The Adults Left the Room

Somewhere in the world, a sysadmin is keeping a hospital’s patient database alive with a cron job and a quiet prayer. At 17:00, they will clock out, drive home, boot up their computer, and spend the next three hours punching a tree.

Nobody will find this strange. Least of all you, because you already know exactly which tree I mean.

The Game

It’s from Sweden. As a Dane, I am contractually obligated to say: screw Sweden.

Still, if you’re reading this blog, there’s a very good chance you’ve played it. There’s a very good chance you’ve played it this year. Somewhere on an old hard drive sits a world you abandoned in 2014, preserved in a save file. There’s a half-finished house, a chest full of things you meant to sort out later, and a dog still sitting exactly where you told it to stay.

I’m in my early twenties, which is apparently old enough to feel vaguely fossilized whenever I remember that an entire generation grew up playing what everyone calls a children’s game.

Except the people playing it are also the ones keeping the lights on.

Doctors. Lawyers. Systems engineers. The people patching the power grid, maintaining hospital infrastructure, and keeping the internet from collapsing. Every single one of them has, at some point this week, swung a virtual sword at a skeleton before returning to their carefully constructed little house by the water, beside a roaring mountain range.

It all started the same way though.

You punch a tree. You make a table. You craft a pickaxe. The sun starts going down, and you suddenly realize you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. So you dig into a hillside and spend the night hiding in a dirt hole like a raccoon in a dumpster.

Then you hear it.

A hiss.

A kid in São Paulo, a kid in Osaka, and I have all experienced this exact moment. We all responded in precisely the same way: a high-pitched scream, a frantic attempt to identify the source, and a confident sprint in the wrong direction.

Different languages, different continents. Same primal terror. We had more in common than we thought.

The Rules

Everyone who has played long enough learns the laws.

• Never dig straight down.
• Don’t light the TNT while you’re standing in your own base.
• Lie about where the diamonds are, and your friends stop following you within the hour.
• Don’t steal from other people’s chests, burn down their buildings, or spend an afternoon making their lives miserable just because you can. Do that on a well-run multiplayer server, and you’ll get banned. We even had a word for people who did it: griefers.

Nobody needed a philosophy degree to figure out that explosives are dangerous or that people don’t like having their houses burned down. The game was remarkably good at teaching consequences, and the lava applied to everyone. You could argue with the rules, ignore them, or spend an entire evening hunting for a loophole. The lava was still there.

But notice that those are two different kinds of rules. The lava is physics. It’s there whether or not anyone is watching. The ban is a rule that exists because somebody wrote it down and somebody stuck around to enforce it.

There was a whole corner of the community that ran anarchy servers on purpose, where griefing wasn’t a violation, it was the game. Your house burned down, and that was considered content. Everyone who logged in knew what they were signing up for, and everyone could log off.

And another thing: the world existed independently of what you believed about it.

Two players could argue all night about where to build their houses. They could disagree about which mountain looked better, or whether that cave was worth exploring.

But they couldn’t disagree about whether the cliff was there.

It was. You could walk up to it, look down, and fall off it if you weren’t paying attention.

For a game about punching trees, it’s a surprisingly good foundation for a functioning society.

Where Are the Adults?

Look at the news.

The most powerful country on Earth is currently digging straight down. Enthusiastically, on live television.

And when someone points out the lava, the response is that there is no lava. There has never been any lava. The person pointing at the lava is the real enemy, and perhaps we should investigate their motives.

Leaders of entire nations, people entrusted with the lives of millions, stand at podiums and lie.

Not the clever kind of lie, you know, the kind that requires a team of lawyers to establish that the speaker technically said something else. I’m talking about the sort of lie where someone looks you dead in the eye, tells you the sky is a different color, and then expects you to thank them for the weather report.

And the part I cannot get my head around is that nothing happens. Nobody gets banned.

I don’t have a joke for this part. I tried to come up with one, but every punchline I could think of was less absurd than the actual news. I’m at a loss for words, which, for a man with a blog, is a medical emergency.

We have a word for grown men who destroy other people’s homes because they can. We have rules against it. We have entire communities built around the understanding that other people’s enjoyment of a shared world matters.

Except these particular griefers have armies, nuclear arsenals, and podiums. They can destroy things on a scale that makes a burning wooden hut look like an unfortunate campfire incident.

