As “Minecraft” is a user-driven experience, the convention’s organizers decided to let the fans decide where to hold Minecon. Vegas must have sounded good on paper, but the heart of empty consumerism was a strange place to drop 5,000 Utopian-minded geeks. Each day there was a long, pasty parade through Mandalay Bay’s casino en route to the conventional halls; bleary-eyed gamblers and prostitutes didn’t know exactly what to make of gamers in costumes and capes. At one point, a popular panel let out and Minecon enthusiasts found themselves outside a theater where Katy Perry was about to play. The anti-consumerist virtual army marched past a hyper-sexualized horde of sparkly-eye-shadowed tweens.

So what the hell is “Minecraft”? And what brought together these 5,000 die-hard fans from 23 countries? What’s difficult to explain to those who haven’t spent time with “Minecraft” is that it is not simply a game, but an open-ended virtual world, one that has spawned a massive and rapidly expanding online community. The gamers believe that “Minecraft” is a powerful force for creativity in an overly prescribed world. I went to Minecon with my guide and translator, namely my son, just shy of 13 years old, a “Minecraft” early adopter and veteran who has taught himself programming simply to manipulate the game.

But despite making Time magazine’s Top 50 Inventions of the Year, “Minecraft” has spread mainly by word of mouth and social media. I was the only journalist at Minecon who didn’t work for a blog or gaming magazine. It’s especially popular on YouTube, which has seen an explosion of screen-capture videos with voice-overs produced by “commentators” who do everything from show off their latest massive builds, “walk-throughs” of challenges and humorous send-ups of things like “Lord of the Rings” within “Minecraft.”

Unlike the all-time bestselling online game, “World of Warcraft,” you play “Minecraft” as yourself, not as a fantastic version of oneself. Therefore, when interacting with other players, you are interacting with humans, not someone acting out their fantasy of being a muscle-bound warrior with flowing locks, or a bosomy blood elf, or a 7-foot-tall slathering goblin. This lack of artifice makes for genuine, personal bonds and it was great to watch as people who’d known each other virtually for months (if my kid is any indicator) meet in person.

It was also interesting to hear parents of kids with Asperger’s relate how “Minecraft” has enabled their kids to socialize in a way they never could before in the real world. Even more surprisingly, the kids have been able to translate these newfound skills into the physical world. One mother said that because her kid, who was brilliant but had trouble in school, spent so much time explaining aspects of “Minecraft” to his mother, he was able to translate this patience and work on his homework from start to finish for the first time.

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So how popular is this game? Many of the most popular commentators have become massive game-world celebrities and are now employed by the gaming video company Machinima (which boasts the most-viewed entertainment channel on YouTube, with nearly 950 million videos posted to date). The Machinima “Directors” make long, elaborate videos, often featuring electronic dance music soundtracks by artists like DeadMau5 and Skrillex. The most popular commentators, the Yogscast, are beyond even Machinima. Starring Simon and Lewis, a very funny British duo (who have a running shtick of their avatars bumbling through adventure maps), Yogscast now has over a million subscribers, and employs four people to keep up with the relentless demands of fans. At Minecon, Simon and Lewis were the elusive prey. Fans lined up for three hours or more for an autograph, and their presentation was easily the most well-attended panel of the weekend.

The game itself is an eight-bit, super-pixelated Java-built universe where you are a generic character (“Steve,” which you can personalize with your own skin) armed with nothing but a pickax. That’s it. Just Steve and the pickax. There are no instructions. It falls to the players to make the most of the randomly generated pixelated landscapes, which naturally involves, you guessed it, mining. You dig for various elements — from gravel to gold to obsidian — then combine (“craft”) elements into mine carts, tracks, doors, windows, and then build anything you want above- or below ground, including towers, Taj Mahals or music-generating trip-wires powered by intricate “redstone” circuitry.

The constructions can be truly spectacular. Sky towers of remarkable complexity, beautifully elegant, geometric, massive structures resembling cathedrals or Miasaki-like flying fortresses. Engineering marvels of circuitry that create whimsical “pig slot machines” or even other games within the game. “Minecraft” gives you the tools, and almost all players love to MacGyver more than anything.

