Disappointment is one of those things that we all go through as a child. Whether it be a small thing or large, we’ve all been there and gone through it. As an adult though we see it in a different way. A lot of the time though we’ll brush it off as something insignificant, but for the child it could be devastating. And when you’re close to your child seeing the look on their faces, as the lips tremble and the eyes well up, it can break your heart.
One such occasion happened to my son Jay just this last week.
Both of us are mad about minecraft and play it all the time. We both have our own worlds and we’ve been spending quite a bit of time building them up. I’ve even been recording mine and posting the videos on YouTube.
About a week ago we sat down to play in his world that we’d set up with the intention of getting all of his trophies/achievements. As we tried to start up his world it came up with an error message saying that the save was corrupt. Unfortunately we didn’t have a backup of this world, which is something I’ve been doing for ages and I’ve told him to do regularly.
If you think this was his disappointing moment, no it wasn’t, but it was an important part of what was to come.
As a result of losing that world we decided to set up a new account on the PS4 (most of our gameplay is on the Playstation 4) and he would start getting all the trophies again from scratch. He was very excited about this and we started working away on his new world.
In the last week he’s managed to get quite a few of the trophies and we’ve done a lot of building and resource gathering, including getting all diamond armour and swords and enchanting them with really good enchantments. If you don’t play, just know that these are good things to have, particularly the enchantments which are luck based and can be quite difficult to get.
One thing we were particularly excited about was to go and defeat a water temple (and underwater temple with monsters protecting it) and get the gold there. We did this and shortly after we decided to head to the nether (the game’s version of hell) to get some resources there.
This is where we get to the disappointment. And you thought I’d never get there, didn’t you?
As we were running around, gathering materials and killing the monsters there, we were exploring an area that was over a lot of lava (the nether is full of the stuff). Rounding a corner we came across a place with a hole in the floor and a drop straight down into lava.
Can you guess what happened? Take a moment to think, it’s not that big a surprise.
Jay ran forward and dropped. Straight down into the lava and died. Now dieing in minecraft is nothing normally, you just respawn and go and collect all the items you had, which drop on the ground where you died. But since he’d died in lava, all his things burnt up and he lost them.
All the things he’d worked so hard to collect were gone. He exited the game and walked away. The look on his face was heart breaking. He didn’t cry, but I could see it wasn’t too far away.
So what to do? I did the only thing I could do, I quietly talked to him and reassured him that it was okay, and gave him a hug. It didn’t help him much though, whatever we say or do in these situations can only do so much. But being there for them is what we do as parents and I tell myself we do make it better if only a little bit.
We didn’t play again that day, but when we went back to it we loaded up the backup (he’s started doing that everyday now) and did the water temple again. We’ve been back to the nether too and we’re both more careful now. The death has been forgotten, but I still remember that look on his face and wish there was more I could do in those situations.
I could only say, kasihan……