is the awesomest in, like, ever, and can even build cooler structures than certain offspring.”
And we were rewarded with Dad-Land:
And then, with a smug look on our face, we rotated the view to get a better look at the world.
Behind us, we saw this:
Assuming that he had won, our son brushed his hands together, signaling that he was done, and went downstairs to load his dart gun. Sure he won. That round.
After we took him back to his mom’s for the week, we logged back in and accessed our son’s desert world. In the desert world he has a quaint little village full of monks. Or something. They look weird and have really large noses.
We figured this group of pious villagers needed a guardian, so we crafted a colossus to watch over the town:
Then we turned the view around so he can’t see the giant statue right away the next time he logs in.
We can’t wait.
Super-Dad status confirmed.
MojoFiction 
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