Whereas “World of Warcraft” has set missions that you must complete to advance, the genius of “Minecraft” lies in its mutability and adaptability. Its creator, the Swedish game designer Marcus Persson, aka Notch, encourages outside coders to modify and subvert the game. This includes developing “mods,” which can be inserted into “Minecraft,” introducing everything from werewolves to nuclear power.

“Minecraft” can be played in single-player mode, allowing for uninterrupted construction, or in multi-player mode with a running chat feature. Collaborative spirit is one of “Minecraft’s” main emotional engines. The game is played on a seemingly endless number of servers, both public and private, which you can then open to friends, virtual or otherwise.

“Minecraft” is revolutionary because it has no real goals, no real end. At least until Minecon, where Notch decided to announce “The End.” Notch, a self-effacing, charming, gnomish Swede in his ubiquitous fedora and polo shirt, told me, “I always imagined ‘Minecraft’ would have an end. I like games with an end. But,” he smiles amiably, “I’m not taking it too seriously.”

And neither did the gamers. Most were willing to indulge Notch his end. As it turns out, after playing “The End,” which involves defeating an “Enderdragon,” a menacing black dragon, which, in Classic mode took the assembled geeks anywhere from one to 15 minutes to dispatch, the gamers jumped right back into the heart of the game. For “Minecraft” users, it is all about the journey, not the destination.

After test-driving the new version on any of the hundreds of free computers set up in the exhibit hall, most gamers returned to creating their own worlds — and to the all-consuming mission at Minecon: meeting the rock stars of their universe, the Directors. There was also buzz about who was actually going to get into the closing party, where wildly successful 23-year-old British artist DeadMau5 himself, a “Minecraft” über-fan, with a Creeper (the green, phallic, zombie-like creatures that prowl the “Minecraft” night) tattoo on his arm and a green Space Invader on his neck, would be playing.

As with any geeky gathering, part of the joy is getting to be with your own people and letting your freak flag fly. In that spirit, many participants brought homemade pickaxes, diamond swords, boxheads and full-on costumes. The chaotic costume contest, judged by fan applause, was a highlight. There were plenty of Steves, Creepers, black-clad Endermen, boxes of TNT and even the online avatar of DeadMau5 — a blue mouse-head with beady red eyes. Since the crowd was half teenage boys, a “Sexy Wolf,” wearing only a few strips of fur, won going away.

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But this online world has applications in real life as well. On one panel, a Swedish developer discussed using “Minecraft” to redesign and rebuild dilapidated public housing. He said that the “Minecraft” rendering was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of the new buildings and parks. The physical results exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Jason Levin, aka “the Minecraft Teacher,” founded MinecraftEdu and uses the game in his curriculum. He’s discovered that students go beyond their assignments when “Minecraft” is introduced to the classroom. The game’s applications range from simple ones — foreign-language classes where students build a world and label everything with their new vocabulary words — to elaborate. Students have made entire cell structures, or created the equivalent of a living, breathing book report of the “Lord of the Flies” island, re-created with all of its characters. “If the kids are already going to be playing ‘Minecraft,’ why not incorporate these challenges?” he said.

Collective, virtual problem-solving that can be applied to the physical world is most certainly the future. Game theorist Jane McGonical, author of “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” is convinced that an entire new generation raised playing collaborative games will help solve the world’s greatest challenges. In online games, she argues, we are at our best and most optimistic selves. Real-world goals of money, fame and beauty are more and more hollow to young people, she suggests. They’re much happier collaborating on “epic wins” in the virtual world. She believes that we are well on our way to harnessing this energy and creativity to tackle real-world issues.

It’s an argument that dovetails with Rachel Botsman’s economic utopian theories. Botsman, the author of “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption,” argues that we are moving away from endless consumerism. Economic necessity and finite resources, she writes, have generated a moral shift; many people are now more interested in “uses versus possessions.”

