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I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

theeggandtherock.substack.com

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Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#571

Post by gomibako »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #484
bambax wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last quote is damning. The game works well without an ending poem -- or an ending, for that matter. I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set. That said, the rant, while much too long i…

> Some artists are good at business (Picasso) I know basically nothing about the life of artists in general, but this interests me. Where can I read about this? Would appreciate a link that deals with the business side more than a general biography. Thanks.

Read "why are artists poor?" By Hans Abbing, who is an artist and an economist himself. It's more focused on the economy of what we call the contemporary art market but it does spend time contrasting it with the economy of """lower""" forms of art (recorded music, commercial illustration etc)

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#572

Post by Laaas »

beAbU wrote: post #338

I've had Minecraft since before the pre-alpha days. I think I had a pirated copy of Alpha late in 2010 and some time in 2011 or shortly thereafter I actually bought the game. I might have easily sunk 1000s of hours into this game. I think I played the ending only once, in Creative Mode, to see what the fuss was about. I never cared for the ending, because to me Minecraft never had an ending. We had a Survival server…

I am stunned this is on HN. He got _20k EUR_ for a (not fantastic) poem he quite likely didn't use more than 160 hours of work on. He played the game with his daughter for a while and then wrote this according to the article itself! How could you possibly demand more than 20k? How could he even believe he has _any_ legal case when he took the money, gave Mojang/Notch a license verbally (especially given he took the money), even if Microsoft bought Mojang?

The entire article is just egoistic/greedy nonsense.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#573

Post by snowwrestler »

robertlagrant wrote: post #189
cmeacham98 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem with the post is the massive ego the author seems to have about the impact and importance of their writing. To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success. The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally…

Indeed. The game would've made $0 less had the ending just said "The End".

The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars.

That’s why the author lets go of the dollars and gives the story away for free at the end.

Maybe the game would have made the same money. But it’s also true that Markus asked for an ending story, selected this one and put it in, and kept it there.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#574

Post by Lendal »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #41

That's a lot of anger, negativity and bitterness, and entitlement (one of the game's creators for writing the ending text?). Reminds me of the kid on the cover of the Nevermind album and other people that are kinda tangentially connected to something massively successful, but not connected enough to benefit materially, and they let that define who they are and ruin their lives. Could have been a neat personal story,…

You say entitlement like it's a bad thing. When I do work, I am entitled to compensation. So yeah, entitlement is the perfect feeling one should have in this situation. Not at all like a kid in a photograph, but more like the photographer and album cover designer. A smaller part of a much greater work of art.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#576

Post by spritefs »

What exactly is the point of this article? People here are saying it's an "emotional journey" or something. What a load of shit

> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.

> Which was a lovely thing to do, but as I wasn’t staff at Mojang, and therefore got nothing… well, I was a bit hurt that I didn’t get even a token acknowledgement from Markus that I was one of the five people who had helped create this strangest of games.

Notice how it's never about the author's own negotiation. It's always about what he "feels he's owed". Any sort of contractual agreement or unambiguous statement of what is owed is illegitimate in his eyes. Just some vague sense of entitlement and a couple of donation links

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#577

Post by trhr »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #433
krisoft wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are free to negotiate as they are pleased. If the producer feels that they can find a cheaper acceptable alternative they will go with that. If they feel what the voice actor is offering is needed they need to pay for it. > the game they worked on for a few hours Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an an…

It can take a lifetime to get good at something, but a few hours of work after that lifetime generally doesn't cost much. Certainly not more than 5 figures.

A man sails his smoking yacht into a repair shop. The head mechanic goes over with a hammer and slams it against the side of the engine. The engine roars back to life, and the smoke subsides.

He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such:

- $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer

- $199,999 - Knowing where to strike

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#578

Post by dicroce »

spritefs wrote: post #576

What exactly is the point of this article? People here are saying it's an "emotional journey" or something. What a load of shit > Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-f…

I think you're being too hard on him here. It looks to me like both sides fucked up in a number of ways.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#579

Post by ineedasername »

I think this person created something they love, and then completely overestimated its importance. I remember first encountering the ending poem and thinking "Well that seems like a totally random thing to put here, but I suppose it's nice." The game was made & sold millions of copies without it, and I think it's possible that only a single digit # of copies, or maybe a few dozen, were sold as a result of it-- friends & family and a few fans of the author who would not have otherwise been exposed to the game.

This seems consistent with the level of egotism on display in the post. The author repeatedly includes himself as a core member of "we" for the group that created the game, but what this author calls the ending appears to have very much been an afterthought.

Nuggets of egotism are spread throughout in a variety of ways:

>perhaps the largest copyright offence of all time

I'd take that as hyperbole except the tone of the rest of the article supports an interpretation where the author believes this.

>If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me

This in the context of his marriage breaking down, so, really? None of the responsibility was on his wife? All of the importance in that situation is on him? I wouldn't think so.

>Friendship

This seems a very Facebook-era definition of friendship. He met Persson once and then a little time later they wrote some emails back and forth. This is inflated into a friendship wherein the Gough feels he was an integral part of that creative team behind the game.

>1,700 MS Legal Affairs people

I'm sure this thing will catch the attention of someone in MS legal, but I suspect it's barely a blip on their radar, much less something that will garner the focus of the entirety of Microsoft's legal juggernaut.

At least Gough's egotism isn't large enough that he doesn't, on some level, realize that he's blowing things out of proportion. Throughout the piece there's a bit of a conflicting tone where he seems to understand that his contribution really wasn't of the magnitude he makes it out to be. Reading this though, that just introduced a bit of cognitive dissonance with a strange mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-aware/self-deprecation, e.g., "A lot of people didn’t want to read nine minutes of narrative scrolling up the screen, no matter how good it was; they didn’t give a shit. They just wanted to go and play the game again."*

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#580

Post by thesausageking »

thesausageking wrote: post #479

I asked ChatGPT to come up with an ending poem for Minecraft. Here's what it wrote: Farewell, dear player, as you venture forth, Leaving this world of blocks and pixels behind. But know that the memories you've made here Will stay with you, etched in your mind. For in this game, we built and explored, Creating our own little universe. But now it's time to move on, To face new challenges and opportunities. As you go,…

Imagine if the poem were written on demand to you specifically and referred to things you had done in the game. I prompted asking for it to "make reference to Tim drowning in a well he had just built and the time he built a house out of diamond bricks":

  To Tim, the brave and bold,
  
  Who built a well so deep and cold,
  
  And filled it with water clear and bright,
  
  But then, in an instant, lost his sight.
  
  You drowned in the depths, so deep and dark,
  
  But in your life, you left your mark.
  
  You built a house of diamond bricks,
  
  A shining beacon, a sight to fix.
  
  But now you're gone, your time has passed,
  
  Your legacy will forever last.
  
  Farewell, Tim, may you rest in peace,
  
  Your memory will never cease.
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