‘Minecraft: The Island’ blurs line between fiction and gaming

that in 2014, Microsoft bought the company for $2.5 billion.

As product spinoffs go, a series of novels seems like a natural step for Mojang, which already has a wildly successful publishing line of gaming manuals. (A feature film is also in the works, at Warner Bros.)

Since 2013, the children’s publisher Scholastic has published 10 Minecraft titles, which have 25 million copies in print. On Amazon, there are thousands more unofficial titles that fans have self-published, including entire novels set inside the game.

“We had been thinking about fiction for a long time but wanted to make sure that it didn’t take away from people’s experience of the game, because everyone plays in a different way,” said Lydia Winters, Mojang’s brand director.

But commissioning a brand-approved Minecraft novel posed unique creative and commercial challenges. How do you create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end out of an openended game?

And would gamers bother to pick up a nearly 300-page novel about Minecraft, when they could be spending their free time playing it?

Brooks — a cheerful, enthusiastic paranoiac who is obsessed with survival strategies, zombies, apocalyptic scenarios and plagues — wrote the story as a firstperson, Robinson Crusoeesque narrative, featuring an initially hapless character who is stranded on a strange island and has to build shelter, find food, and fight off zombies and giant spiders, all features that exist in the game.

In the process, he may have also created a strange new entertainment category, one that hovers somewhere between fan fiction, roleplaying games and literature — a novel set in a game, that can itself be played within the game.

Like reverse adaptations of movies and TV shows (see, for example, novels based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and CSI), novels based on gaming franchises have long been a lucrative niche within the publishing industry.

When Mojang asked if he would be interested in writing a Minecraft novel, Brooks was so enthusiastic that he wrote a full draft before his contract was even completed. For the most part, Mojang gave him freedom to write the story however he wanted. The company’s only instructions had to do with the protagonist’s physical appearance.

They were very hands off when it came to the story, but very hands on when it came to inclusiveness,” he said.

Mojang wanted to make sure that any Minecraft player could pick up the novel and imagine himself or herself in it. The company even commissioned two different versions of the audiobook, one by a female narrator, Samira Wiley, and another by a man, actor Jack Black, so that listeners can choose a narrator of either gender.

Keeping the character’s identity ambiguous wasn’t too hard: Because the hero is stranded alone on an island, with only animals and other ghoulish creatures to talk to, Brooks was able to avoid using gendered pronouns.

Brooks concedes that the novel, which is geared toward 8- to 12-year-olds, might not hold much appeal for those who are unfamiliar with the game.

The plot was created for players, and perhaps parents and grandparents who want to understand the game’s appeal, Brooks said.

Above all, though, Brooks wrote it to satisfy his own creative impulses.

“Honestly, at the end of it all, I wrote it for me,” he said. “I’m a fan first.”