Though not as venerable as novels based on movies, novelizations of video games have been a sturdy publishing 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 Swedish gaming company Mojang got, in 2016, when it approved Max Brooks to write a book based on Minecraft, widely considered the best-selling video game of all time. In most iterations, Minecraft players enter a Lego-like 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 best-selling 2006 zombie novel that was loosely adapted into a Brad Pitt movie. Brooks’s book took a more rigorous approach 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 worst-case scenarist and lecturer at the United States Military Academy’s Modern War Institute. (The pandemic, which mirrored his zombie plague by originating in China, only enhanced his reputation as an alarmist seer.) His first two Minecraft novels—“Minecraft: The Island,” published in 2017, and “Minecraft: The Mountain,” out this month—continue in this semi-wonky vein: both read less like narratives than like introductory texts on problem-solving theory, albeit lively ones with zombie attacks. They are aimed at kids.
Brooks, forty-eight, was playing Minecraft with his young son when he realized 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 happened 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 approach was useful, Brooks said, when it came to educating a conventional workforce—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 everyone suddenly has to become the master of their own destiny. How do you train our children to be creative problem solvers?” he continued. “I struggled with that as a new parent. Then Minecraft came along, and I thought, Oh, my God.” Playing 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 drivers and freelance content makers will absorb 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 conversation is peppered with casual references to zombie films and “Beavis and Butt-head” as well as to SOCOM (the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command) and “this blue-ribbon biodefense panel that I worked on for a little while.” In his view, the U.S. military could benefit from some Minecraft-style slippery-mindedness. “Our enemies have invested in what’s called asymmetric warfare—cyber warfare, economic warfare, information warfare,” he said. “The Russians 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 concluded, “Our enemies now have a twenty-year imagination gap on us.”
Brooks is the only child of Mel Brooks and the late Anne Bancroft. You can see traces of his father in the way he underscores a point by cocking his head and grinning. He dates his productive obsession with zombies to an evening in adolescence when his parents were out. “I snuck onto their cable TV, probably trying to find a shot of boobs.” It was 1985, and he was thrilled to happen on a closeup of a woman’s open shirt. “What I didn’t know was that it was an Italian cannibal-zombie movie”—a genre known for depicting extreme gore and using footage of real atrocities. “That freaked me out,” he said. “But a few years later I saw ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ and that movie gave me hope, because instead of just screaming and blood the characters discussed the rules: ‘Oh, if you destroy the brain, you can move on? O.K.’ So I could start to think tactically. What are the rules of my enemy?” ♦
