| Wil Wheaton had a funny post regarding Minecrack

Three days ago:

So I thought I'd try out Minecraft Pocket Edition, just for fun because all the kids are talking about it. Just, you know, a little bit of goofing around to see what the big deal is. I even bought a cool little guide on iBooks, figuring that I'd just skim it, and then play around with it on my iPad for a few minutes on the airplane.

The next thing I know, we're landing and I've built a fucking fortress that sticks out of a mountain. I'm looking at the front of it and trying to figure out where I can go get clay to make bricks because a brick walkway would be really nice. At one point, while digging around, I actually said, out loud, "Hey! Coal!"

Seven hours later:

Annnnnnnd I liked Minecraft Pocket Edition so much, I bought the full version for my Mac. I built my first house on the shore of a lake in a snow biome and faced my bedroom windows to the west because the sunset is pretty beautiful to watch.

I'm fucked.

Five or so hours later:

Yep. Completely addicted to Minecraft. I was up until 1:30 in the morning playing pocket edition on my iPad in bed two nights in a row because I wanted to build a wall around my house (two stories! With a staircase! And beautiful wooden floors!) ... and then I decided that the newly-created "yard" should have some dirt instead of sand in it, and probably a tree would be nice, and then I'll just go into the mine I dug out of the mountain behind my house and look for some iron ore because it sure would be nice to have an iron pickaxe and then OH MY GOD WHY IS IT ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING.

This morning:

I can see the potential for this to take over someone's life with "one more block" the way Civilization takes over your life with "just one more turn", and that's a thing I'll have to monitor closely and objectively. I also realized that Minecraft satisfies the same part of my brain that painting miniatures did back when I played 40K: I can keep my conscious mind occupied while my subconscious mind works on story ideas, or just needs to recharge. It's fun and soothing to design and build simple things like a house on the Mac or a full-on castle on my iPad, and the exploration aspects of the full desktop version are really, really fun.

I haven't even tried it on a server or with another player, yet... and I think I'll have to stay away from that for the time being, because that could lead to me wearing Kleenex boxes on my feet.