Want to watch a sci-fi comedian tell stories inside Minecraft?
A new way for me to tell stories.
(I don’t plan on posting about this again, but the long story short is I play Minecraft on twitch.tv most evenings, and I tell stories and jokes whilst doing it).
In my quest to discover increasingly interesting ways of storytelling, I enrolled on a Creative Writing degree in 2013. By 2014 my sister was calling me home, asking me to share a new game with her she had discovered.
Its name was MINECRAFT.
I didn’t like the game’s tutorial world, finding it a bit too restrictive. But once I’d done that, got my hands on some logs and started building a house, I had an idea.
This was somewhere I could tell stories.
To Minecraft content creators, the stories within the game that we write are called LORE. So, the lore of mine and Kath’s world is that we had explored the wilderness and set up a castle to defend ourselves from the creatures that appear at night. It was simple enough. That became a springboard of manic storytelling, from our giant sentient slime cube ‘Susan from Accounting’ (who lived in the castle depths) to the UFO I built in one feverish night between uni essays and the flying machine which accessed it. The world got progressively weirder over time, featuring among other things; a trampoline from which we watched our automatic farms, a church for cats on a floating island in the sky, a disco for our villagers (with working disco floor I invented myself) and above all, my hand-built flying course.
I didn’t get to become a Minecraft youtuber right away because of that degree I mentioned, but I have time to do it now, so I’m doing it, with my own comedic twist.
Minecraft is a game close to my heart. It is a sandbox within which I can tell new stories, and on my twitch stream I get to tell jokes too. I’ve been streaming for about five months now and haven’t mentioned it here on Substack yet, but last night a few people were asking me about my stories on the stream and I realised, a few people here might like my Minecraft content.
So it’s available if you want to watch it. If not, no worries. Normal stories will resume next week.
And if you opened this email around the time it was sent, I will be live right now and you can come by and say hi. At the moment I am building a big castle, and I may soon have a garden of dedication for my Patrons. Watching the stream is free, just like reading most of the stories here.
And if you’re not up to tuning in right now, here’s a pre-recorded intro to show you what kind of stuff I get up to.