Minecraft

The Thing:

As described by the creators themselves: "Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens"

Why it is Worth Your Time:

Minecraft is basically a mash-up of adventure games, sim games, and Legos with a healthy dash of zombies thrown in for flavor. Basically, everything great ever rolled into one game.

Not enough for you? Ok, let me walk you through a game of Minecraft, assisted by Google Image Search.

You start with nothing in a world made of blocks.

Maybe the blocks take the form of a grassy field, or perhaps a snowy tundra, or even a mountaintop forest. Whatever biome you spawn in, one of the first things that will likely catch your eye is a tree.

What to do with such a majestic plant such as this?

 Punch the fuck out of it.

Seriously, fucking punch it.

This will give you wood. You want wood, and lots of it. With it you can build the tools necessary to begin exploring and building in your vast world.

That is, until nightfall.

Then these fuckers come out.

Think that shit is going to slow you down? Fuck no. Kill those assholes, harvest materials off their corpses, and then come dawn get back to building your castle.

Oh, did I forget to mention you can build anything, even sweet shit like castles?

And so you go for a while, defending yourself at night, exploring and building epic monuments during the day, maybe tame a wolf or two in between. 

You do it using the bones of your enemies. Seriously, that is how you do it.

But after a while, the world may start to seem too tame for your badassery. No worries, just throw together a portal out of the hardest material in the game.

How do you activate it? LIGHT IT ON FIRE.

Where does this mysterious portal take you? Where could it possibly go that could offer a challenge to your mountain moving, monster slaying, castle building avatar of awesome?

How about HELL ITSELF!

Well, ok, its actually called the Nether, but considering its an underground, lava covered, horrifying monster murder-orgy, I am gonna call it functionally the same. 

So, what do you do in this realm?

Kill everything and plunder it for resources. 

And you know what? Fuck it, build another castle.

Now that you have mastered both Earth and Hell, it is time to consolidate your empire, explore, build and expand so that when they finally release a patch with a Heaven analog you will be ready to go dominate that too. 

Make sure to stockpile material for your divine castle.

Itching for a challenge still? Not to worry, you can just travel to the mind bending, physics-challenged, sanity eroding chaos at the end of the world.

 You know what that maddening affront to natural law could use?

Castle

Why people will tell you it isn't:

There are a few key arguments I hear repeated about Minecraft:

1. Poor Graphics.
2. Huge Time Sink
3. Guide Dang It.

 Well, fuck that noise. Here are my responses.

1. Its a sub $20 dollar indie game. Considering it started with one guy and even now only has a handful of folks on staff, the incredible complexity of the game and breadth of the content is simply amazing, and it would have been disastrous if they had limited that development so that they could make sure things were shiny. Furthermore, while primitive the graphics really do add a certain aesthetic that Minecraft simply wouldn't be the same without.
2. Oh come one, if you are even considering playing Minecraft chances are you waste a metric fuck-ton of  time on some hobby or game anyway. 
3. Don't be absurd, its not that....yeah, ok, I've got nothing. The recipes/materials/mobs are almost impossible to puzzle out on your own without getting frustrated and there is little to no in game instruction. However, as you may have noticed from the links sprinkle throughout this article, there is an incredibly robust wiki, and poking around it for a while will give you a working knowledge to get rolling, and you can look up the more exceptional things as you come across them.