If you don't know, Minecraft is a "sandbox" adventure game, meaning that while it has an adventure mode with many goals, the game engine encourages free-form playing and exploration. The game is centered around crafting objects and tools out of existing materials, and mining to find such materials. Each world that is generated is different, making each play-through a different experience.
Being so free-form, and at times a bit too difficult for me, it was the kind of game that made me procrastinate, that is I wouldn't play it for months at a time, and when I'd play it I'd play it for far too long. I started playing that game when it was in its alpha release, and a lot of my experiences were influenced by many things that were tweaked since then. Since I started playing it again in a new world in version 1.0, I was pleasantly surprised at how better balanced it became.
To make a game work less "idle" all the time, I've made my own Minecraft server, and for the past few months I've let my brother play in the same world as me. This collaboration immensely helped me, partly because my brother ends up playing more than me, but also because his style of playing and building complements mine. In a way, it is as if the server was some kind of game "wiki".
Last weekend we dared enter as a team the Nether world for the first time. My previous (and only) experience of the Nether was from the beta days, and it was a nightmare. The portal exited in a place filled with ghasts, and back then you couldn't punch the fire balls to bounce them back, nor could you have a chicken farm and reproduce them to get feathers and craft a decent quantity of arrows to safely attack those ghasts at a distance. But this time, working in pair means that if you die it is possible for your partner to collect all your equipment even if you're far away from your spawn point. I'm still scared at finding those yellow monsters that contain the brewing sticks we seek, but not being alone might just make the difference.