I had just gotten home from school; it was a day I’d rather forget. Bad news about a few test grades and a project due tomorrow that I hadn’t even started and probably wouldn’t start at all. I was dreading tomorrow, but I knew today was going to get better when I sat in front of my brand new laptop I had gotten for Christmas a few weeks prior.

The laptop was Dell, a bluish finish with silver lining and the letters XPS on the cover to signify the sub-brand. I always found XPS to be the superior laptop over the Alienware Dell also sells. It was the model M1530 and it was a computer that could run my favorite games like nothing. I had just installed Windows 7 on it and it still boasted quite the repertoire with four gigabytes of RAM and a dual core Intel processor. It was a computer that I had asked for in detail, and to my surprise, it was a computer I got.

But of course, it wasn’t just the laptop that would make this otherwise boring Wednesday afternoon an exciting one, full of exploration and even mischief. It was a game I saw on Youtube, one that I saw many people playing, and one that only cost $26.50.

I had $26.50. I planned on using it for gas, but I didn’t plan on going anywhere special. Sadly, my life revolved around technology and keeping myself occupied.

I had friends, and we did stuff together but my friends had relationships and those relationships took precedence over me. I was okay with that though, it made the days we did have together pretty memorable. I made a lot of friends online, a few of which I talk to quite a bit at night because of their time zone and my clinically diagnosed insomnia. I was diagnosed a while ago and don’t like taking medication that makes me sleep so I take Nyquil for the drowsiness effect and it works in my favor most of the time. My prescribed medication, Aderol or ‘Addie’ as I usually call it is only taken when I am truly desperate.

Days like this though, my life is free of distraction and I’m wide awake sitting in my room in front of my laptop and a second monitor tuned to a re-run of LagLateNight. I was content and soon I’d have the game I’ve been waiting to play for a very long time… well, it felt that way at least. I’ve heard so many good things about it and the community surrounding it. So much so that I signed up to the forums and a separate forum called MinecraftWB. They run a server that you need to be whitelisted, I guess that means accepted, onto the server before you can log on.

I introduced myself and started posting, I am a very down to earth person that loves to help out anyone that needs it. So I eventually put in an application to get whitelisted; before I even had the game. It took a few days but I got accepted yesterday and can’t wait to log on and play my first experience with the game on a server with a bunch of people rather than by myself.

But before I could do that, I had to buy the game, so I logged onto Minecraft.net and hit the yellow “Buy Now!” button, signed up with the name ‘ObliviousWriter’ because I loved to write when I wasn’t playing games. I typed in my debit card information and then… I owned the game. The feeling I felt is simply indescribable. I felt amazing and I still hadn’t even played the game. So…

I downloaded it. I pinned it to my start menu and opened it up to a window prompting me to log in as it let me read the various additions that version 1.1 offered. I clicked log in and it started downloading the game. My hands were shaking when it showed me the panoramic viewing start menu and when I clicked multiplayer; I found that I forgot the IP address for the server. It was way too late for that now. I had to play it, so I decided single player would have to do.

My hands started shaking more and more as I clicked to create a new world. When I saw the two words “Generating Chunks”, I simply closed my eyes as my hands began to shake more and more but when I opened them… I wasn’t looking at a screen anymore.

I was standing in a hot desert surrounded by nothing but grains of sand. But these grains were different… They had edges. I closed my eyes thinking I was day dreaming but when I opened them I was still in this world. It was an infinite world that was still growing all around me, more and more being revealed to me as I turned around to look at my surroundings.

But then, as if it was a brick thrown by Cy Young that hit me straight in the forehead, it became clear to me.

I was in the game. I was in Minecraft.