A generation raised on the delights of Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Game Boy Tetris has now grown up. We have iPhones that wake us in the morning, Kindles that put us to sleep, and Facebook news feeds that annoy and entice us during the day. Many of us also have children. These children see us on our screens, want to play with these screens, and eventually ask to have their own screens. The discussion about how much screen time a child should be allowed is central to modern parenting. It’s the inescapable question.

The fervor and complications behind this issue were brought into relief by two recent news stories. The first was a report in the Times, by Nick Bilton, about how, in 2010, Steve Jobs was a “low-tech parent” who did not let his children have access to Apple’s new gadget, the iPad. Bilton quotes Walter Isaacson, who describes how Jobs instead “made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things.” Then, on Monday, Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for Minecraft, the hugely popular game in which players build, explore, and destroy Lego-like virtual worlds. When the Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella was asked why his company bought Minecraft, he replied, “If you think about it, it’s the one game parents want their kids to play.”

What to make of these neat, contrasting C.E.O. statements? It was Jobs who declared that a computer was “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” He built Apple on the mystique that its products unleash inner creativity, that they are machines for reaching one’s full potential. That’s why the no-iPads statement to Bilton stood out. We like to believe the fantasy that Jobs peddled; it makes us feel better about our devotion to his products. Jobs’s decision not to let his own family use iPads has the air of the drug pusher who takes care never to sample his own wares. Bilton goes on to quote other tech leaders who strictly limit their children’s access to phones, the Internet, and laptops. The exclamation point is provided by Chris Anderson, who offers a “universal rule”: “There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever.”

One suspects that these tech leaders were posturing a bit—really, no screens? But Anderson’s statement gets at the unspoken fear. Screens are no longer simply bicycles for the mind; they are bicycles that children can ride anywhere, into the virtual schoolyard where they might encounter disturbing news photos, bullies, creeps, and worse. Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers. It’s nuts. We inure ourselves to this craziness by relying on the basic innocence of kids: they could type all sorts of unseemly things into that Google search box, but they usually don’t. They look at trick-shot videos, or at an annoying orange. Still, the sense of playing near a cliffside remains.

The comfort of games is that they are partially walled off from the larger Internet, with their own communities and leaderboards. But what unsettles parents about Internet gaming, despite fond memories of after-school Nintendo afternoons, is its interconnectivity. A lot of those older games became boring. We were playing against a machine, and we learned the patterns, the cheats, and the glitches. Eventually, we wanted to stop playing and maybe even go outside. Now, when children play FIFA 14 or Clash of Clans, there are other children, adults, teen-agers playing against them. These games are networks pulsing with life. They are much more interesting than TV or books or a whiny little brother. They are usually the most interesting things in the house, by far.

Enter Minecraft. The game was first developed in 2009, but reached the mainstream with the introduction of an iPhone app in 2011. It’s as though it were a drug designed to neutralize the fears of anxious parents. Minecraft’s open world of 3-D blocks resembles a Lego world, with Lego being the paragon of the virtuous toy. The main character, Steve, spends much of his time walking through a sylvan landscape. He digs for coal and iron ore. He builds a house for shelter. In “survival” mode, there are zombies about, but the graphics are not sickeningly realistic. Rather, they are primitive and suggestive and occasionally cute. (The wolves are very cute.) Perhaps most potently, the game is built upon the D.I.Y. aesthetic of “crafting”: you need two sticks and three cobblestones to make a pickaxe, and so on, as though your child were training to one day open a blacksmith shop in Bushwick. I once observed my two boys spend the good part of an afternoon digging for “beet roots,” which make a powerful health-restorative soup.

Minecraft is played by both boys and girls, unusually. Players can join together to build worlds together: airports, castles, cave systems, roller coasters, an accurate replica of Westeros. At its best, the game is not unlike being in the woods with your best friends. Parents also join in. The Internet is full of testimonials of parents playing with their kids, of children reading their first word in Minecraft, and other milestones usually performed in the analog world. This paradise is not entirely without its shadows. There are mods and different versions that introduce weapons and all manner of “Hunger Games” scenarios. You can kill and be killed. In multiplayer mode, I’ve witnessed asinine comments get typed back and forth for hours. But the foundational experience is wholesome—shredded wheat for the mind.

Minecraft is made by a company called Mojang, and in a post about the Microsoft sale on the company’s Web site, the game’s creator, the Swedish programmer Markus (Notch) Persson, seems happy to be free of the burden of carrying a world. “Over the past few years he’s made attempts to work on smaller projects, but the pressure of owning Minecraft became too much for him to handle,” the piece, by a contributor named Owen, reads. The only option was to sell Mojang. “He’ll continue to do cool stuff though. Don’t worry about that.”

But Notch should feel good, as the significance of Minecraft, ultimately, is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. There is no realistic chance of pulling the “full Amish” and living in the past—nor is that a good idea. We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world. The late Robin Williams had this right. In this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcZhY_Zo-yg), he explains why he named his daughter Zelda after the princess in The Legend of Zelda, and what’s noticeable is how free of angst the whole conversation is. The two laugh together as they recall playing the game together. Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft’s ownership, but it’s a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate.