
Why won’t she get off Minecraft? - tux
https://deangroom.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/why-wont-she-get-off-minecraft/
======
lookbothways
The elephant in the room here is that children in the 21st century have little
to no freedom or personal control. The days of packs of children running
around town or exploring the woods are long gone, due to fears of dangerous
men and accidents. Children wake up, are shuttled to school, then either come
back and are locked in their homes for the rest of the day, or else are
shuttled off to another extracurricular activity. Nothing is unsupervised, and
nothing is spontaneous. No where is this more clear than in the concept of a
"play date," that a parent must schedule a meeting between two children
instead of just, you know, letting them walk down the street and ring a
doorbell when they feel like it.

The internet is like a parallel universe based around the exact opposite
rules. You can look at whatever you want, talk to whoever you want, say
whatever you want, _do_ whatever you want, and no one is going to stop you.
There is no wonder that so many suburban children become "internet addicts"
these days, given that it is the sole element of freedom in their lives.

And Minecraft is the ultimate embodiment of this freedom. There is no
structure or goal to it, just the freedom to wander about a crude
approximation of the natural world, go on adventures by yourself or with
friends, and build things with your own two hands. In short, it is a safe,
sterilized version of the ancient childhood experience of wandering the woods,
building forts, and carving out a society secret from the adults. It is the
solution to problems we created ourselves out of fear of the world.

~~~
dopamean
I got my first skateboard in 1996. I was 10 years old at the time. I grew up
in a small town on Long Island and because I was obsessed with going out to
skate with my buddies my mother let me walk into town on my own. Spend all
afternoon doing whatever I decided to do (usually skate) and then come home.
The only rule she had for it was to call her if I was going to be late and
explain why. Sometimes I'd take the LIRR (local commuter train) to Montauk,
which took about 30 minutes, to go to the skatepark there.

A month after my 16th birthday my little brother was born. He's 13 now and
when I look at how little freedom he has compared to what I had when I was a
kid I sometimes wonder how he's going to figure out how to do anything for
himself.

To echo your point about the internet... My brother is online, often playing
Minecraft, all the time. He loves the internet. He loves that he doesn't have
to ask permission to look at anything. He enjoys meeting random people to chat
with online about video games and weird youtube people that teenagers are into
now. I think it's pretty awesome. He has a sort of digital version of what I
experience IRL.

The contrast is actually kind of amusing when you consider that in 1996 I also
got my first computer. A Mac running System 7. At the time the internet was
considered dangerous for children and my parents heavily monitored my activity
on it much like they monitor my brother's real life experiences.

I wonder what I'll be worrying about when I have kids.

~~~
afarrell
I'm worried that this will be even more the case when I am raising kids. I
don't want my daughter taken away because I let her go camping.

~~~
kordless
> I don't want my daughter taken away because I let her go camping.

From the parent comment:

> The days of packs of children running around town or exploring the woods are
> long gone, due to fears of dangerous men and accidents.

Fear is fear. What you fear will manifest itself further if you and others
continue to fear it.

~~~
afarrell
This is a collective action problem. My own lack of fear will have no effect
of the actions of CPS if they decide I am a negligent parent because other
people could have been afraid to let their kid go camping.

------
legohead
Feels like the author doesn't want to admit gaming addiction is real. So
because Minecraft is a 'good' game, you can't get addicted to it? bollocks

I grew up playing (and becoming addicted to) MUDs, which are, from an outside
perspective, quite good for you. They promote reading, high imagination,
social interactions, a sense of accomplishment, etc. and there are MUDs which
focus on or require player building (MOOs/LPs etc).

