Open Worlds -- Real Life

Minecraft has sold 176 million copies across all platforms, making it the best-selling video game of all time. I first learned of it in 2013, when its popularity was peaking, just before it was acquired by Microsoft when it bought the indie studio Mojang for $2.5 billion. While surviving against monsters, starvation, other players, and environmental conditions can be part of the game, the main object is to build things. Players extract resources from the environment and combine them to make construction materials, armor, weapons, and more. All the nerdiest boys in my seventh-grade class were obsessed with it; they all wore T-shirts and backpacks with the game's pixelated characters, and I would overhear them making plans to meet up in the game after class.