I learned about Minecraft a little over 3 years ago, around the time of the Pretty Scary Update (version 1.4) for PC. How I found out about Minecraft began when I was looking for a 3D version of the pokemon red/blue games on youtube. Instead, I found some really cool pokemon maps in Minecraft.

I tried the Minecraft demo before actually buying it, which was a good thing because it took me a while to figure out how the controls worked. How was I to know that your mouse moves your head and you have to look at where you want to go? The first noob moment for me was realizing you have to use your mouse and wasd keys at the same time if you want to get anywhere.

I played the demo for hours, building random things and that's when I realized the game was worth buying. Once I bought the PC version of the game, I started a new world and spawned in a cold taiga biome near a tall hill with snow and trees. I dug a tunnel through that hill and made my first home there.

I had already watched a few Minecraft let's play videos, so I was already somewhat familiar with how to play the game. I still had a lot to learn though. I remember mob drops filling my inventory and just dumping them into a body of water because I didn't know what to do with them. Eventually I did learn about the different mobs and their drops by looking them up in the wiki.

Here's another noob moment: learning that every world generates from a different "seed" after figuring out that coordinates in one world were different from another. Also, you can't fly in Minecraft unless you're in creative, have cheats enabled, or you use mods.

I never kept my first world, in fact, I never kept a survival world before and rarely do I ever keep one of my creative worlds either. Even the creative worlds that I upload online don't stay on my computer. Any one world will eventually bore me really easily, so I'm always looking for something new.

Minecraft has kept me hooked to this day because there's always something new to look at. It's not just the randomly generated worlds to explore and the new updates Mojang keeps making. The Minecraft community's endless creativity is what really keeps me hooked to the game. Minecraft modifications, resource packs, skins, custom maps, mini-games, youtube videos showcasing many of the things already mentioned, and youtube machinimas that humorously explore hypothetical situations in the game. All these things keep me forever entertained.

You see, that's why I'll never understand why there are people who don't like Minecraft. I think they just need to play it and look at the Minecraft community's endless creativity to really get it. It's obviously not about the graphics, there's even mods for that too, so you can't really complain about that.