Minecraft: Hope in Java form

My indie support fund for this month was expended getting into some Minecraft, and this investment has paid off in ways I didn't remotely expect. 
 
On the more obvious front, the game's simplicity and openness make it very entertaining. There is little depth to Minecraft's mechanics, but the few pillars the game is built upon have brought LEGOs into the 21st century. This is easily the most apt comparison I can draw for the game, from the brick-by-brick construction to the enforced granularity of the world to the mine spelunking--an exercise suspiciously akin to my time spent rummaging in a giant tub for the one piece I need, sidetracked by a multitude of wondrous obstacles along the way. 
 
The more subtle, and possibly more gratifying, thing that Minecraft has done is restock my belief in the ingenuity of the video game industry. I am not naive enough to believe that video games have stopped evolving or have "run out of ideas;" I am actually rather anti-nostalgic as far as gamers go and I frequently defend new games from the community's stigma against corporate influence, whether these games are based on novel ideas or not (Modern Warfare 2 comes to mind). But I do lose confidence in the industry's ability to make novel adventures as the years go by. I can't help it; as my perspective for this entertainment form gets larger, the momentum of today's innovations seems less and less impressive by comparison. 
 
But once every year or so, a game like Minecraft comes along and shines a light on that gathering shadow. Anyone could have made Minecraft. Anybody. The game runs in a browser and is so simple it could have existed in its current form ten, if not fifteen years ago. But the hand of fate fell last year on recently unemployed Markus Persson to codify this work, a game allegedly inspired by games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Dungeon Keeper, neither of which come close to emulating the creative freedom of Minecraft. 
 
That is a hell of a thing.