Minecraft as a Purgatory

I've been playing Minecraft for many months now (since October of last year I believe), and since those early days playing survival mode, I've always thought of Minecraft as a sort of digital purgatory:  A place in which one poor soul (your character) spends eternity, isolated from other sentient life and civilization, in an ever expanding and completely wild and dangerous world with no means of escape (even death proves incapable of solving the problem) for a practical eternity.  While this comparison has no practical purpose (as far as I can decide), and Notch may or may not have intended such similarities between the religious concept and his wonderfully addicting game, I still find it and interesting and stimulating topic worthy of mention here.

Purgatory, as described by Wikipedia, "is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatory).  In my mind, I imagine that the Minecraft survivor is a troubled soul:  One that has seen many horrors in his life, has done some sinful deeds, and is sent to one of the Minecraft worlds as punishment for his crimes or to somehow repair his soul.  Perhaps the world the character is exposed to is meant to mirror parts of the character's soul as sort of a learning tool.  The properties of many creatures in Minecraft may reflect the past life of the survivor in some way: The giant spider, a fearsome and fast creature frenzied by the darkness and docile during the day.  Maybe, in the survivor's past life, he was afraid of spiders.  Or the dark.  Or both.  Perhaps the spider, a real creature on Earth, symbolizes the inherent capacity for both evil and good in natural beings.  Humans, being "natural" entities, no doubt share the same quality as the Minecraft spider, that is, the natural capacity for both good and evil depending on any number of factors. The zombie and skeleton, a corpse and its framework, mindless and violent, perhaps represent the blunt and obvious evil of humanity.  The zombie wears the same clothing as the default survivor, probably signifying some sort of demented alter-ego of the survivor.  The skeleton, ruthless and even unfair due to its ranged bow, might represent the true depth of evil in this person (down to his bones even).  These three creatures, the spider, zombie, and skeleton, cannot truly thrive in sunlight, as if enlightenment and purity are their ultimate bane: Spiders become docile and purely defensive in daylight.  Skeletons and zombies literally burn in the brilliance of the sunlight.  The last "terrestrial" evil, that is to say common in the normal world (I will discuss the Nether in a later post), is the creeper.  This creature does not burn in the sunlight, is almost completely silent, and literally explodes, causing massive damage to the survivor.  This creature would represent the kind of natural violence that cannot be cured by morality and enlightenment, is completely indiscriminate, incurable, and is self-destructive, often fatally: insanity. Even the name, a derivative of the word "creep" suggests an entity with an unhealthy mind.