London - For a room full of children, our lounge is awfully quiet.
There are five of them, aged between eight and 14, sprawled out on the sofa and the floor staring intensely at their phone screens. Occasionally, one of them issues a stern command: “Get the torch,” and “Steal the weapons” or more worrying, “Kill the zombie pigman”.
Usually that many children in our small lounge would make a noise roughly the same decibel level as a crowd of One Direction fans at Wembley, so this near silence and focused concentration is unnerving. It is like walking into an old people’s home during a bridge tournament. I’m even tempted to offer them some Battenberg cake and a nice cup of tea.
“What’s going on,” I ask.
“Minecraft,” my eldest whispers without looking up. I am perplexed by her reply. It sounds so much more exciting than it is because Minecraft, in case you didn’t know, is probably the world’s dullest computer game.
It may have notched up 100 million downloads since its launch six years ago, but believe me, it is so boring I would rather help Mr Candy fold his secret stockpile of plastic bags than play it.
Yet my children and their friends love it.
They pretend to be a character called Steve who builds worlds out of brown and green blocks. He is himself made of blue and brown blocks. You can use him to visit your friends’ blue and brown block worlds online. It is so basic, my four-year-old could have invented it.
I know everyone believes computer games open the door to a dark, dangerous world, but if Minecraft is anything to go by, it is a gateway to nothing more sinister than tiddlywinks.
I’m fascinated by the children’s addiction to it. How can something so boring and unsophisticated be so enjoyable? They play it with their friends for what seems like hours. Mine have even joined Minecraft worlds with children at neighbouring tables in our local cafe.
You don’t win anything, you don’t gain any points, you can’t buy anything exciting, there are no sound effects worth mentioning, little skill is involved and it makes Angry Birds look highbrow.
Steve is not a superhero and he doesn’t save anyone from anything. Put it this way: no one is pretending to be Steve in the playground when I drop my eight-year-old at school.
Maybe the simplicity of Minecraft is what makes it so attractive. In a world where children are constantly bombarded with exciting, sophisticated new things and ever-more social activity, perhaps this extremely basic game has a calming effect.
Maybe it serves to slow things down, in the same way that a programme about strangers baking is more popular than anything else on telly.
I suspect the whole nation goes on ‘standby’ when they watch The Great British Bake Off, like a huge group meditation where our minds completely empty as the soothing tones of Mary and Paul talk us to sleep while keeping our eyes open. I love GBBO and I hate cooking.
And unlike any other computer game they play, Robot Unicorn Attack and the like, I notice that there is no lesson to be learned from Minecraft, no battle between good and evil, no underdog overthrowing a power-crazy ruler, so it isn’t even helpful to use a disciplinary tool or an explanation of real life told through computer characters.
It’s a waste of time on every level except for this suspiciously quiet atmosphere it creates. It’s like Valium for the under 18s.
Plus the other Minecraft challenge for me is, because it is so monumentally dire, there is so little to object to, which makes it difficult to enforce my regular bans on screen time.
It’s possible I am missing a sinister secret meaning of Minecraft due to my own prejudice against computer games, but if anyone can explain the phenomenon I would welcome your input, because even the man who founded it — multi-millionaire Markus Persson, hates it.
After out-bidding Beyonce for a flash pad in the LA Hills, he tweeted about how unhappy his fortune had made him and how lonely he was. See? None of it make sense.
The one upside of Minecraft? If you play it and watch Bake Off at the same time, you can fall into a coma so deep that it starts to make up for the 13 years of sleepless nights caused by motherhood.
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.
Daily Mail