And then the sky shifts from cyan to tangerine. The sun sets. It happens fast. The light level drops below seven. You hear it: the dry, rattling thwump of a spider. The wet, sucking groan of a zombie. The hollow click of a skeleton’s bow.

Multiplayer Minecraft is the closest digital analogue to the real world. You spawn in a pristine forest. Within an hour, someone has built a cobblestone tower that says "SUCK IT, KEVIN." Someone else has dug a hole to bedrock and refuses to leave. A third person is trading emeralds with villagers, hoarding them like a dragon.

In the real world, you cannot punch a tree and turn it into a door in thirty seconds. In the real world, you cannot look at a mountain and say, “No, I want a lake here.” In the real world, you cannot see your own progress in neat, blocky increments.

The Quiet Apocalypse of the Square Sun