So that’s what I’m going to do

"The modding community is HUGE"

This makes the pocket and xbox edition experience quite a bit different from the PC/servers version.

My experience was I made a lair basically tunneling out an entire 100x50 ish island, built a tower going up until I was bored and a spiral staircase from top down to bedrock, then dug what amounts to a giant multi-lobed endless loop subway just above sea level around the map (probably about 4 minutes, yes that is indeed a lot of mined/smelted iron, and gold/redstone to boost my cart up to speed) diverted into optimized partially-automated chicken production, then got kinda bored. I think I got about a hundred hours of fun out of it, which, for what it costs, is an excellent rate of return.

It reminds me of an old saying about "second life" from about a decade ago, where if you can't be entranced by it for at least a dozen hours, there's probably something wrong with you, but much after a hundred hours or so, its kind of boring.

A third comparison of about equal depth and entertainment was playing Eve:Online also about a decade or so ago without joining any social groups (which was impossible because I was scavenging random hours here and there, and clans wanted dedicated scheduled mining/raiding nights and such)

All three share the characteristic that its hard to go beyond a hundred or so hours without the community, although if the community drags you in, then you're stuck in there forever.

There's probably a startup lesson in here that if you want more than 100 hours of engagement, its going to come from the community, not the programmers / artists / suits.

If you like games like SimCity, you might like Minecraft. Although SimCity has much deeper game mechanics, Minecraft focuses on exploration. (HN crowd: bear with me, they're b both exploratory world-building games to a certain extent with terraforming. For me personally, my enjoyment of them is the same for similar reasons.)

There are a large variety of clones out there, and "inspired" titles, but Minecraft got a lot right as far as a sense of exploration is concerned.

There's a fairly advanced open source "Minecraft-inspired" game called terasology I found this weekend:

http://terasology.org/

It's not as polished as Minecraft, but if you just want to get a feel for the basic mechanics and tinker without having to pay anything, it's worth a look.

Notch doesn't maintain Minecraft himself these days; Jeb at Mojang does. But they're doing a great job.

I no longer have the time to play Minecraft regularly, but I revisit it from time to time, just like Simcity.

Similar to the game he canned, check out Red Power 2 for MC, it's actually got an in-game computer you can program it in Forth, save programs on in-game floppies, and build a giant IO bus to control various things in the game world.

As a contrary answer: Not very.

As a game with any purpose aside from building, it falls flat. After the first evening or two, monsters aren't a real issue unless you want them to be, exploration is somewhat dull after your first few caves, and the graphics (while arguably part of Minecraft's charm) are about as basic as you can get.

There are a number of mods and texture packs which address some of these issues to some extent or another, but even they get dull quickly.

Ultimately, it's a set of digital legos, and your enjoyment of the game will depend greatly on how much you want to play with digital legos.

He certainly writes better English than I write any of my second languages...