- Encounter: A World Made of Blocks
I first encountered Minecraft in 2011, when I was still a child full of curiosity and wonder. I remember sitting in front of a clunky computer, watching my character punch a tree with a square fist. There was no tutorial, no instructions—just a vast, pixelated world made of blocks and silence. I was instantly captivated. The game felt at once strange and intuitive, familiar yet entirely unknown. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but I knew I wanted to explore everything.
It wasn’t long before I discovered mods—player-created modifications that added new dimensions, tools, creatures, and rules to the game. I was drawn to them not because I understood how they worked, but precisely because I didn’t. There was something thrilling about installing a mysterious new mod and wandering into its world like an explorer landing on an alien planet. I didn’t yet have the scientific vocabulary to understand terms like “quantum generator” or “biosphere regulator,” but I remember the excitement of trying to assemble machines without knowing what they did. It was chaos—and it was beautiful.
Looking back now, I realize that these early experiences weren’t just about playing a game. They were about being immersed in an ecosystem of partial understanding. In my nowadays words, these digital objects were part of a regime of value that exceeded monetary worth—they evoked a sense of ritualized engagement, intimacy, and even reverence. Each texture, each sound—especially those soft ambient tones that played at dusk—became a kind of mnemonic anchor. A blocky sunrise could feel like coming home.
This was my everyday world for years. I explored caves after school, tried and failed to build complicated contraptions, and chased digital goals that only made sense in that strange pixelated logic. The game’s materiality—its grainy textures, repetitive motions, and chiptune-like sound design—etched itself into my memory. It was, as Joe Moran might put it, not simply a game, but a medium of the everyday: repetitive, unnoticed, and yet capable of evoking the uncanny. A world where even the mundane could be haunted by memory.
MEMORY REBUILD 