So my youngest (who is ten) came to me on Sunday afternoon and said, “Daddy? Will you play a Minecraft LAN game with me?” She loves playing Minecraft, and building outrageous pink and gold structures, but sometimes she wants company.

Now, Minecraft is designed to be multiplayer, but in our house it’s generally played single-player because we’ve never managed to get it to play reliably on our LAN. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. This particular day it didn’t, and after about half-an-hour of trying this and that I decided to try something different.

Some months ago, Mojang announced something called “Minecraft Realms”: you can pay Mojang to host a Minecraft world for you on their servers. Only people you explicitly invite to play can come play in it. And it’s all built into Minecraft, so you don’t need to worry about the network configuration. I thought, “Well, it’s a monthly fee; let’s try it for one month and see how it goes.” And I set it up, and invited Mary to come play.

And so we were beginning to build a house and a mine, and gather resources and such like, and my eldest, who’s 17, came over and said, “Hey, that looks like fun. Can I join?” (I’m a programmer. Computers are one of my hobbies. We have, ummm, enough, yeah, that’s a good word.) And then the fifteen year-old wanted to join as well. And so for the rest of the afternoon, the four of us worked on our little village. (And then we all went to Mass, and then we all had dinner.)

You can see the Big House down right; my second son’s tree house up left; and my eldest’s mine built into the dune in the middle.

So, the cost of setting up the realm was $13 for the month. Four us spent about three hours each with it on Sunday afternoon, or about the same length of time as we’d spend going to the movies. The kids don’t get to play video games during the school week, generally, but they are all looking forward to this weekend. And if they get bored with it by the end of the month, hey, I don’t need to renew the subscription. Not bad, not bad at all.