Alohomora

The pixels, portals, and paradoxes of our digital wonderlands

To know the world, one must construct it.

- Pavese

Popular fiction is filled with stories about children who grow to realize that they possess some kind of special power—usually, they learn this from an unexpected incident, however jarring, that makes them realize Woah! There’s something special I have going on here. 

These are moments like when Harry Potter accidentally made the glass of the zoo snake tank vanish with his magic before he knew anything about wizards or Hogwarts, or when Elsa from Frozen realizes how powerful and dangerous her powers are when she accidentally harms her sister Anna with her ice magic when they were kids.

From those moments onwards, their lives will never be the same. These heroes and heroines must embark on a journey to understand how to master this special ability they possess. Failing to understand and manage their potent powers has dire consequences—they end up being controlled by their own powers and live in misery due to being unable to properly channel their abilities, like Elsa when she shut herself in her own ice palace. 

On the other hand, mastery over their powers enables our young heroes and heroines to unlock new agencies and channel their abilities to accomplish formidable deeds. In fact, they only become capable of successfully facing external challenges when they’ve learned to resolve their own internal conflict—the one of wrestling with and properly understanding how to wield their own latent superpowers, simultaneously nurturing and taming it. This dynamic is everywhere in the stories that have captured the hearts and minds of millions of kids, from Avatar the Last Airbender to Percy Jackson & The Heroes of Olympus. 

We grow up steeped in and shaped by these myths—why does this narrative arc enthrall us? What parallels do we see between these iconic stories and our own contemporary lives? 

Today every single child growing up with technology has at minimum one of these incredibly potent superpowers as a baseline — access to the internet and its infinite portals. The internet as a superpower is a source of mystique, danger, and untapped pools of agency. It can satisfy almost your every curiosity and enable you to create things and discover people that would otherwise totally be impossible pre-Digital Age.

With the power of the internet, all kids have a higher probability of stumbling upon the talent they were destined to master, to become the “Chosen One” of their own journeys. But we all must learn to tread carefully, to understand how to wield this double-edged superpower of the internet to enable us to discover other latent powers—to artfully manipulate it without being manipulated by it. 

Alohomora…

Every child has that moment when they stumble upon something on the internet that makes them realize Wow I can’t believe it! I’m doing what feels like magic—it can be as simple as the moment when you realize you can work on the same Google Doc at the same time as 2 other friends, or when you find yourself stumbling into a 3-hour Youtube rabbit hole about a fascinating topic you thought you hated in school, all the way up to the moment when you make your first dollar on an eBay shop or program your first website. 

At first the internet may seem like a really cool, really advanced toy but gradually you might stumble upon something on here that makes you realize Hold up, I can use this thing to craft my own world. This is no longer just a playground but a space to build empires—to affect the world beyond my screen even. 

This is the moment when you’ve crossed the threshold. Another iconic narrative arc flickers to life — kids can now literally follow in the footsteps of superheroes like Spiderman and Batman who live double lives, working mundane jobs during the day while accomplishing heroic deeds at night. Similarly, that master hacker with the anonymous username could be 12 years old or 32 years old — it’s now possible to live the fantasy, the thrill of following in the footsteps of superhero role models with dual lives. 

This is the bildungsroman of the digital age — to realize you can play, and win a different game than what was served up to you in your IRL life, to realize that you can design your own games and that the ceilings in the world behind your screen is higher than what IRL adults would make it seem.

The internet is an ocean—with many goldmine treasure chests and many lurking dangers. But just because there are dangers does not mean we should completely shield kids, ban kids from its shores — this delays not only their growth, their ability to discover empowering tools & communities online, but even more importantly the delayed exposure can render them defenseless when they ultimately must face the internet and all its whirlpools head-on.

How do we help kids learn how to swim in this ocean while we ourselves are also struggling to learn along with them? To not drown in our ever-evolving, metamorphosing digital world, we must all figure out how to become masterful amphibians — capable of navigating and reconciling our worlds IRL and on the URL.  

Kids today and in the future are inevitably going to grow up in multiple parallel universes, one foot in the online universe and one foot in their home and school environments—almost think of the latter as the anchor that kids will gradually wade farther and farther away from as they surf the Great Online earlier and earlier.

