With books and videos, people are passive consumers of content. With videogames, players are active consumers of content, in that they need to be engaged in order to consume the content.
The demand on creativity and imagination in videogames is usually at least in overcoming the obstacles/challenges of the game. With games like Minecraft, there's also a more tangible intermediate result in terms of building blocks.
Though, mobile games might tend to be more "cow clicker" ish, and mainstream games can be linear sequences where the game makes it hard to fail.. there's less demand for creativity there.
(Note, Minecraft Classic ≠ "Minecraft Java" or whatever they're calling the primary pre-Microsoft PC version now)
It kind of is. Survival was added Java Edition Classic, then was spun out into its own version with Java Edition Indev. The modern Java version is a descendant of Indev.
Although funnily enough, his desire to play Minecraft motivated him to learn to read.
So it might be due to kids being exposed to and wanting to play these games earlier, which has perhaps caught Minecraft off guard resulting in a new generation that plays fast-following Minecraft clones instead of actual Minecraft.