What did my addiction to MUDs get me? Bad grades in school, and no 'real life'
experience. I had no idea how to take care of myself, which would cause me
issues later in life when I did start forming RL relationships. And while my
online social ability was amazing, in real life I could barely talk to people
(I believe there could be a lot written about this very subject). I didn't
make friends, much less girlfriends. All I cared about was getting through the
school day so I can could get home and play MUDs. The one thing it did give me
was programming, since I became so interested in them I began programming
them.

~~~
MichaelGG
All this is just arguing over definitions. No one disagrees (well, much) on
what's going on. It's just a "semantic stopsign" to short circuit a proper
evaluation. If you can make the case it's an addiction, hey, you've proved
it's bad to some extent, mission accomplished. For magazines and many people,
that's enough analysis.

And the author didn't seem to ever explain how a kid that refuses to get off
Minecraft and fights with his family isn't a problem. Unless the point was
"don't tell him to stop". While I generally appreciate the sentiment, maybe
the kid has other things he's neglecting...

Same argument for drugs. People resist the term addict when talking about
SSRIs, but that's probably because they never run out. And likewise, since
everyone agrees that opiates are addictive, they must be bad. The thought that
you can be an illegal opiate addict yet reap huge benefits from it is a
contradiction to many people. (Unless a doctor is involved -- then it's OK.)
It's just intellectual laziness.

Btw, MUDs were awesome, and I had my first real relationship by meeting
someone via a MUD. It contributed to me dropping out of school, but getting
more info software was far more useful.

~~~
carbocation
For other people reading this who are less familiar, there is a difference
between dependence and addiction. This difference offers a clear explanation
behind why someone can have withdrawal symptoms from abrupt SSRI cessation
despite these not being addictive drugs. It also explains why some opioid use
is considered beneficial while other use is considered harmful, despite all
opioids having properties that can lead to dependence.

------
wvenable
My son is 6 and many of the kids he interacts with at school and daycare play
Minecraft. So just the last week or so, we picked up Minecraft for the iPad
and for the PC. I had always been vaguely interested in playing it but never
actually pulled the trigger.

So my impression after a week is that it is weirdly fun and addictive. I've
now put more hours into Minecraft than anyone else in the house. I got my wife
playing it and she's still experimenting around. My son likes to play creative
and just kind of fool around. I think he's a bit too young yet to really get
into it. But he does love watching me play and we discuss everything together.
It's probably the most engaged he's been with me on the computer.

But I have stayed up way too late playing it...

~~~
MichaelGG
I played it on PC years back (and when I thought the game making $30M was an
insane amount of success). But shitty graphics support prevented me from
running it on my laptops and I gave up. Yet I can still remember the large
things I built, the houses and bridges and staying up all night.

Now my girls are 7 & 8, and for the last year they've been building these huge
things in creative. They're in love with Stampy (on YouTube... Annoying voice
but he shows some neat tricks). This week they took vacations, and I agreed to
play survival with them. (I must admit, it does scare me just a bit; the rush
to setup before nightfall and the sound that _something_ is nearby.)

Well... Every night we've stayed up until 1am or so (kids are lightweights)
playing Minecraft. Coordinating expeditions, streamlining resource usage,
building sky palaces. It's a blast and my one daughter told my wife how much
she enjoyed it and was so happy I did this. Now it's probably because I'm a
terrible father and don't spend enough time with them, but they _really_ enjoy
this time. And they tell stories, laughing, about how the time a creeper blew
me up, or when they accidentally attacked something or whatever. It's some
serious "together" time. (And I can't imagine am easier way of being a decent
parent.)

I'm gonna install it on their laptops (I was lazy and used 360) and I'm hoping
there's servers aimed for littler kids. Just because teenage boys seem to be
real dicks online. (It's not language, we swear a fair amount while playing,
I'd just like to increase the chance of them making real friends vs endless
griefers.) There's gotta be other parents like me that'd be willing to run a
private, verified identity, server, eh?

~~~
GotenXiao
Mojang actually have a service that provides an invite-only hosted server
called Minecraft Realms[1] - it's subscription-based, currently priced
(according to their website) at £8/mo. And, quoting: "Only the host of a
Realms server needs to pay a subscription fee."

[1] [https://minecraft.net/realms](https://minecraft.net/realms)

------
fezz
Understated: Parents should get on minecraft with their kids. It's very useful
as a family team building and can also encourage leadership if you let the
kids be the boss of you in the virtual world.

It's also great if you're traveling to get on minecraft together to have fun
instead of a short phone conversation. (it also works well for divorced
parents)

------
blazespin
Creative / collaborative mode is good addiction, but when they start
connecting to servers or griefing their siblings, it's not so good anymore.
Survival mode isn't so great either,but can be ok if they are using it as a
constrained creative mode. iPad is really the best format as it doesn't have
all the distractions of PC minecraft. The UX is great for kids as well.

Note minecraft can be awesome for siblings that fight all the time. You'll be
amazed when they actually get along on building something.