At Minecon, this utopian idealism was pervasive. The participants ranged in age from 4 to 77, and there were many, many families present, usually one parent with one very happy teenager. A majority of the parents were players themselves, while a sizable number came to find out more about this all-consuming passion. Via Twitter, I noticed that Lauren Myracle was in the building with her 13-year-old son, who is only a few months older than mine. Myracle, who had been disnominated for the National Book Awards YA category in a colossal blunder on the part of the NBA, decided to attend Minecon rather than accept an invitation to the awards ceremony. When we spoke, our sons talked about which Directors they had met, and we tried not to embarrass ourselves in front of our kids as we compared notes about the phenomenon. Like most of the parents at Minecon, we found that we are much more willing to indulge endless hours of “Minecraft” as opposed to first-person shooter or role-playing games.

I also tracked down Alex Leavitt, who is working on his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. His thesis is on “Minecraft” and its popularity. (I studied the psychology of sport in grad school, so I know the incredulous eyebrows Alex gets.) Leavitt is onto something quite profound. As an academic subject, “Minecraft” is endlessly fascinating, and changing by the second. “Two years ago this couldn’t have happened,” Leavitt told me. “The infrastructure was not there to support this.” Leavitt told me that one year ago there were a few thousand “Minecraft” YouTube videos. Today, there are well over a million. And with the rise and cult of the Directors, these videos are heavily curated with instantaneous feedback. “Captain Sparklez,” one of the most prominent Directors (his “Revenge” video, based on the Usher song “DJ’s Got Us Fallin’ in Love,” about the dangers of Creepers, is a “Minecraft” legend with over 16 million YouTube views) says that within minutes of posting a video he has thousands of comments. “You are my content,” he told a cheering crowd of fans.

Minecraft Miles, who has the daunting task of running the constantly updated Official Minecraft Wiki and Forum, came to Minecon straight from Occupy Portland. He was very happy to have his first shower in two weeks. You might think that a populace that spends a lot of time in a Lego-like virtual world wouldn’t be in tune with current events, but the Occupy movement was very much in the Minecon air. Everyone who works for the tech company IGN, the official online streamers of the convention, were wearing “Occupy Minecon” T-shirts, and there was more than one overheard conversation along the lines of “How do we take Occupy into ‘Minecraft’?”

For all the utopian, anti-consumeristic idealism, the most popular booth at Minecon was Jinx, the official swag retailer, which had a nonstop line for T-shirts. There’s nothing like a physical manifestation to show which tribe you belong to.

Indeed, Minecon attendees left with a new sense of how profoundly meaningful the community is to so many players. With the new app and the Xbox versions, the “Minecraft” revolution is only going to spread further and deeper. While I’m looking forward to all of the incredible new “Minecraft” creations, what I’m particularly interested in is what the Minecraft Generation is going to do in the virtual and real worlds. My son and several million other kids are coming of age playing a utopian game with no limits and no rules. Their creations are going to change the world in ways we cannot imagine.

The year is 1970, and fatherless, aimless Bobby, who wants nothing more than to be the filling in a hippie love sandwich, is stuck instead in his pill-crazed mom’s condo, having been booted out of boarding school for doinking the daughter of a one-armed townie barber and tattoo artist (after being nabbed by the father while searching for a lost condom where a condom shouldn’t get lost and then literally getting tattooed by the enraged parent). Back home, Bobby hooks up with his kindergarten crush, Michelle, a lapsed Hare Krishna on her way to San Francisco. Hoping to “de-lame” himself, Bobby impulsively pinches his mom’s money and joins Michelle on the road.

Up to this point we’ve been in “Portnoy’s Complaint”/”On the Road” territory, with an angst-ridden, sex-crazed, too-sensitive, too-smart kid wondering, “Could life actually not be hell?” But as soon as the two strike out on their own, the trip turns bad, the wide-eyed beat euphoria veering into ’70s Manson-family buzz-kill.

