As I start writing this it's 6:27PM on Sunday the 22nd of August 2021. Melbourne has now passed 200 days in lockdown. Unfortunately for my family, the timing of these lockdowns means my daughter has just spent her second birthday in a row in lockdown. Happy 8th birthday munchkin! Only a few hours ago my daughter was enjoying her birthday party, peaking at 15 kids.
No face masks.
No social distancing.
And no worries, because we never left the house.
Last year we held an enormous video call to wish my daughter a happy 7th birthday. Video calls are great for work meetings, they're great for conferences. They're not great (or even good) for a large family gathering, where everyone wants to talk, everyone wants to catch up and everyone wants to sing Happy Birthday at the same time. For that reason my daughter asked that we delay this year's family gathering until lockdown ends. I'm fine with that and fully understand why the video call wasn't enjoyable, especially for a child. But this left two big questions: How we make her birthday still feel special? How can she see her friends?
The answer is given away by the title of this post: Minecraft.
A few weeks back as another lockdown project I build some super budget (but exciting looking) gaming PCs with my kids (this will be a follow up post). My daughter's friends are using a combination of PCs and iPads so Minecraft Bedrock Edition was the only choice. You can read about the different versions here if you need to.
So a week ago I started building a Minecraft Bedrock Edition server on Linux (I'll detail how I did this in a follow-up post also). I built my own server because I was trying to avoid the issues of running the game off a PC that one of the kids are using. I also didn't want to use public servers because I wanted the kids to have a private space to play without any strangers. Next I started pulling together a quick "how to get started" guide to walk all the other parents through how to setup Minecraft, Discord and how to send me the relevant details so I could add their kids to the server's whitelist.
The final step was to set up my own monitoring station. One PC to monitor server health and connectivity logs. One PC to stay logged into the game and moderate things so everyone is happy (pro tip: if you're planning to host a Minecraft party for younger kids also, disable friendly fire from the very beginning).
And that's it! I know the endless march of pandemic through 2020 and onwards into 2021 is weighing heavily on many people, so hopefully this inspires you to create a little escape that your kids can enjoy.