Minecraft: The Crash

I was getting used to moving around in the game. There was one thing that I really wanted to try. Flying. From the top of the hill, I jumped twice, expecting my avatar to soar into the sky. Instead, I tumbled down a few blocks. Must be survival mode and not creative, I thought. I climbed back up and looked around. On the other side of the hill, in the distance, was a field of brown. A desert biome, I guessed. There didn t seem to be any villagers or buildings, so I turned and went north, following the curve of the river. I ran past mobs of pigs and sheep, clumps of trees, and fields of flowers. Much farther away, things turned green. Swampy. I d have time to explore all of that later. What I wanted was to check out the village on the other side of the river. So I turned my gaze, and the entire world turned beneath me, pointing me in the direction of the village near my home base.

Running in the game felt amazing. The world whizzed by me, and the exhilaration of being able to sprint around was intoxicating. I could almost pretend that they were really my legs pumping beneath me, sending me flying through the Technicolor scenery. Optical illusion, I said out loud. I knew I was really lying in bed in a hospital room, and the entire world around me was a projection of light that extended only as far as the goggles did. It wasn t real. None of it.

It reminded me of a unit we did on optical illusions with my eighth grade art teacher, Mrs. Franklin. I loved it. There was the Necker cube a cube drawn in two dimensions that you could see two different ways depending on which plane you decided was front or top, and also the Hering illusion, which showed how a at illustration could appear to curve or even move with a series of strategically placed straight lines. But my favorite was the snake illusion, a circle of colors that only seemed to move when you weren t looking directly at it. It seemed like magic, like the colors themselves had a mind that could read

Tracey Baptiste is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction for children including the Jumbies series and The Totally Gross History of Ancient Egypt. Baptiste volunteers with We Need Diverse Books, The Brown Bookshelf, and I, Too Arts Collective. She teaches in Lesley University’s creative writing MFA program, and runs the editorial company Fairy Godauthor.