CREATIVE TIME CAPSULE BY SCOTT GRAUMLICH

July 27th, 2012 (my mom’s birthday), I downloaded Minecraft onto my sister’s old hot-pink high school laptop, fulfilling the origin story of pretty much every 6th grade boy my age. I started small, building a modest cubical house made of wooden planks, with some simple farms to sustain my playing.

That world is 9 years old now. Pretty soon I will have had it for the majority of my life. The 3 gigabyte file has been transferred to 5 different computers now, hard drive to hard drive. It is a 9 year portfolio spanning the efforts of middle-school Scott to desperately bored Covid-Quarantine Scott. I’ve gone from playing religiously in middle school to logging in once or twice a year - yet even now I can still jump in and build right next to something I built when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. The builds have evolved as time has progressed, but it still captures that same free spirit I had when I used to play.

Nowhere else in my life do I still work the way I did when I was 12 years old or even in high school - back then I was stressed if I had a vocab quiz during the week. Now I’m methodical, efficient, and stressed about my work and stressed about my full-time career. Building in that world is like traveling back in time to when I worked spontaneously, creatively, and with fun in mind - it feels therapeutic.