It's basically 21st century Lego.

~~~
abustamam
I grew up playing with Lego with my siblings. We would fight over that ever-
elusive piece of which we only had one of.

I haven't played too much of Minecraft to understand the "pieces," but I think
the problem we had with Lego would be solved :)

------
tzakrajs
Playing too much Minecraft is considered an addiction because it has a real
cost to the addict playing the game. Please note that "playing too much" is to
the point that it is causing the child to do poorly in school or have other
negative effects.

~~~
nmrm2
Preface: I agree with you, especially wrt video games. I never understood or
enjoyed video games, anyways.

However, when defining addiction, I think "causing the child to do poorly in
school" is a really, really dangerous standard. Several psychologists and
teachers told my parents I was addicted to computers because I did poorly in
high school and also spent a lot of time on the computer. Never-mind that I
had worked through Cinderella, SICP, the first half of Dragon, and an
undergrad crypto course in addition to a Discrete Mathemtics and Linear course
by the end of high school... all while fueling my "addiction".)

I think there's a lot of danger in conflating "interferes with good grades"
with "harmful". _Especially_ in high school. Taking grades seriously in high
school would have been far more harmful than my computer "addiction".

~~~
chernevik
My own experience with my son is that he spends an enormous amount of time
online on Pokemon. I'm still figuring out what the hell he's doing there. Some
of it seems useful. He just recently got excited about JavaScript, to help his
buddy run a server, but fizzled out after five hours. He just doesn't have the
follow-through skills. I'm trying to gently help him forward with it, but
there is an engagement problem. (And some other problems, we're paying a lot
of attention to him right now.)

He's been through Minecraft, done some stuff, and then fell off when it got
harder than he liked. Likewise with other video games. He loved Kerbal for 45
minutes and was done. He gets hooked on video games because they are shiny,
and sniffs at some of the possibilities, but then drops out. They provide
enough stimulation to distract him from whatever is bothering him, and to keep
him from getting so bored that he might actually read a book. But they don't
provide any steps up to an actual learning threshold.

Yes, some people can learn enormous amounts from video games and such. But I
worry that those people have a particular set of focus and problem-solving and
follow-through skills. I don't see much in the online environment to help
identify and fill those gaps for other people. Ideally schools should be able
to do that, and no, too often they don't. But at least they have the
opportunity to put great teachers in position to do just that.

I definitely get the possibilities of video games and I hope I'm not hung up
on conventional learnings. But I fear that for a large category of kids, these
games are really net negatives. I'm definitely worried about my son.

~~~
asuffield
I'm always very hesitant to suggest anything based on a vague description -
but it sounds like games are not the problem here, because the same pattern
repeats in other things.

~~~
chernevik
Yes and no. Yes, there are definitely other problems (and we're trying to get
at those).

But the games are a problem as an attention sponge / stimulus hit. Thirty
years ago the kid would have gotten so bored that he would have read a book or
picked up a basketball or listening to music or something. Those initially
would not have provided stimulus, but in time they would have, and he would
have begun to associate the work done at them with stimulus and thus become
more engaged with them. (I would hope. Maybe he'd start on weed, right?)

Today, it is just too easy to get a small stimulus attention hit from some
game, or surfing around. God knows I struggle with it sometimes, don't most of
us? For a kid who hasn't developed real engagement and follow-through, those
little hits stave off boredom, sort of, but never lead to anything more
rewarding.

All I'm saying is, I think the whole online environment definitely poses a new
set of risks and that some people are more at risk than others.

------
vonseel
Addiction isn't defined by the "pleasure source" (drug, game, shopping) and
doesn't require criminal or financially draining effects. Addiction is being
so obsessed with an activity that it consumes one's life and he/she neglects
other priorities in pursuit of its pleasure.

------
navait
It would be completely foolish to deny that some games have addictive
qualities to them - look at how developers such as Blizzard hire psychologists
to make their games more appealing. That short work-reward cycle feels
fulfilling, and drives many people to keep on playing despite it being
harmful.

> Non-gamers are bombarded by messages from the larger media-culture.

>So parents hear constantly that games are harmful, that gamers are all
potential crazed gunmen, isolated shut ins and so on.

No they don't. Has the author noticed it's not 2007 anymore? To find
substantial video-game addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They
are not a part of mainstream culture, _especially_ the crazed gunman stories.

>This is why we have televisions, magazines and newspapers – they are
technological devices to sell us advertising.

Lots of media companies own video game studios.

To be sure, video-game addiction is a minor problem compared to drugs,
alcohol, and sex addiction. But sticking your head in the sand is not going to
win you any allies, nor does a persecution complex. Instead, stick to the
positive benefits that video games have, and DO NOT overstate them, like
marijuana activists convinced the drug is a cure-all.

The world has moved on. We(gamers) won. It's time to stop pretending we're a
persecuted minority.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Has the author noticed it 's not 2007 anymore? To find substantial video-game
addiction stories, you now have to go find them. They are not a part of
mainstream culture, especially the crazed gunman stories._

I'm not sure if things have changed all that dramatically in 8 years. Video
games remain a convenient scapegoat for various societal ills.