A couple of older longhairs named Meat and Varnish, wired crank-heads in a moving drug warehouse of a car, pick up Bobby and Michelle, and it’s on this long, nightmarish ride that Stahl ventures out of shtick and into narrative, the tension ratcheting up far beyond the realm of funny-but-slight set pieces. But once the ride to the Haight-Ashbury dramatically ends, the novel keeps limping along until it runs out of time and steam. And that’s too bad, since the dark flip side of the sunny Summer of Love has rarely been captured with such venom and humor.

Even without the dead-on depiction of the period, though, “Perv” would still be worth reading for its wry take on the teenage sensation of being perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time with the cool kids just around the corner — the feeling that life is “everything you couldn’t see.” Is it a great novel? No. Are the characters and situations hilarious and sad, poignant and empathetic? Yes. Although definitely bound to a time, “Perv” is a timeless tale of teenage displacement and, weirdly enough, star-gazing wonder.

Structurally inventive, “Heading South, Looking North” alternates chapters about the dangerous days after the CIA-led Pinochet coup in 1973 with chapters about his wild family history. Itself worthy of a book, the Dorfman family odyssey reads like a shadow history of the 20th century. His grandparents, Eastern European Jews who barely escaped the Czarist pogroms, fled to Buenos Aires, where Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman was born in 1942. His father, a communist teacher, was expelled from Argentina after the Peron-led fascist coup in 1945. In New York City, Vladimiro forswore Spanish, refusing to speak it even to his parents and insisting that everyone call him Edward, and lived an all-American, baseball-loving childhood until 1953. That’s when Sen. Joseph McCarthy personally insisted that Dorfman’s father, who worked at the United Nations, be shipped off to a remote post in Santiago, Chile. Dorfman’s cultural confusion only increased as he continued to write in English while thinking about Chilean politics in Spanish. He was soon making a name for himself with his revolutionary lit-crit essays and vocal political agitation.

“Heading South, Looking North” adroitly reexamines the quandary of withdrawal vs. engagement. Dorfman felt forced to choose between the life of an artistic nomad and accepting his home as a place worth risking one’s life. “Latin America, I felt, could solve the dilemma of the modern artist, merge the intellectual and the social, the vanguard and the masses, the heroism of the writer and the heroism of the people.” With refreshing and clear-eyed honesty, Dorfman reflects on his successes and failures, and in a rare feat manages to resonate intellectually, historically, poetically and emotionally. “Heading South, Looking North” is easily one of the most memorable memoirs in years.

These wrenching yet hopeful essays open a window into a house of
pain. It is a place where the biological alarm clock has gone off,
dropping the all-consuming procreational bomb on the brain. “The
irrevocable moment in becoming a parent is not the moment you conceive a
child; it’s the moment you conceive of her,” Barbara Jones writes of traveling to China to adopt a girl when she was still
single. As soon as these desirous shock waves ripple through you, the
world assumes a simple duality — you either have a child or you are
childless. “They were in one world, and I was in another,” as co-editor
Helen Schulman puts it in her harrowing account of trying to conceive, a
three-year nightmare that included “three miscarriages, five doctors,
two surgical procedures, a blood transfusion, infertility drugs, four
months of progesterone shots, endless, endless testing, and a partridge
in a pear tree to achieve this pregnancy.”

Procreation is frequently perceived as a mystical experience wherein
strange cosmic forces seem to play with no regard to the hard and fast
rules of science, logic or fairness. And when infertility strikes, most
of the contributors turned from intuition and the unknown mysteries of
the universe to the comfort of fertility specialists. “Magical thinking
gave way to practicality,” as Rita Gabis puts it in her poetic essay
about her battle with infertility and miscarriage. And when science
fails, faith in anything, even mourning, can be obliterated, as with
Peter Carey, who writes a heartbreaking remembrance of the stillbirths of
three children to his first wife. Thirty years later, remarried and
with two healthy children, Carey still regrets not naming his lost
children, not properly mourning them, not properly acknowledging his and
his wife’s pain. As co-editor Jill Bialosky writes in her beautiful and
tragic account of the loss of her two prematurely born children, “They
existed; they matter.”

