When going on an academic trip to read and explore a city like New Orleans, the video game Minecraft is not what comes to mind as part of the experience. However, what started as a way to escape the heat and decompress became part of the trip for me. Before exploring the connection between bookpacking and Minecraft, I’ll explain how I play Minecraft.
Minecraft is considered a sandbox video game, which means that, like a real sandbox, you can create anything you want with enough skill and imagination. Except, instead of sand castles, it’s castles made out of pixilated blocks. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of different ways to play Minecraft, so instead of trying to describe all the different ways to play, I’ll go over how I play. Despite my undying love for video games, I am pretty bad at them. To compensate for this, I play Minecraft on peaceful mode, which means there are no hostile mobs (which is short for mobile entity) that can threaten to kill you, causing you to lose all the resources in your inventory. I do play survival mode every now and then, but I tend to stick to creative mode. In creative, you can’t die; you can fly as well as have access to unlimited resources to build and create with. Normally, I would create a new world and fly around until I found a cool-looking area to build a house or structure in. However, I recently decided that I wanted to practice my building skills since some of the buildings people have created show just how much is possible in a world made entirely of cubes. I watched a couple of YouTube videos and learned some tips on how to make more interesting or realistic builds. Currently, I am playing on what is called a Super Flat World, which generates a world that is completely flat and covered in grass. This makes building much easier because you aren’t fighting the natural terrain of the normal worlds, which can be tedious to clear out.
It’s on my Super Flat World named Cortona (I can’t remember why I named it that) that I probably created sometime back in 2019, but only returned to recently, when Bookpacking starts to come into the picture. I upgraded my phone after having my iPhone SE for almost 6 years to the new iPhone, and I was able to play Minecraft on my phone without it destroying my storage space. I rediscovered my love for Minecraft and building houses. This is why, during our trip to Grand Isle, I was so inspired by the architecture I was seeing that I made my own version of the houses in my world, Cortona. Once we arrived in New Orleans and walked around the French Quarter, and later the Seventh Ward, Treme, Lower Ninth, New Orleans East, and Marigny I felt the same excitement about building a shotgun-style house with all the beautiful colors and detailing. However, I didn’t want to create just one shotgun house; I planned to make five using all the different wood types in Minecraft to reflect the different colored houses all lined up next to each other. I got started on my research, taking pictures of different houses I saw on the street, looking up floor plans, and searching for interior images on the internet. I started laying out different foundations that still rang true to the saying of being able to shoot a shotgun through the house; however, in Minecraft, that would be a crossbow.
When we began reading The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, I got the idea to make the yellow house in Minecraft using the descriptions from the book to help me better visualize the house. At first, this seemed simple, but as I kept reading and playing, I realized that there was going to be some creative liberties with my interpretation of the house. Because the yellow house has gone through several transformations over the years, originally being green, having a crown attached to the top, and constant work being started but never fully finished, the house never looked the same for too long. There is also the issue of what you put in a real house versus a Minecraft house. For example, it is normal for a Minecraft house to have an anvil, crafting tables, and enchantment tables, which can make your tools stronger, and other items that don’t belong in the average American home. Additionally, most Minecraft houses don’t have bathrooms, dining rooms, curtains, and other common household items unless they are there for aesthetic reasons. At first, I was going to build the house like a Minecraft house; however, while reading The Yellow House, all the descriptions of the interior of the house, I realized that I would compromise and do a combination of what is said in the book and what is common in a Minecraft house.
Exterior of the yellow house and the shotgun house inspried by local architecture.
The yellow house lot today, with the white house on the left side.
There was one thing I couldn’t achieve in Minecraft when recreating the yellow house, and that was the wear and tear it had been through. Now, if I were a more experienced builder and had more time, maybe it would have been possible to achieve what was described in the book. However, despite how hard I try, I’m still just ok at Minecraft (I’m getting much better at it!). After completing the exterior of the house, I realized that what I had built wasn’t the yellow house from the book, but instead what the yellow house could have been. A pristine, well-built house that felt uniform, connected, and strong, because there are no yellow blocks that naturally look like they are in disrepair. In a way, when the house was completed, I felt sad. It felt like I was seeing a version of what the house should have been, but instead, it was bulldozed after Katrina and is slowly being taken over by junk. The Minecraft yellow house is like a picture you put of a loved one after they passed, a picture of them in their prime. The building outlines of the shotgun houses that I still need to work on look a little like the concrete foundations left over in the empty plots because of Katrina. This wasn’t my intention, but it felt like maybe the yellow house could have survived like the white colored one that stands next to its plot today if it just had the resources to be repaired. I did not bulid the yellow house, I bulit what Ivory Mae thought the house would become.
“I always dreamt I would have this house that was so pretty. It was gonna have a nice front yard, a big backyard. Three bedrooms. A sewing room. I always pictured a front room that had a window with a little seat running across it...It wasn’t a big ole house, just a nice house”
Interior of the Minecraft yellow house.
In a weird way, my escape from the heat and how I take breaks between reading has become just as much a part of this bookpacking experience as the travel and reading. Minecraft has added this fun yet impactful layer to an already layered trip. I currently have only the two shotgun houses fully built, and I hope to post all five finished before my last blog.