~~~
qmalxp
I haven't heard one media outlet claiming e.g. Dylann Roof was influenced by
video games, and I think they would have a stronger case nowadays with games
like Hatred on the market.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Dylann Roof is an atypical case. Not much was said about gun control either,
which is unusual. The primary debate that was sparked was surrounding the
Confederate battle flag(s).

What do you mean by "nowadays with games like Hatred on the market"?

What is special about Hatred? It wasn't a particularly violent game, it just
got propelled into notoriety by demagoguery and the developers' guerrilla
marketing. It's a near verbatim clone of Postal, and that came out in 1997.

~~~
harryjo
That's because society as a whole isn't mentally capable of assigning more
than one salient feature to an event.

------
Sakes
Video games can be good. Video games can be bad. Specifically pertaining to
minecraft, I've never found a game that has the potential to offer so many
educational experiences. You can start off stacking blocks with your kid. Fast
forward a few years and you've downloaded something like computer craft and
you are now creating your own game skins and literally programming simple AIs
whether they are bots or enemy mobs.

~~~
steve-howard
It's a much older demographic, but Kerbal Space Program is educational in a
similarly sneaky way. First you build some rockets and they don't go very far,
then you build some better ones, and at a certain point you wind up learning
about orbital mechanics and rocketry equations. It really changed the way I
think about space, while procrastinating!

I haven't made mods for it yet, but there are people that go down that rabbit
hole too. Quite a bargain for the $30 I paid.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Oh yes, for me it was best money spent for a video game ever. I've clocked
almost 400 hours and I still really didn't get into making planes - I'm
launching rockets, building space stations and (with help of a bunch of cool
mods) setting up colonies on moons.

This game has it all - you need to learn being precise (targeted landings if
you want to build a structure somewhere or picked up kerbonauts you crashed
the previous time), you need to plan and do logistics (hello fuel shipments),
and you need patience (rendezvous and docking). And, as OP said, you quickly
end up learning _a lot_ about orbital mechanics, rocketry and space
exploration. You don't need to know the maths, but you'll end up learning it
anyway, because formulas are the easiest way to compress your intuition about
"why bigger ships need helluva bigger rockets" or "why when I go faster I go
slower".

Oh, and a fun thing I observed watching the community - because KSP runs on
Unity 4, which has an unusable 64bit version for Windows, and the game itself
starts quickly eating your RAM when you go for installing part or visual mods
to the point of crashing the 32bit version, a lot of people install Linux for
the first time in their lives just to play a working 64bit version of KSP. Yay
for more education :).

~~~
MichaelGG
I'm just starting on that game (ThinkPad T440p didn't have the gpu to run
it...X250 does). But I run Windows as host OS to avoid drivers and battery
issues. Do you know if the game will be OK inside VirtualBox or VMware? (Yes I
could just try it but commenting is easier.) Will I not hit RAM issues if I
don't install visual mods? (It renders shitty enough already; don't need to
slow it down more.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't now how good is the virtualization nowadays; KSP is mostly CPU-bound
anyway thanks to physics done in a single thread. You should be fine on
Windows though, as long as you don't overdo it with parts mods. The magic
boundary for 32bit processes is 3.2GB RAM (fire up Process Explorer after KSP
loaded and see how much it uses). There's a trick you can use to get the game
use only half of the memory (for some weird reason) - fire it up with --force-
opengl command line parameter. This should let you install pretty much any
visual mod you want and then quite a bunch of others. Some people also used to
use texture compression mods. Either of those tricks may no longer be
necessary though, because one of the recent updates got rid of the
uncompressed textures in the game - but by that time I bought an SSD and
installed a fresh Linux on it to play 64bit, so I don't know if the change
helped.

------
johnchristopher
> To your brain, Mincraft is a form of going outside.

> Our bodies are just a way to move our sub-conscious around. We spend most of
> our lives in our own sub-conscious because our brain likes to do stuff. The
> brain is in charge, not the body, and the brain is just as interested in
> solving problems in Minecraft as it is getting hands to move lego-bricks
> around a table.

Errrh. I like gaming but dualism is a poor excuse for that (and one I believe
to be very wrong both empirically and philosophically).