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Even after Bialosky’s tragedy, she, like many others, continued to
yearn for a biological child. “What is this burning desire? This need
for a child? I remember wishing they could extract it out of me, the way
they extracted my child,” Bialosky writes. While wishing the feeling
away, she still completely entrusted herself to fertility specialists:
“Medicine is seductive. It gives me the hope I need to get up in the
morning.” And after repeated failures, hope itself can become the
enemy. “It was hope, more than anything else, that my wife most feared
these days,” Bob Schocochis writes in his devastating essay
about his wife’s repeated miscarriages.

When we first decided to try to have a child, my wife and I glanced at
the literature of failure, about what could go wrong with egg and sperm,
and the myriad of misfortunes that can befall pregnancies. But only a
quick glance. We had an almost superstitious fear of looking, as if by
letting words and phrases like “ectopic” or “Down’s syndrome” into our brains they
would somehow manifest themselves in my wife’s womb. What would we do
if we were faced, like L.N. Wakefield and Michael Berube, with an
amniocentesis test showing Down’s syndrome? In “Wanting a Child” the
emotional weight of deciding whether to abort is
heartbreakingly rendered. “Every aspect of daily life, from what I ate
to how I slept, to my thoughts and emotions, had been focused on
protecting my unborn child,” Wakefield writes. “How was it possible
that I would consciously with free will participate in its death? How
could my husband and I have wanted a child so desperately and yet have
known relatively quickly that we would not keep it?”

Philip Lopate, in his account of raising a daughter with severe gastric
problems, writes: “That she made me enter the Kingdom of Anxiety, which
is the lot of all parents, seems a small price to pay for the plentitude
of her being.” And this is at the heart of “Wanting a Child,” this
fierce, unquenchable desire to give life, to give of ourselves. Jenifer
Levin, a single gay woman, contributes an account of her quest to
adopt a Cambodian child in the war-torn country that does not allow
foreign adoptions. She persists, fights and passionately demonstrates
“the multiple ways we find to love.”

My daughter recently told me, in all seriousness, “Daddy, we’re not friends.” Luckily she amended the statement by adding, after a dramatic pause, “We’re mammals.” Because of her constant creativity, willfulness and unrestrained love, I have never experienced so much joy, exasperation and connection to life as
in the last two and a half years. Reading “Wanting a Child” affirmed all
of these feelings and took me further, opening me up to the complete
realm of possible parenting experiences. To acknowledge the risks, the
possible pains, the possible failures only heightens my appreciation for
the miracle that is having a child. For any parent and for anyone who
has contemplated being a parent, “Wanting a Child” is an invaluable
affirmation.

In a brilliant blending of brand names, Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz announced early this month that, starting with Oprah Book Club Selection No. 8 — Mary McGarry Morris’ “Songs in Ordinary Time” — which was announced yesterday, Oprah’s Book Club selections will be for sale at all 1,200 Starbucks stores. Schulz says he plans to donate the proceeds from Oprah book sales to literacy causes and has hired a full-time staff to oversee all such disbursements.

Apparently Schultz, a mega-gazillionaire known for supporting numerous charities and PC causes, had a bit of trouble getting Oprah’s attention. For weeks she didn’t return his calls. Perhaps that’s because anyone who has even dreamed of selling a book has called Chicago and tried to whisper sweet nothings in Oprah’s ear. When Schultz finally got through, Oprah had no trouble smelling the coffee. As Adam Handlesman, the Starbucker in charge of the company’s literacy project puts it, “The two major powerhouses finally came together and saw a great opportunity.”

Handlesman says the Starbucks-Oprah alliance springs from Schultz’s sincere interest in American literacy. Skeptics will note that it no doubt also occurred to Shultz that Oprah books would bring more people — and more money — into his stores.

And the opportunity for both Starbucks and Oprah is great indeed. Four million people fill their cups at Starbucks each week. The coffeehouse has long been a meeting spot for readers and writers, as is noted in the Starbucks press release announcing the Oprah-Starbucks alliance. Why not offer those 4 million latte drinkers a little something they can read as they sip?

