The artist's 10 year-old daughter builds worlds and expresses her attitude to possibility in the infinitely-playful Minecraft universe.

Amazing gameplay footage: Minecraft through the Hololens. The VR demo from Microsoft executive Sax Persson today at the annual E3 games convention completely transforms the experience of Minecraft.

Microsoft acquired Minecraft Maker Mojang for $2.5 billion last year.

From PopSci:

"This is a live demo, with real working code," Persson said, before donning the HoloLens and projecting a Minecraft map onto a wall, and then a table onstage.

Did Chris Ware sneak into our house to draw this? That's my daughter on the beanbag.

One of the world's leading experts in online education sings the praises of Minecraft as a tool for helping kids find and realize a passion for learning

If the endless galaxy of Minecraft just isn't big enough, we've now got another virtual world to make our own (with bricks, of course): Lego Worlds.  Today Lego announced its "early access" release of its video game on Steam, currently available as a beta program for $14.99. — Read the rest

Very big. Huge. MASSIVE.

I reviewed this beautifully designed Minecraft boxed set of four hardcover handbooks in December. The price has since dropped to $(removed), which is a great deal.

David Best, who builds the enormous, gorgeous temples at Burning Man each year, created "Temple" in London/derry, where survivors of the Troubles have left memorials to their dead in advance of the temple being burned on Mar 21.

Forbes profiles Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft.

So with well over half his life ahead of him, the man who created an entire universe, whose persona was synonymous with it and who received the wrath of his community for abandoning it, must now figure out exactly who he is.

In September Markus "Notch" Persson, the 35-year-old creator of Minecraft, sold his game company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. This month, he spent 3% of it on a $70 million house in Beverly Hills.

The beautiful packaging for Minecraft: The Complete Handbook Collection isn't the only wonderful thing about this box set.

I found this perfectly cubic block of reconstituted foam. It immediately made me think of a) Minecraft, and b) William Gibson's description of recycled plastics from Communist-era East Germany.

They made, for instance, light-fixtures out of recycled plastics; the plastic was chopped up, melted and molded, but the various chopped bits retained their original color, resulting in a translucent solid that looks exactly like joke-shop vomit.

Longtime Boing Boing pal Tara "Tiger" Brown co-founded LA Makerspace, the first kid and family-friendly makerspace/hackerspace in Los Angeles. Today, she shares word of a terrific new crowdfunding project:

The 20cm^3 plush Minecraft TNT block is covered in suede-effect polyester and stuffed with soft foam; for something less explosive, try the Chest or the Log (or get the 10cm set with Grass, TNT, Diamond and Creeper blocks).

(via Geeky Merch)

The Wild Bunny made this excellent Minecraft Creeper apron.

Ziad sez, "I interviewed C418; we talk about Minecraft's early days, the purchase by Microsoft, how the gaming community has helped him become a self-sustaining, independent musician, and creativity in the gaming industry."

Tech giant Microsoft is to buy Mojang, creators of Minecraft, for $2.5bn, reports the Associated Press.

Launched in 2009, Minecraft is a sprawling, endlessly-replayable "sandbox" game that dumps the player in a randomly-generated abstract world. By exploring, gathering materials, crafting items and equipping their avatars, players can set about surviving hostile fauna, launching expeditions deep into ore-filled caverns, and constructing anything from huts to palaces, and even vast machines. — Read the rest

Many countries have been surface-mapped in Minecraft, but here's one that goes right down to the bedrock, courtesy of the British Geological Survey: "Glaciofluvial deposits and superficial deposits of mainly gravelly composition are represented by Gravel."

"Minecraft is digital Lego," says Lego marketing director David Gram. "We only wish we had invented it." This is mentioned in about the same breath as the phrase "core brand beliefs," a concise reminder why they didn't.

Bored of the sandpit? This all-in-one collection of mods makes it prettier, deeper, and more focused on wilderness survival. [via RPS]