~~~
AgentME
I don't think the author was trying to go for anything metaphysical there.

~~~
harryjo
Worse, physical. The author is claiming that body exists to serve the mind,
and as no needs of own. Nutrition and exercise/atrophy and vitamin D
production give the lie to the claim that playing outside is equivalent to
playing minecraft.

------
golemotron
I wonder if anyone ever asked whether playing with blocks is addictive?

~~~
derefr
I've been waiting forever for someone to write the ultimate eloquent screed on
medium irrelevancy, so I could link it in response to a thousand conversations
including this one. It would cover things like:

• How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract
vertices;

• how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not;

• how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of
plastic and paint or network packets;

• further, how talking to friends is talking to friends, whether it's on a
playground or on Facebook;

• and that talking to _strangers_ is talking to strangers, whether it's on a
playground or on Facebook;

• but also how there are also structured leagues that kick out creepy people,
both for soccer and Starcraft;

• and, most importantly, that "playing on the computer" isn't an _activity_.
The simplest and most useful metaphor is that the computer is a _place_ , like
"school" or "the park" or "a friend's house", where your child goes and all
sorts of activities happen. Those activities are not better or worse for
happening on a computer; they're exactly as they were when they _weren 't_
happening on a computer.

Ideally, parents would treat the computer, the medium, as an _irrelevant
distraction_ to finding out what their child is up to. One is not "chatting on
Facebook"; one is just chatting _with friends_ , or _with a kid in my class_ ,
or perhaps _with some random person who started talking to me_. That
information, the _important_ information, gets buried under the medium.

~~~
maaku
Except the argument doesn't hold water. There is a difference between playing
with toy blocks or virtual blocks. The toy blocks develop physical skills, and
teaches physical experimentation. The virtual blocks develops keyboard/gamepad
skills and usually illustrates unphysical simulation. The toy blocks allow
arbitrary social interaction with other kids, the virtual blocks constrain
social interaction to the limits of the device or setting.

I've been in that camp -- I got a degree from DigiPen before I decided to do
something more meaningful with my life. But I wish I could go back in time and
tell the adolescent me that obsessed over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent
all his waking hours in front of his custom-built PC, to just go outside and
play.

~~~
derefr
> But I wish I could go back in time and tell the adolescent me that obsessed
> over games, hosted LAN parties, and spent all his waking hours in front of
> his custom-built PC, to just go outside and play

That sounds like you were in _the opposite of_ that camp, actually. If you
embraced the idea of medium irrelevancy _as a child_ , then you would _default
to_ ambivalence between, say, playing a sports game, and playing an actual
sport. This would let you freely weigh the pros and cons of each, which would
likely end up with you playing the actual sport.

The medium may be irrelevant, but the individual activities are not
_identical_ , they're just _in an equivalence class_ with one-another. Playing
with wood blocks _can be_ better or worse than playing with abstract-vertex
blocks, exactly insofar as either of those can be better or worse than playing
with jello blocks, or imaginary blocks, or building something out of real
fired-clay bricks.

What I'm getting at, is that activities done on a computer are not in a
_separate magisterium_ where their "computerness" is their one and only
property. Ignore that they're on a computer; look at them for what they
actually are, what they actually require and enable you to do, etc.

Soccer is better as a real physical activity on a field. Scrabble (as my
grandmother continually attests) is better as an asynchronous online mobile
game. The reasons why have nothing to do with the "computerness", and
everything to do with the required affordances and social goals of the two
activities.