For a dramatic insight into her prowess as a bookseller, look at the case of Oprah’s very first book club selection: “The Deep End of the Ocean” by Jacquelyn Mitchard, a grim but well-reviewed first novel about the disappearance of a 3-year-old child. The book had sold a respectable 68,000 copies before Oprah announced that it would be the club’s first selection. It sold an unprecedented 750,000 copies in the month between Oprah’s announcement and the day her first book club feature aired. The book charged up the bestseller list, topped the chart and has proceeded to sell more than a million copies.

The next month, Oprah followed with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s 1977 classic, “Song of Solomon.” Then came Jane Hamilton’s novel “The Book of Ruth,” the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award winner. Blam! Another million copies each, and instant No. 1 paperback bestseller status. Each successive book followed the pattern and right now those four books — “The Heart of a Woman” by Maya Angelou, “The Rapture of Canaan” by Sheri Reynolds, “Stones from the River” by Ursula Hegi and “She’s Come Undone” by Wally Lamb — are all still on the bestseller lists; Angelou’s latest installment of her memoirs is now No. 1 in the nonfiction paperback category.

To put these numbers in context, you need to compare Oprah to the next most popular book club — the Book of the Month Club. The 71-year-old organization, now owned by Time Inc., is actually made up of 11 different clubs with just over 4 million members. The charter club, which has a million members, goes gaga when it’s able to sell 100,000 hardbacks of its main selection, something that only happens with established names like Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Anne Rice. This is through aggressive direct marketing in a billion-dollar business that has had it’s best year ever despite sagging profits by most publishers. A BOMC subsidiary, the Quality Paperback Club, has 800,000 members and tends toward literary selections that the club’s editorial director, Linda Lowenthal, says correspond with San Francisco-area bestsellers. In the last year one of QPC’s biggest sellers was David Denby’s “Great Books,” moving roughly 50,000 units. This month’s selection, Robert Fogel’s much-praised new translation of “The Odyssey,” is enjoying a similar sales pace.

These numbers are anemic compared with Oprah’s club, especially since Oprah spends zippo promoting and announcing her choices. While many in the literary community scoffed at the spectacle of the talk show queen choosing fiction titles, the conventional wisdom within the book world has been that Oprah has done a decent job, picking fairly difficult, quasi-literary titles. Through her well-oiled publicity machine, Oprah assures publishers and her viewers that she alone chooses each title, based solely on what strikes her fancy, and so far she seems impervious to hype or pub dates. There was minor grumbling when she chose Morrison because Oprah’s film company owns the rights to another Morrison novel, but it’s difficult to find fault with Oprah’s selections.

On the other hand, Oprah’s Orwellian ability to create the book of the month is terrifying. She wields so much power that she can command utter secrecy from the book selection authors and publishers; if word leaks out before Oprah announces the selection, she says she’ll pull the book. So far, despite the headaches involved in getting enough books into stores to meet an instantaneously massive demand, no one has violated her secrecy rule. What’s more, Oprah even dictates the price for which selections sell. No one in the book business seems willing to risk offense to one of publishing’s biggest powers.

Meanwhile, the secrecy surrounding Oprah’s book choices, naturally, helps build suspense — and viewers — for the monthly shows on which Oprah announces her selections. As do all Oprah’s Book Club shows, Wednesday’s program featured four Oprah viewers at dinner — and subsequent pajama party! — with last month’s book selection author, Maya Angelou, this time around. Oprah ended the show with what she called a big announcement for a really big book; she said readers could have the rest of the summer to finish Mary Morris McGarry’s 740-page tome even though she read it in less than a week herself. Then, in a moment that must have roasted Howard Shultz’s beans, she announced the Starbucks deal; holding McGarry’s book aloft, she urged viewers to get up the next morning, head for Starbucks, “have a latte and buy this book.”

Trying to come to terms with the Oprah-Starbucks connection is something like staring at a difficult cubist painting: One sees what one wants to see. Those predisposed to seeing signs of an endless march toward a streamlined, thoughtless McCulture will be horrified, while those who believe that only corporate giants and celebrities can cure society’s ills will say don’t worry, be happy, have a Grande Frappuccino and Selection No. 8. The choices have already been made for you.