1
WORSTCASEDEPT.
UNDEADPEDAGOGY
T
hough not as venerable as novels
based on movies, novelizations of
video games have been a sturdy publish
ing genre for decades. Assassin’s Creed,
Halo, Donkey Kong Country—all have
been rendered in what technically counts
as prose. You wouldn’t call these novels
of ideas, probably, but that’s what the
will be given to people with disabilities.
Not people whose shoes are too small—
people with disabilities.... Stay classy!”
Heller looked confused. “People whose
feet are too small?” he asked.
“No,” Smith said. “Shoes!”
“I don’t get the reference,” Heller said.
“That’s because you’re not a girl!”
After the session, Smith reminisced
about the subway, which she said she
hadn’t ridden in twenty years. “I’ve lit
erally seen someone with a whole liv
ingroom set on the train platform,” she
said. Soon, she promised, she’ll catch the
6 train at the Castle Hill Avenue station
and ride south until she hears her voice.
—André Wheeler
than like introductory texts on problem
solving theory, albeit lively ones with zom
bie attacks. They are aimed at kids.
Brooks, fortyeight, was playing Mine
craft with his young son when he real
ized that the game might be “the most
important teaching tool we have since
the first printing press,” as he put it during
a recent Zoom call (from his family’s
pandemic hideaway, somewhere “in the
mountains”). “I’m not exaggerating,” he
went on. “Growing up with dyslexia hap
pened to make me very conscious of our
education system. Since the nineteenth
century, we have had the Prussian model
of education. There’s only one way to
solve a problem. Binary. If you do it the
right way, you get rewarded by getting
kicked up to the next grade.” This ap
proach was useful, Brooks said, when it
came to educating a conventional work
force—as well as designing most video
games, with their obvious rewards and
increasing levels of difficulty. It is less
useful in a gig economy, “where every
one suddenly has to become the master
of their own destiny. How do you train
our children to be creative problem solv
ers?” he continued. “I struggled with that
as a new parent. Then Minecraft came
along, and I thought, Oh, my God.” Play
ing with his son, Brooks would say, “See?
You just learned that there are a million
ways to solve a problem like Don’t Starve.”
The lessons he hopes future Uber driv
ers and freelance content makers will ab
sorb from his novels are codified in study
guide appendices—e.g., “Don’t dwell on
mistakes; learn from them.”
Brooks is the rare author whose con
versation is peppered with casual refer
ences to zombie films and “Beavis and
Butthead” as well as to SOCOM (the
Pentagon’s Special Operations Com
mand) and “this blueribbon biodefense
panel that I worked on for a little while.”
In his view, the U.S. military could ben
efit from some Minecraftstyle slippery
mindedness. “Our enemies have invested
in what’s called asymmetric warfare—
cyber warfare, economic warfare, infor
mation warfare,” he said. “The Rus
sians came closer than they’ve ever come
to wiping out NATO without firing a
shot. Or what does it mean when the
Chinese could hack a soldier’s Fitbit
and then they know our deployments
all over the world?” Channelling both
Dr. Strangelove and Willy Wonka, he“I just want to name her something that one day
will be a great crossword-puzzle clue.”Swedish gaming company Mojang got,
in 2016, when it approved Max Brooks
to write a book based on Minecraft,
widely considered the bestselling video
game of all time. In most iterations, Mine
craft players enter a Legolike universe
where they must learn how to shelter
and feed themselves, marshal resources,
build stuff, and otherwise survive while
coping with nightly mobs of zombies,
skeletons, and other bad actors. There is
an often ignored way to “win” Minecraft,
but for most players the game is more a
world to invent. Authors, too.
Brooks was both an obvious and an
unusual choice for a novelization. He had
previously written “World War Z,” the
bestselling 2006 zombie novel that was
loosely adapted into a Brad Pitt movie.
Brooks’s book took a more rigorous ap
proach to exploring the ways a zombie
contagion might unfold in a globalized
world—so rigorous that it helped earn
him a senior fellowship as a worstcase
scenarist and lecturer at the United States
Military Academy’s Modern War Insti
tute. (The pandemic, which mirrored his
zombie plague by originating in China,
only enhanced his reputation as an alarm
ist seer.) His first two Minecraft nov
els—“Minecraft: The Island,” published
in 2017, and “Minecraft: The Mountain,”
out this month—continue in this semi
wonky vein: both read less like narratives