Not directly apropos to this article but let me reenforce the data point: Minecraft is BANANAS with 10-12 year olds. My kids discovered it on their own, and their friends (from decidedly less geeky families) were already playing it.

Reminds me of this time I found one of my younger nephews -- who is around 10 -- playing Dwarf Fortress...with the default tileset. I don't know how that kid got into DF, but he's already my hero.

Agreed. My cousin's kids are about that age and they're the ones who got me started on it. We joke about making a "Don't fear the creeper" t-shirt someday, too.

Which reminds me, I still have to finish that gigantic automatic monster harvesting building one of these days, assuming I can find the schematics I wrote out for it.

I was at a church gathering recently and there was a 10-ish year old kid who couldn't stop talking about MineCraft. He was really impressed when my wife told him she'd written a mod for the game (the original Marble mod with the texture that tiled over multiple blocks).

Is your monster harvester similar to http://ripminecraft.blogspot.com/2011/08/monster-condo.html ? Larger? Smaller?

Assuming I ever finish, it'll have a central chest-high "lava blade" as the wiki called it to kill monsters. The rest is just a large area with water flows to push monsters towards the water blade.

It's big enough that cobblestone generator is pretty much mandatory. It probably spans roughly an 16x16x8 volume, though not all of that is filled in for obvious reasons.

My 12 year old son has been playing Minecraft with his friends for a few months now - it seems to be a real hit with that age group. He also has a real interest in anything to do with Roman history, and gladiators in particular, so he was quite excited when he showed me a copy of the colosseum that he'd found somewhere.

I finally got into it with the kids (11 and 7) after hearing their friends talking non-stop about it. In less than a week they were memorizing all the non-redstone crafting recipes, setting me on fire (in non-PvP mode), and setting up TNT traps for me. Their older friends are coding mods.

Quite an amusing story. Minecraft sure can introduce you to the importance of planning & strategy.

I recall early in my minecraft career learning painful lessons (don't dig down!) as I was exploring a large cave, fell in lava & lost my hard-earned diamond-tools, respawned & had no idea where I just was.

If it weren't for the peer pressure of being at a lan surrounded by other players, I probably would have cried too ;)

One of the first things I learned was to build a giant torch-studded tower in order to mark your house. Sure, you may have to suicide to get off of it, so leave your good stuff at home. This prevents exactly the scenario they encountered.

Yeah, you can also build a compass, but that takes gold & redstone. Huge towers can be made with mere dirt.

Try a spiral staircase instead of a straight tower. It takes the same amount of material once you remove any scaffolding. You don't need to jump off and die, and you can return to the top and build a larger or more interesting beacon (such as a lava ball, a pixel art sign, or a huge glass observatory) at a later date.

Another thing I like to do is, once I've gotten just to the edge of sight range from my current base of operations, find a local high spot and put up a short cobblestone pillar. Put a torch on top of it and another torch on the side facing home (or two sides if your base is on a diagonal). These navigational beacons extend the range at which you can easily explore without getting lost.

Build a bed. The last bed you sleep in becomes your spawn point, and they look less ugly than giant dirt towers.

I have several, but sometimes you want to walk home. And they help you know your relative location when exploring so you can find your items if need be.

Hit F3 and write down your house's coordinates.

Iron and redstone for compass. Gold and redstone is clock.

Oops. You are correct. I have one, but I leave it in my base. And I'm still miffed that you can't put clocks on the wall.

The lessons I learned when I played a bit this winter:

Always put torches on the right (really "same") side of tunnels/etc as you dig/explore. Then you can always find your way back topside.

Always build markers at your spawn point pointing which way you're heading out, as well as a chest with basic supplies there

The mapping tools are great for finding a structure that doesn't fit on your mental map you know you built (but ones that point out minerals feel like cheating)

Burning Netherrack makes excellent markers, as well as monster killing traps

I don't play minecraft often anymore, but when I do, it's very well planned out ;oD

> Nothing educational can have value without the possibility of crushing failure.

That's a thought-provoking statement, I think.

I think he's identified the root cause of the ongoing failure of our modern education system.

Minecraft is 21st century digital Lego, for better and worse.

I was just looking at the comments, and I'm kind of surprised that spambots aren't smart enough to skip a site when comment links are nofollowed (and Blogspot seems to be terrible at blocking them in the first place). Seems like it would be more efficient to move on to sites that don't nofollow their links.

Off Topic also: google still count them as backlinks, but do not pass on Pagerank juice. They might still count them as a small factor in website rankings.

Cost to spam is probably lower than the effort to avoid nofollowed blogs. Also, there might be just enough idiots clicking links manually to encourage them to persist.

Having only do follow links pointing to your site would set off some alarms at Google Search HQ...

Really cannot understand the fascination with that "game".

If only there was an article somewhere that described one reason why someone likes it. Oh wait, that's what this discussion thread is for...