Autcraft — Building a Haven for the Autistic on Minecraft
Or ‘A Census of a Better World’
There will be those of you who have begun your journey through this article — a journey predestined for a violent end, I’m afraid — with a certain feeling of demiverachtung; “little contempt”, the sentiment many feel when they have begun reading an online article in spite of, or indeed because of, the fact that they are fairly sure that its subject, or one aspect of its subject, is to some degree beneath them. “What a choice of topic focus”, perhaps you scoffed…
“ …Minecraft. And relative to such a serious topic as autism”
For those of you to whom this description applies, and to whom demiverachtung currently attaches itself, your conception of what Minecraft is will be roughly demonstrated by the first video posted beneath this introductory paragraph, in which a user navigates a crude pyramid.
The complication I would venture to mix with that initial conception is contained within the second video, posted beneath the first, in which another user constructs their own pyramid.
Excuse the soundtrack.
There is good reason why at least one major news circulation dubbed Minecraft the young century’s greatest game. One would be hard-pressed to deny the sense of sublimity that is engendered by the structural realisation in that second video. However imaginary its product, it is clearly the work of will and wild animus, the kind which, as it piles one brick atop the last, knowing there are hundreds of thousands still to go, wrestles down the sense of uncertainty or presumed futility-of-effort which the builders of the original pyramids must themselves have struggled with.
