Swedish people disagree, and rightly so according to national happiness/quality of life indices.

Nah not really. In Sweden if you find yourself unemployed the government will do an awful lot to help you. It's a worthy infrastructure.

Tax is only very slightly less in the UK but if you're down and out here, you're pretty much screwed and left to accumulate permanent debt and rot without help.

Cas

well, Im sure oracle is glad for minecraft, because it increasesthe amount of JVM's out there, which I am sure in some way increases their revenue

someone crated a minecraft water slide

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ot39sgEMic

pretty cool stuff.

and we have a new record, 7000+ Minecraft sales in 24 hours  .

That would be pretty neat!

well think of it as lego, there are no real rules, you just use your imagination and creativity and stuff just happens.

for example this video that just went viral on the internets, rather sad ending (for the player)

I just tried the "real" version of Minecraft for the first time. After trying out the free versions a few times and thinking it was okay I finally had the chance to try the alpha build.

I started digging into mountains and looking around but it didn't make much sense I then went off to watch a 1h and 50 minutes YouTube series about how to play the game. It now makes much more sense and I really enjoyed playing it for a few hours the second time. (I guess this means that the learning curve is really high and that the tutorial definately is needed)

I still can't keep the focus for more than a few hours though, After having made the first couple of houses that no zombie can get close to, explored a cave or two and made a small farm and so on it just feels like there isn't a whole lot to do yet. Maybe it is just not a game for me yet, but I really hope it will be when it is more challenging after the first night.

Oh, and the game crashed when I was in a cave and I can't load the save file anymore so that kinda bummed me out as well... But it is an Alpha so it makes sense that there still are several bugs.

@Markus_Persson

Just thought I'd point out that the instructions to run minecraft on linux have a small typo, instead of

it should be

I can't believe it takes so much effort to get into Minecraft. How can this be possible with the number of sales it is making? People in general have very short attention spans. What are we missing?

I think people are curious about this new kind of play, so they have a stronger motivation not to give up... It's kind of a logical step after lego, your persistence remains, they have a feeling, they can learn something or extend their visual capabilities, like children do. So they are not giving up so fast...
If they see games they already know or whose playing mechanics are very familar to them,  they seek for another  stimuli inside of this games and by finding none they leave. Minecraft manages to combine two things: build what you love (as its a long process to build something great) and defend what you love (creeper's tssss...BOOOM, etc.)
But building alone is a big motivator, as it allows people to create third dimensional things from their mind easily (easier than with 3D modeling tools, but not as accurate)...

cheers, kulpae

You know you can dig into the ground right?

Well, at daytime I enjoy building my empire and when night breaks in I defend it (or when I can't, I hide).. .
I must admit, that minecraft alpha makes much more fun, than classic... well with classic I tried building some houses or towers, that's all... nothing more... but with MC-Alpha I have much more fun extending my buildings, looking for rare ores, be off to the sea and explore new places... I'll make a youtube video of my "work", so I can show off a bit

If I can put this world (MC says its 20MB huge, but on my hdd its > 120MB) to a minecraft server, so others can join, colonize islands and we could trade and so on.. that would be cool

So as you can see, the fun lies not in the goal of the game (like in real life, nobody gives you objectives, when you come into this world...), but in the process of achieving something, that the player choose for himself.

If you don't set your own goals, you won't achieve anything and thus it won't be fun. Use your imagination and build something (tower, house, cave,...), then try to expand it or look for better materials and enhance your building ... or look for redstone and build complex logic circuits...

I actually saw some pretty active discussions on the suggestions forum about this. Somebody wanted to make it so you could go to the moon or some BS (and subsequently the moon would render your world as it flew over the sky). This seems like it would be far too much work. Instead just having teleporters to go between worlds (each one having some special materials) would be cool.