What Minecraft taught me about power, agency, and the human need to matter

Fidgets2Widgets has been finding its way back to me lately. Just last week a former parent reached out, and later that same day, a former student, now 24, approached me at a coffee shop to express his gratitude. Two days later, a note arrived from a former staff member. I mean… F2W is up for me right now, seven years after we closed.

Each one of these interactions brought the old joy right back into my chest. Memories of the vans pulling up filled with raucous kids who couldn’t wait to jump on one of the 60 computers we provided. The long summer days, the hum of a room full of children building worlds, the rapt attention as we taught coding, 3-D printing and all that comes with technology. I founded Fidgets2Widgets in 2012 as a technology and Minecraft education center, and I wrote every piece of the curriculum. We closed our doors in 2019.

I’m only now realizing how many of the most important things I know about people, I learned there.

Here’s one of them.

Early on, we noticed a pattern. Some kids (usually boys between nine and eleven) absolutely loved to blow things up. I’m talking the kind of love that was fully embodied, as in hardly being able to stay in their seats!

We’d have a group server where everyone was playing. Some of the kids were designing extraordinary builds, using redstone (Minecraft’s version of electrical wiring) to engineer working doors, elevators and machines. And as they built, the ten-year-old sitting at the computer next to them would begin imagining all that glory erupting into one spectacular, catastrophic explosion.

Quietly, Nick (that mischievous 10-year-old) would start setting the TNT. The builder usually had no idea, because he was immersed in his own joy of building, so exquisitely focused that destruction was the furthest thing from his mind.

And then that moment would come. Nick would set off the TNT, and all those beautiful blocks would erupt into a glorious array of chaos and destruction. But what surprised me the very first time I witnessed this dynamic was the builder’s reaction when the explosion came.

It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t a desire to reach over and knock Nick on the head. It was grief.

And it would come in a torrent of tears, head in hands, shaking shoulders, abundant mucus. The whole heartbreaking business of watching something you’d poured your heart and soul into disappear in seconds landing all at once.

And the destroyer? He was shocked. I watched the pure joy freeze on his face as he came face to face with the grief that he had caused. And almost every time, what came next was an immediate offer.

“I’ll help you rebuild it. I’m sorry. See, I’ve already started…”

It happened time and time again.

We made rules. We talked about respecting other people’s work. We even created a server specifically for explosions. But it kept happening anyway.

On the one hand, it was a wonderful real-life classroom for empathy, but on the other, it often left me wondering exactly what I was watching. And why it seemed to need to happen.

There are plenty of tidy explanations. Testing boundaries. Cause and effect. The sheer thrill of watching things go BOOM. But I kept coming back to something else.

Power.

The builder felt powerful. The destroyer felt powerful. Minecraft gave both of them a world where their choices made something happen. Where they could create, alter, influence, and control their environment.

The emotional regulation and empathy we taught were side dishes. The main course was power. And here’s what convinced me. The explosion server didn’t work. Blowing up something nobody cared about wasn’t nearly as satisfying. I watched it happen again and again. The destroyer would stay on the server for one good explosion, but then he would be bored. It wasn’t fun. It was expected, predictable even.

The destroyer wasn’t simply after an explosion. He was after impact. He wanted to know he could move something in his world. Change something. Make something really big happen. And nothing demonstrates impact quite like another person’s reaction.

But then the grief arrived. And something remarkable happened when the grief was acknowledged. He discovered he had another kind of power. The power to repair, to contribute, to take something he’d damaged and help make it whole again.

He could matter in a way that made someone’s day better instead of worse.

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I’ve thought about those boys many times over the years. Because adults aren’t so different. We just have better camouflage. Every human being needs some sense of personal power. We need to know our choices count. That our effort lands somewhere. That we can influence the world we live in.

When that need has somewhere constructive to go, we build. When it doesn’t, some of us start setting the TNT. In grown-up life, the TNT rarely looks like an explosion. It looks like the team member who agrees in the meeting and quietly undermines the plan afterward. It looks like the partner who goes cold because withholding feels like the only lever left.

It looks like the leader who micromanages because control is the only power they know how to exercise, or the exhausted professional who has had decision after decision taken out of her hands until one day she detonates, and everyone around her is stunned.

I don’t think these behaviors are always conscious attempts to exert power. Sometimes people don’t recognize what they’re doing themselves.

But underneath the behavior, I often find someone who has lost their sense of agency. Someone who no longer feels they have much influence over their own life. It’s a close cousin of the meaning famine I write about so often. And it’s showing up everywhere in my work.

Physicians who have watched their autonomy disappear into metrics, protocols, and someone else’s schedule. Executives with enormous titles and very little real say. Founders who built something beautiful and now feel trapped inside it. Couples locked in a quiet war over who gets to decide.

Sometimes they’re the builder, grieving something they spent years creating.

Sometimes they’re holding the TNT, surprised by their own capacity to destroy.

Often, they’re both.

When someone comes to me wanting to stop a behavior that’s creating problems in their life, I’m interested in understanding what that behavior is doing for them. And so I ask myself three questions:

What is it accomplishing?
What need is it meeting?
What happens if we take it away before there’s something else in place?

And in this case, I’m especially interested in where their power has gone.

Where do you still feel capable of influencing your own life? Where are you building? And where are you quietly setting charges? Finally, what would it take to give that need for impact somewhere constructive to go?

Those ten-year-olds taught me something I’ve never forgotten. The boy holding the TNT was often the first one offering to help rebuild once he saw what his explosion had cost. He hadn’t lost his desire to make something happen. He’d discovered another way to use it.

Maybe the question isn’t how to take away the TNT.

Maybe it’s what we can help someone build instead.