As they spend more time in the bewitching digital worlds they discover, as they acquire new skills and experiment with different identities online, how do our relationships with the youngest generation evolve as they become almost strangers, speaking different languages from their family and even their own offline peers? They will become people who have seen and resided in whole different worlds. Normally, kids and parents start spending less and less time in the same shared world starting in their teens, but access to the portals created by technology accelerates this process—how do families prepare for this? 

In attempting to face these monumental questions, let’s start by zooming in to grapple with the questions surrounding one of these mini-digital universes that have captured the hearts & minds of millions of children since its inception over a decade ago:

Minecraft, where millions of kids have turned to pour their creativity, the pixelated wonderland that has ignited their ambition, their passion, their compulsion to build, create, design, invent… 

Children are building out pixelated empires in Minecraft—how do we even begin to make sense of this? 

While the many stifling containers kids find themselves in (schools, daycares, etc.) often put an arbitrary ceiling on how much kids are given the space, resources, and community to learn and build at their own pace, the “world of bits” is moving at a startlingly fast pace at tearing down these walls and limitations — and the creativity of children is pouring through the cracks. 

Anyone, anywhere can build.

— that is the core appeal and thesis of Minecraft. The low barrier to entry to get started on the platform makes building permissionless for kids. The explosive popularity of the game hints that there is this strong latent desire to create things — an instinct innate to children in how they begin constructing their relationship with the world.

Minecraft is an infinite playground where you can construct houses, castles, villages, forts, cities… whatever your heart’s desire without having to overcome the physical constraints or spend years developing the technical skills before making your first attempt to build. 

It creates an accessible but nevertheless magical gateway experience— it allows you to earn the tingling feeling of seeing your creative vision come to life – however imperfectly — and that urge to perfect it then becomes your compulsion to master the craft of creation — of chasing the satisfaction derived from gradually aligning that difference between your mind’s ideal and your hand’s ability. 

Minecraft fulfills the ultimate fantasy of childhood: to transcend the oftentimes stifling environments children find themselves plopped into, to an exciting other-world they can discover the agency to shape.

In Minecraft, kids realize quite literally that the world is indeed a malleable place. They begin to instantiate their own universes that they can shape to their own vision, starkly contrasting the IRL world of worksheets and classrooms, which feel even more stagnant now in comparison. 

So it’s a pixelated, ceiling-less sandbox world that enables kids to unleash their creative energy, for oftentimes there are so few outlets in their brick-and-mortar lives. 

Ok great, so what’s the catch? 

How do we explain our totally reasonable, instinctive hesitancy about the idea of kids spending hours and hours glued to alluring pixelated worlds? 

Thoughtfully designed game-worlds like Minecraft are great stomping grounds for exploration — for getting their first taste of the thrill of shaping their own worlds that might gradually steer them towards learning more skills that will enable them to shape more elaborate worlds. 

However, here’s what feels uncanny about the phenomenon of many kids drowning themselves in these digital game worlds:

1) The relationships forged solely through these gaming interfaces are parasocial (developing attachments to anonymous username acquaintances on a screen)

2) The great deeds and accomplishments achieved feel artificial once you step away from the screen—so why step away at all? Sometimes, the digital world that enabled creative escapism becomes another prison we can’t escape. 

We must recognize that games like Minecraft simultaneously both enhance the agency of kids but can also chip away at it if we’re not careful—it is one of the many mutations of the overarching double-edged superpower of the internet. 

Technology can sometimes make each of us feel like gods, transforming us from muggle to wizard, enabling us to accomplish deeds unimaginable without it—but it is a god itself that demands its own sacrifices, explicitly or implicitly, on the altar of our attention. Figuring out how to negotiate our relationship with technology, how to use the resources and communities of the internet to shape the world to your will instead of becoming a slave to the alluring but ultimately pseudo-digital worlds will emerge to be one of the core questions of education unique to our times. 

Learning to manage the superpower of the internet is what will enable kids to discover what their unique superpower is early on — whether it’s by starting off doing art on Procreate, negotiating deals on Animal Crossing, dipping their toes into programming with Scratch games, writing with fanfiction.net, or building things with Minecraft. To kids, the internet is an untapped source of power that we are just barely scratching the surface of, but there are also dire consequences if they don’t learn how to manage these potent powers properly. How do we reconcile this dilemma and create environments where kids are able to reap the benefits of learning how to interact on these online platforms without being consumed by them? 

There’s no definite answer to this question, and the lines will have to be actively drawn and redrawn…