Playing with Fire in Minecraft

I've been watching with delight the stratospheric ascent of popularity of a new indie game called "Minecraft." (The creator, a Swedish game designer named Markus Persson earned upwards of $350,000 from downloads of the game in the first 24 hours.) The game is something like Legos for the virtual world set. It has simple, almost retro-style graphics that are big and chunky, not like the the highly detailed graphics we see in virtual worlds and mass-scale online games.

And yet it's wildly popular.

The above hilarious video of a guy demonstrating how to add a fireplace to a massive house he and a collaborator must have spent hours creating, is a great example of how different Minecraft is in its simplicity. But how devastating the consequences can be of your actions.

Game designer Fred Zeleny (aka @Fizzbang) reacted to it this way, "It's all about cleverly implementing small interacting systems, then standing back and watching the messy organic magic."

Watch and enjoy.

[Minecraft]