I should also note that frequently there isn't an either-or distinction. I
"hang out with my friends" _strictly more_ than I used to, because I do the
same amount of real-world "hanging out", and a bunch of additional low-
engagement online "hanging out." This is especially true of the friends I have
in other countries; 20 years ago, my relationship with them would be something
like "I write them letters and see them once every three years." Now we talk
all night.

~~~
maaku
Past tense.

------
tw04
I think the biggest problem is the online nature of it. When I was growing up,
it was literally "you can play until the next spot where you can pause". That
doesn't really work with an online game like Minecraft where there is no
definitive beginning and end. There's no "round" or "level" to beat. And
there's almost assuredly at least one friend who can keep playing until
bedtime, even if all your friends can't.

I think the only real way to "fix" the issue is to set strict time limits out
of the gate so that your children learn early on to mediate their time.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You need to be careful with those limits 'lest you end up ensuring your kid
never learns to do _anything else_ with the computer than playing games.
Exploring and tinkering takes time. A kid won't start doing that if he/she
knows he has only an hour a day tops, nor you can really do anything creative
on such short time blocks.

~~~
tw04
Spending time on a computer != playing minecraft on xbox which is almost
always what I see occurring when I hear parents talking about their kids
spending too much time playing minecraft.

Yes, Minecraft is available for PC. But I would say that is the vast, vast,
vast minority of how kids under the age of 16 consume it. I see it almost
universally on tablets, phones, and consoles.

------
vacri
> _Saying Minecraft is addictive is similar to trying to argue millions of
> people addicted to soccer and therefore soccer creates the violence and
> racism on the terraces and so on._

Unfortunately, playing a lot of Minecraft won't help you detect humongous
logical fallacies like these. Whether it's addictive or not is orthogonal to
the knock-on effects of that addiction. The article has more than a few of
these woozy rationalisations, which is sad as there are some decent points in
there.

------
illza
Similar to just about anything I read these days about parenting, I found some
things I agreed with and a few that I don't. What has always been troubling to
me however, is "our" (society, media, whomever) propensity to blame our
children's activities for the disconnect between what they enjoy doing and
what we, as parents, think they should be doing.

There are benefits that can be obtained from playing games, video or
otherwise. I, personally, have used pokemon to teach reading, story-telling,
math, strategy, problem solving, and a myriad of other things to my oldest
son. His brother isn't far behind him. We play minecraft, smash bros, mario
kart; I even recently introduced him to portal 2. Some of what I let him do is
for fun. Some is to gauge his interest in things. Other times I use the time
to teach him something new. But the biggest factor of this strategy working is
and will almost always be parental involvement.

Most of the backlash I see/hear/read about from other parents is due primarily
to an unwillingness to get interested in what their children are interested
in. They'll buy them the game and go enjoy some "peace and quiet" and never
think twice about it. There's something to be said of a parent really taking
an interest and learning about a new universe with their children. I'm far
from perfect, but that's what I've been attempting, and it's working out
pretty well so far.

There was a quote in an Orson Scott Card book, "The Lost Gate" where the main
character speaks of his sort-of adopted mother/trainer/mentor where he
mentions that "Love ... it's a term for the woman in my life who loves me
enough to read the novels I'm reading just so she can try to figure out what
they're teaching me."

TL;DR - Games aren't inherently good or bad. But it's up to the parent to
actually do the parenting. They can't just throw a "good video game" in front
of their children and expect them to magically grow into engineers or doctors.

------
sjtrny
The addiction to Minecraft (or most other online games) is purely social. Soon
a new game will come along that the next lot of kids will all play together.
There is nothing about Minecraft itself that makes it addictive. I've lived
through this myself hopping from game to game with my high school friends.

------
kerrsclyde
Perhaps it is a bad thing that kids are never bored.

As a kid I was often bored - playing outside with friends was the only
interesting thing to do.

My kids have unlimited YouTube/App's/Minecraft to enjoy.

Some of my later interests came as a result of having to occupy myself, I
don't see this process happening with them.

------
ChrisArchitect
please add a (2012) to this article title. Minecraft and it's evolution in the
mainstream has come a long way since then. Discussion here is still relevant
and current, just sayin - old old url.

------
baby
it's impossible to be addicted to video game? I'm sorry I had to stop reading.
I feel like there is no point upvoting or even constructing a thoughtful
comment to this article.

