I imagine the creation of most video games as a fairly straightforward procedure involving a lot of coding and testing and talking and other boring office-type procedures. Only when the process goes horribly wrong—like the ET tie-in game or Duke Nukem Forever—do we traditionally tend to notice or care about the background of video games. Surely there's not enough interesting material behind the creation of a single video game to warrant an entire book, is there?

Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson have either found the exception that proves the rule, or they've figured out that the most important thing about a story is how you tell it. Their Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed Everything is an interesting story about an interesting man who decides to make an interesting game. Even I, a non-gamer who has spent maybe two and a half minutes playing Minecraft on my phone a year or so ago, was enthralled. The book follows Persson from his early days as just another computer nerd through his time as a cog in a large game company to his bumbling beginnings as the self-deprecating creator of a game that would inspire legions of people to come together and virtually build things. Granted, Minecraft isn't as thick with sex and drugs and interpersonal conflict as your standard rock biography, but it does pull itself along with the narrative compulsion of a tech biography—a simple idea explodes in unforeseen ways, causing its nerdy creator some large amount of stress—and outline a cultural phenomenon in ways that even those who've missed out up 'til now can understand.

Tonight, Goldberg and Larsson are celebrating the release of their new book at the UW HUB with a free "all-day LAN party" and reading. The event starts at 2:30 pm, features junk food and soda, and if you're a Minecraft fan, you should seriously consider attending. (The reading part starts at 6:30, if you're curious but have a day job.) Find more information at University Book Store's site.