The Internet Helped These Feuding Brothers Keep Playing Minecraft Together

The story of a real person who went to reddit and asked for help, and found a path to keep a longstanding brotherly bond going.

Photo by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash. These are not the people in this story.

Being a sibling is hard, but the larger the age gap, the more distance there is in terms of life experience, emotions, etc. At some point in every older child’s life, even if they care for their sibling and enjoy hanging with them, they’ll want to be left alone. Which is why a recent reddit thread called “I don’t want to keep playing Minecraft with my little brother,” by user “rockelliot” was so immensely joyous to read.

Here’s the post in full:

“I created a server for me and my bestfriend (20yo) and we wanted other people to join us eventually. I decided to invite my brother (10yo).

After we got diamond tools, we decided to set up in a nice landscape and everyone got an "area" to build their houses. My bestfriend built a cute house and I decided to put some effort in mine too to match up the energy of the server. However, my brother keeps building stuff with cobblestone that looks honestly terrible. Me and my friend didn't worry too much about it because it was his area, but whenever we offer tips to build better, he says that is too much work and he doesn't want to rebuild.

Besides that he broke our flowers for dye, accidentally killed a villager, takes wood from the villager houses and left a trail of cobblestone. Everytime I tried to politely teaching him the right way but evertime he comes up with something new.

I don't want to kick him out because the server means a lot to him but I don't want my best friend to get tired of him and stop playing the server. What would you do?”

10 years is a huge gap. My children are nearly four years apart. Our plans were three kids with a two-year gap between each of them, but life had other plans for us and we ended up with two kids that are, instead, four years apart. I’m a little less than two years older than my brother. We were close as kids, then drifted apart for no particularly good reason during middle school and high school, before becoming close again as young adults, a bond that’s lasted through the roughly 20 years since. 

I wanted to know more about this Minecraft sibling situation, because even if your kids haven’t had something similar happen between them, maybe you’ve had it between you and your kid. rockelliot, who asked to keep their real name private, was more than willing to answer a few questions about what brought them to reddit.

The story goes that the two started playing Minecraft together four years ago in the early days of COVID, while everyone was locked up. They were living in different houses, and video games became a way to bond while distancing. This worked fine for a long time—many years, in fact—but it was reaching a tipping point recently.

One thing you notice when chatting with young children is they’ll look for any loophole in your logic, and claim that because you didn’t specifically say X, you can’t be mad because they did Y. This is probably where rockelliot made his first mistake: trying to defeat a 10-year-old with logic and rules. They are made to dismantle them.

“I just told him rules, as he would do something that we didn't appreciate,” said rockelliot. “‘Don't break these flowers, don't break the villagers' houses for wood.’ And he would listen. However, as we played, new stuff came up, and he would say ‘you said not to break the houses, but you didn't say anything about the village paths.’ Then, he was just playing and a creeper exploded and killed some of our important villagers.”

As a result, he kicked him out.

Minecraft was a big deal for my seven-year-old a few years ago, but we’ve cooled on it since. I’m sure it will stick around for years, though.

It’s understandable why this was creating tension between the two, and crucially, tension between the three people on the server—rockelliot, his brother, and rockelliot’s friend. Tension can lead to embarrassment. We’ve all been there before.

The word “temporarily” is important. It’s the equivalent of a time out. You hope, with reflection, a child will understand what they did was wrong and try a new approach.

“I believe that he was just trying to play the game,” he said. “I believe that kids' perspective on the game is different than older people. Me and my friends value the time we spend in the game. My brother instead just wants to do everything ASAP, meaning that he will break a house to make a crafting table, use flowers from the garden for dye instead of planting himself the one he needs.”

I watch this happen all the time with my seven-year-old daughter. She’ll spend an hour building something in Minecraft, and it looks beautiful! Then, two seconds later, it’s merely useful material for the next project. Boom! Even weirder, she rarely revisits the same “world” or “realm,” which, in theory, is part of the appeal of Minecraft, because there is persistence and a chance to really shape a space to your liking over long periods of time. When she has a new idea, she makes a new realm, and starts from scratch. Every single time, even though Minecraft isn’t really my thing, I sigh.

It’s at this point that rockelliot decided to ask for help. I recommend reading the thread, because it’s full of people sharing wonderful stories. There is a version of this post that’s an older brother complaining about their younger brother, and using reddit as a way to shitpost and vent. But instead, a community came together to help them.

From jokey posts:

“How i convinced my destructive young nephew, we were in desperate need of "shiny stones underground". He died alot but kept going down in the mines like a trooper 🤷🏽‍♀️”

To genuinely good ideas:

“At the risk of sounding like a massive douchebag, Minecraft is a journey, not a destination. Not just in-game goals, but a creative journey too. Don’t encourage him to remake that starter building, instead explore out and make new settlements where he can try again, and again, getting better each time. He’ll be inspired by your examples and want to build better. And then the need for resources and the etiquette required to get them efficiently will come naturally.”

To heartfelt stories of loss:

“I'll open this a bit sad for a reality check, I lost my older brother two years ago and I wished I spent more time with him playing games together. We both played the same games, but our playstyles differed, and we also had our own friend groups, we'd still play together from time to time, but it was obvious from Minecraft to Destiny we played extremely differently. Enjoy the time with your brother and cherish every moment of it. Stop stressing and let him enjoy the game and playing with his older sibling both.”

Rockelliot decided to start with one idea that was consistent across the thread: moving his brother somewhere else. Minecraft is a big, random world, and there’s no reason you can’t go wild in another corner of the map, and there are tools to make warping between spaces trivial. You can be both far away and very close at the same time! His brother seemed to understand this idea and was fine with it, even if there was haggling along the way, such as wanting to keep his first farm at the original location, because it felt important and foundational. Rockelliot agreed to let it stay.

In fact, rockelliot personally packed up his brother’s stuff and helped move it.

It was not all smooth, however.

“I believe that he was just trying to play the game. I believe that kids' perspective on the game is different than older people. Me and my friends value the time we spend in the game. My brother instead just wants to do everything ASAP.”

“He took one of our cats for his house,” said rockelliot. “That's when I decided to put things clear for him. I explained to him that finding the cat missing made me frustrated, and that the server was becoming not fun for me. I mentioned that I might stop playing because [of it] and he returned the cat. He said that he wouldn't change anything and offered me a handshake.”

This seemed to reveal the gravity of the situation to his brother, and so far, so good.

“I didn't want to stop playing with him because time with family is valuable and video games is a great bonding experience to have,” he said. “I shouldn't have tried to control every action of him in the game, but rather give him his own space to learn and play his own way. At the same time, it's important to share your feelings with them. I think empathy is an important thing for kids to learn. When he understood that his actions were making the game non-enjoyable for me and that I might stop playing, it seems like he is going to be more careful when coming to our place for visits without taking what doesn't belong to him.”

We’re all rooting for you here at Crossplay.

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• What’s been your experiences with sibling video game experiences? This isn’t an issue in our house yet, because of the age gap, but it’ll come up eventually.

• I can’t remember running into this with my brother, but I did, for years, convince him to have us “combine gifts” around Christmas so we could get game consoles, because it was the only way my parents could afford it. He caught on.

• Anyone else have siblings who are much older/younger than they are? Have you kept in touch with them through video games over the years, as well?