Crafting away bad feelings

Journal, 15th of June 2026

Photo by Djesic on Unsplash

Right, I’ll admit it.

I’m a gamer.

A dirty, filthy gamer. A greasy basement-dweller of the worst kind!

This is your que to throw rotten tomatoes at me. I’ll take them all with stride.

Recently, I’ve been playing Minecraft again. It’s not a hardcore gaming experience by any means; my friend group has a shared server where we work together to explore, build houses and all the other jazz. But the laidback nature of the experience is kind of the whole point for me at the moment — it’s something chill to do while working through my recent breakup.

God it feels like this breakup is becoming my whole journaling personality…

Not too long ago, I joined a research study spanning multiple universities both here and abroad. It focuses on the experiences of people who play video games (not just “gamers” per se) on a game-by-game basis. Participants at my university were asked to write notes about their personal gaming sessions in great detail — with a focus on “what makes the game fun”. Between rounds of sharing said notes in essay form to the researchers, I had multiple meetings with an assigned researcher who asked me additional questions.

One of these questions was simple, but it stuck with me. I was writing notes on a game called CS2, and the researcher asked me: “Is CS2 your comfort game?”.

I really had to stop and think. Sure, I had poured thousands of hours into playing the game over more than ten years, but I couldn’t bring myself to call it a “comfort game”.

“No. CS2 is usually very intense and competitive. There’s no real reason such a game couldn’t become your comfort game if you were so inclined, but for me a comfort game should be something with less stakes.”, I answered.

The researcher noted my answer and we moved on.

It was only later that I started thinking; do I actually have a comfort game?

The first thing that came to mind was OldSchool Runescape (OSRS for short), a medieval point-and-click RPG from more than 20 years ago. I’ve quite literally been playing that game since I was 4 years old, and it often feels like nothing’s changed from back in the day; at its best it’s like eating your favourite childhood candy for the first time all over again. It’s very home-y.

And now that I’ve started playing Minecraft again, I’m getting a lot of those same feelings. The big difference from OSRS is that Minecraft is inherently very creation-based. You can spend hundreds of hours in both games doing whatever you please, but everything in Minecraft somehow feels even more open-ended.

As a result, I’ve just been pouring my energy into creating whatever my heart wills — from hidden gardens in cherry tree groves to giant cat sculptures, complex machines and underground swimming pools. All in a world where I get to share all of it with my best friends.

I think there’s something special about that. It feels great. Comfortable, even.

Sure, I’m a 26-year old man struggling through life on my own.

I could be doing a hundred things that would be more productive for my future than building a hidden underground hypnosis tunnel with an automatic door for three hours in the middle of the night. I could literally be flying to Spain for an all-expenses-paid hiking trip with my mother right now (sorry mom). But I’m not, because I chose not to.

Not because of Minecraft.

But I’m glad I have the game right now, because for every one of those hundred better things I could be doing instead of playing Minecraft, there are a hundred worse things.