OK, well, I should try and make the most of my situation. I seem to have discovered a flooded underground cave. Placing torches to light the pitch blackness, I carefully move forward.

Notch's water physics are more convincing than the flat oceans above might have led you to believe. Better keep out of the river, don't want to get swept away twice in one night.

Spelunking further downwards, I discover a magma spring! Dynamic lighting means if I follow this, I won't need torches to keep the monsters away (that's right, frigging monsters haunt these tunnels in the dark).

I smash a hole in the ground for the magma to flow through, and find a huge cavern below. I can hear the sound of rushing water some distance away. Let's go and check it out!

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! Breaking through a wall a little carelessly caused me to fall into a huge lake of fire. I tried to wade to the pond on the other side, but burned to death mere feet from safety. In my dying moments I hear something ahead of me, over the crackle of my sizzling flesh.

Hiiiiiissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

I guess death is sometimes a mercy.

Now I respawn, ready for another adventure in the world of Minecraft!

Conclusion

The above documents maybe the first 10-20 minutes of a Minecraft game. I've only shown you a satellite photograph of a crudely-drawn picture of someone pointing in the general direction of the tip of the iceberg.

There's nothing quite like cowering in your tiny log cabin overnight while listening to monsters fighting outside, wishing you hadn't lost your sword and all your torches in that lava flood earlier; riding a mine cart at breakneck speed down into the bowels of the earth, flashing through light and dark areas and flying past underground streams filled with hundreds of lost pigs; completing a month-long building project that connects your self-built villages into one gigantic mining complex with massive, valley-spanning bridges; even just turning the corner and seeing what the game creates for you is potentially a powerfully affecting experience.

I've seen some genuinely unbelievable terrain. Emerging from underground in the middle of a dried-up lake, above the surface of which floats a self-contained island, easily a 100 meters in the air -- that made more of an impression on me than many professionally designed game environments.

All I can really do is list things that have happened to me, because the possible stories that can emerge as you play are limitless. This isn't the bullshit of Spore, where everyone experiences the same boring story, just with the main character having a different number of legs or something. It's the kind of storytelling that games like Dwarf Fortress and Sleep Is Death excel at, because it results in a highly individual, beautifully original tale with just a little imagination from the player.

To close, I'd like to see two things as games move forward:

Truly open worlds, where stories tell themselves, unrestricted by a designer's imagination. Games where you're just plonked down somewhere and told to play -- not forced into someone else's idea of what is fun.

More goddamn mine carts, they rock shit hardcore.