As a veteran of eight quite solitary years of homeschooling, I wouldn’t say I’ve had the most conventional childhood. I’ve probably played tag fewer than ten times in my life, I didn’t learn what a tetherball was until I was fifteen years old, and the exact meaning of a hopscotch grid still evades me to this day. But this liminality never hindered my play then, and it has significantly shaped how I understand play now. 

To me, play in its purest form is a non-prescriptive “sandbox,” to borrow a term from the world of video game design. Developers of sandbox games place great faith in the open-endedness of self-expression and the emergent tapestry of player creation, relinquishing a level of creative control to empower players to conceptualize personalized experiences through simpler underlying mechanics. To put it simply, sandboxes are filled with sand, not castles. The best-selling video game of all time, “Minecraft,” is built on this philosophy, as its rudimentary palette of cubic blocks lays the groundwork for strokes of brilliance in “Minecraft’s” expansive and resourceful player base.

Sandboxes inspire us to trust in our imaginations, and to cultivate novelty despite (or even through) the most unassuming artifacts of life. That is the essence of a playful mind: to be open to everyday discoveries that make the ordinary something extraordinary. It’s something we all understood at one point. In childhood, we made lightsabers out of old gift-wrap tubes, constructed fortresses from pillows, and invented telephones with tin cans. Yet as we age, the pitfalls of prescriptiveness loom so large that we risk forgetting what it means to be playful.

A playful mind is a tool whose usage should come no less naturally to us than it does to children, but opportunities to apply that tool become increasingly limited as society makes tools of us. I believe sandboxes are invaluable because they restore our ownership of the toolbox, a premise that must be defended from the constant pressures of societal formalization.

This is a tension made alarmingly evident by my childhood sandboxes’ gratuitous attempts to “mature” with me and others my age. For example, “Minecraft” in its modern era has been marked by graphical uniformity, autocratic implementations of player reporting, biome-locked resources, specialized non-cubic blocks and hairsplitting block variations permitted by uncritically exploiting upgraded storage formats — all of which undermine the game’s emphasis on personal inventiveness and self-expression. These features make misguided appeals to “Minecraft’s” aging player base by needlessly pursuing veneers of sophistication over the imagination, whether it be in “scientifically accurate” conceptualizations of biome-locked flora and fauna, additions of “ornate” yet highly situational block shapes like bells, lanterns, lecterns, and grindstones or muted “modernizations” of “Minecraft’s” originally kaleidoscopic textures. (The latter was self-deprecatingly dubbed “programmer art” by “Minecraft’s” own developers.) Such presumptions attest to a cultural cynicism which, in its devaluation of our creative faculties, has deemed playfulness an obsolete relic of our childhoods. 

The overstated marketing of another building-block sandbox, LEGO’s disappointingly facile “Adults Welcome” campaign, is even more guilty of this prescriptiveness. The sets LEGO arbitrarily rates 18 and up are often exorbitantly priced and stiflingly unimaginative, making bad-faith appeals to our “adult sensibilities” through fashionably minimalistic yet monolithic black boxes and statuesque but lifeless subject matter. These sets — which range haphazardly from Adidas shoes to band logos to prop replicas — forgo LEGO’s historic play scale in yet another vain bid at sophistication that ultimately precludes them from the interplay and versatility of LEGO’s minifigure-scaled sets. 

Sandboxes function most effectively as instruments of creativity, inspiring a kind of improvisational play which eventually warrants more layered orchestration. However, that “raison d’être” is jeopardized when commodifications of the cultural zeitgeist undercut the creative processes from which they are derived. This quandary is not limited to discussions of building blocks; its prominence in our ongoing discourse on the “AI revolution” is a case in point, as generative AI’s continued reliance on the works of others has called the technology’s “revolutionary” character into question.

I want to emphasize that my skepticism of such developments arises not from an aversion to change, but from my greater confidence in the originality of a playful mind. It was a sensibility I embodied over countless hours of tinkering in “Minecraft,” devising server-client exploits for mining unbreakable blocks when I was only thirteen years old. And it was a sensibility just as palpable to me last month amidst uncounted hours of sleeplessness in an empty apartment while I finished software engineering projects in the faithful company of a now thirteen-year-old stuffed rabbit. Sandboxes possess a sort of pragmatism that affords us that creative agency, be it in the silent companionship of a stuffed animal, a game’s inventory of blocks, the playable keys on a keyboard or the open invitation of a blank canvas. It is ultimately up to us to make something of those sandboxes, no matter how old we are — and that is a prerogative I hope we don’t soon forget.