If the above image looks familiar to you, congratulations, you’ve been exposed to Minecraft before! Also, congratulations for being able to stop playing it long enough to look at my post! (Ok, it’s not quite that addictive.)

For those who don’t know, Minecraft is the ultimate sandbox game, and for those who are still confused, sandbox games are those where you can do what you want, how you want. The rules are just there to give you a framework. Minecraft also is frequently compared to Lego in the way it works.

The art style is deliberately retro, with large pixels all over.  It fits the block motif, it provides a distinct appearance, and it saves on processing power.  But as low-resolution as it is, it can still be beautiful.

You start the game in a random location in a random world, with nothing. All you have is your hands, and the world around you. The world is made of blocks, and (almost) all of them can be destroyed, picked up, and placed as you want. Some require tools to collect, so the first task is to find a tree and punch it.

Yes, punch it.

Punch it until a piece of it falls out.

No, that doesn’t make the tree fall over. The rest of the tree is perfectly happy to just sit there, floating in mid-air.

Then you take that log, make it into planks, then make those planks into a workbench. Then you hack down more of the tree, make a wooden pickaxe, use said pickaxe to get stone, craft stone tools, use them to get iron, make iron tools, and delve deep into the ground to find diamond. To make diamond tools, of course.

All along, you build. You need a home, after all. It’s a place to store your stuff, after all. And you’ll need it come night.

Monsters come out at night, after all.

I’ve been playing this game since October 2010, while it was still in the Alpha phase. The creator, Notch, was still working on it all by himself, letting people buy it while still in development (technically, it was a preorder with the bonus of playing the game as it was still being developed). He never did any advertizing on his own, just let it spread by word of mouth. I was somewhere around the 500,000 person to buy the game. Now, over 5 million people have bought it. Notch has formed a company, and is a multimillionaire. Minecraft was officially released last November, just over a year after I bought it. Notch has handed off Minecraft to his employees while he works on other games, but those employees are doing a fantastic job continuing to update it. And they still don’t advertize much, beyond giving their players free reign to show what they’ve created to whomever they want.

Minecraft is what you make of it.

You can build a small house of your own, and tame the land around you, building farms and pastures.

You can play with friends, and conquer the world together.

You can spend your time crafting weapons and armor, find a stronghold, and journey to the mysterious End Lands to fight the near-invincible Ender Dragon there.

You can modify it, changing the way it looks and plays to just about anything you want.

You can spend all your time building fantastic creations, and not care about the monsters at all.

You can even build Middle Earth to scale if you wanted. One group of players is.

It’s your choice.  Completely and utterly.