And they behave as though the world has a respawn button.

It doesn’t.

The Server Doesn’t Pause

So who’s supposed to be in charge?

We are.

The old ones age out, the next ones step in, and the world gets handed over like a keycard. Eventually, it’s our turn to decide what gets built, what gets maintained, and what gets torn down.

And we’re not the worst people for the job.

We learned, in a block-shaped sandbox, that a lie has a price. That the cliff is real, regardless of what anyone says about it. That you can’t keep digging forever without eventually finding something you really should have left alone.

We learned that other people exist, that their things matter to them, and that a shared world only works when everyone agrees to play by at least some of the same rules.

Somewhere in 2026, the voice of reason is a twenty-four-year-old with several thousand hours in a game about dirt.

And then so many of us don’t vote.

The people who can see the cliff are leaning against the wall of the lobby with their hands in their pockets, while the people sprinting straight toward it are the ones showing up to the booth.

It’s difficult to care about a system when every available option feels like choosing which direction to dig. It’s difficult to believe that your vote matters when the machinery seems designed to ensure that the same people keep winning. And it’s difficult to feel responsible for a world that has spent years giving you reasons to believe nobody else is.

But there’s a difference between recognizing that the system is broken and deciding that your absence is going to fix it.

On a well-run server, you could go AFK for a week and your house would still be standing. We rarely stopped to ask why. Someone had set up the protections, written the rules, and stayed online to enforce them. That was work, and it was invisible, which is how you know it was done well.

Anyone who has played on a server where that person left knows what happens next. The world doesn’t pause. The sun keeps moving. Nothing out there cares that you stepped away. The people who are still online keep building, and they build whatever they like.

When you finally come back, your base might be gone. Your chests might be empty. There might be a sign where your front door used to be, explaining in remarkably poor spelling why someone decided to set your house on fire.

An empty seat doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled by whoever turned up. Leaving it unattended and hoping whoever turns up is considerate is not a plan. It’s a prayer. And prayers, as any sysadmin can tell you, are not a substitute for backups.

Meanwhile, the ones of us who do show up are often showing up to work, and some of that work is a lot bigger than a hut.

Some of the largest AI infrastructure companies on the planet are staffed by people who were in university only a few years ago. People handed budgets the size of small countries and told to build technology that could fundamentally alter the way humanity operates.

They are building the future. And above them? Nobody supervising. Nobody who read the manual. Nobody who remembers what the hiss behind you means.

And they probably play it too.

They have a world. They have a tamed wolf. They learned the same rules I did, that you did. They know what happens when you dig straight down, and they know what it sounds like when something gets too close in the dark.

Whether any of that knowledge survives contact with a billion dollars of compute is another question.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to, and I hate it.

The problem was never that we play a children’s game. The problem is that nobody seems to be supervising anyone. Not the people building the technology. Not the people making the laws. Not the people who are supposed to hold them accountable. And not the rest of us, who keep looking away because the whole thing is too exhausting to watch.

The adults left the room.

The griefers stayed.

Epilogue

Is it a children’s game?

Sure.

It’s also one of the few places I’ve watched strangers from across the world agree on anything without first needing to establish which side they’re on.

Everyone starts the same way. No tools, ten minutes of daylight, and a tree.

You don’t get to choose the terrain. You don’t get to negotiate with the sun. You don’t get to decide that gravity is a political opinion. You get the world as it is, and whatever you manage to build in it.

Some people build castles. Some build machines. Some spend hundreds of hours making a single mountain look beautiful. Some spend their evenings helping a complete stranger find their way home.

The adults were supposed to have a better plan. They were supposed to know what they were doing, to understand the world they inherited, and to leave it in a better state than they found it.

They didn’t.

So I suppose we’ll have to make do.

We’ll punch the tree. We’ll build the hut. We’ll put a torch outside for whoever is still wandering around in the dark. We’ll teach the new players not to dig straight down, and we’ll keep an eye on the people who insist on doing it anyway.

None of it works if we’re AFK. Log back in. Dig down far enough into any of us, and there’s a layer you hit.

Bedrock.

The one layer in that world you cannot dig through, no matter how hard you try.

I’m starting to suspect the adults would like to find out.