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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

#691

Post by jameshart »

Gigachad wrote: post #363
mananaysiempre wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code. Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.

What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.

Go hire a photographer some time and prepare to be surprised.

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

#692

Post by yobert »

nearbuy wrote: post #676
pflenker wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree with you overall, I think the author was right to assume that the non-skip feature was meant to appreciate his result. And calling it poorly-written is uncalled for, I think.

For what it's worth, I'll second that I thought the end poem wasn't very good.

I loved it! Just to represent the other side :)

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

#693

Post by GalahiSimtam »

JulianPGough wrote: post #646

Hi all. I'm Julian, the guy who wrote the ending to Minecraft, and that Substack piece. I've read a fair few of your comments. (Not all; blimey, 600? You've crowdsourced a book!) Very interesting and enjoyable experience. Almost all the ones I've read are parsing the legalities; engaging with the law around copyright, rights agreements, etc. Arguing about legal specifics. Almost none of them engage with the artistic…

Emotions: disgusted

Justification: in your piece you avoid mentioning that copyright can be merely licensed, not transferred, hiding this by portraying yourself as a naive artist who does not understand the law.

Dream Sequencer System Offline

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

#694

Post by burkaman »

spritefs wrote: post #641
burkaman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did the author really expect that he would be getting royalties to all the Minecraft end text teatowels and fridge magnets as part of the deal? No, and I feel like he made it extremely clear that this story is not really about money and his feelings are not driven by a lack of royalties.

> No, and I feel like he made it extremely clear that this story is not really about money and his feelings are not driven by a lack of royalties. If it wasn't about money, than what was it about? "Fairness"? So money?

Yeah fairness, emotions, recognition, his own flaws and failures, and his general outlook on life. It's not about contract law or conflict with Mojang or Microsoft, it's just a story about his feelings.

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

#695

Post by TheCapn »

jack_pp wrote: post #169
europeanguy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's what he says. But someone who genuinely grew to understand he was wrong doesn't write blog posts like this, explaining how he was wrong, like that's a question in everyone's mind (honestly until now I'd never known there was an end to Minecraft) No, this is a person who's burning with envy and finds telling yourself stories an outlet.

Or it's a person who burned with envy, is introspective enough to recall that feeling and write from that perspective in order for his readers to learn from his own shortcomings.

Or, it's a writer, who writes for a living, spinning a story to draw the reader in. He pitches his product at the end: he want's subscriptions to pay his rent and buy his socks.

I have no ire towards the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the post and found several aspects of it that helped me find some introspection to something I was talking about with my wife just the other day (regarding capitalism, career, compensation).

I think in the end that's what he's doing. It's an overly long winded way to say he wrote the poem. He's trying to wrestle that recognition for his work he thought Mojang was going to provide him and he's sharing a tale of one artist who wants to live above Intellectual Property law and create beautiful things while recognizing he has to eat and put a roof over his head.

I pass no judgment on the author. I might slip him a few bucks in the paypal link he gave because I acquired Minecraft during beta and continue to play it off and on today and consider his contribution to be a nice addition to the game. Perhaps I will buy his novel. I think he did a great job trying to market himself here.

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

#696

Post by ghaff »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #316
Gigachad wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah looking at the contract, it seems exactly like the kind of thing you’d want to have for content in a game. It removes all complexities as you may need to edit or do whatever to it years later. Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.

> Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code. Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.

>Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.

Well, it's less common for fiction but if you're working for a company and writing content you're almost certainly giving up any rights.

If you're ghostwriting without credit, it's not explicitly spelled out but the way it works is they'll slap it on their copyrighted website, possibly under someone else's byline. And they'd reasonably expect you not to publish the same thing verbatim somewhere else.

Though you also have cases where cross-posting is at least tolerated.

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

#697

Post by sudosysgen »

I feel like a lot of people here are also missing a huge claim that Mojang promised a lot of promotion to the author and did not make good on that promise. That would mean that Mojang did not, in fact, make good on their half of the contract.

Also, a lot of people are saying that the end poem wasn't a big part of Minecraft objectively speaking, which I think is false. Personally, as a kid, reading the poem gave me shivers and is a pretty big part of why I continued playing the game for so long and got so invested in it - it did give it meaning and gave it a sense that it was a piece of art made with love. It also inspired me to make my presentation on video games as art in elementary school and I got in a great debate about it with my art teacher which was a great learning experience for me, so it definitely had a solid impact on me and I imagine at least a million other people. It's a sizeable part of the game for me and I'd say it definitely was worth at least 5% of the experience for me.

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

#698

Post by registeredcorn »

dwaltrip wrote: post #654
warinukraine wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The text isn't even _good_. "and the universe said i love you because you are love". That's expert level cliche.

Art is subjective. It fits well in the poem in my view.

If you'll allow me a small but important nitpick: I would say that the value of a piece of art is subjective. Critique, if done correctly, is based on measurable factors. "And it was all just a dream" could be fairly, and reasonably, be called: predictable, unsatisfying, and lazy. Whether someone thinks that the content leading up to, and including the ending is valuable or "good" is subjective.

To put it a different way, music is "subjective" in that people have different tastes based on their values of music genres, but the ability to play a song correctly is a measurable, obvious thing which you can critique. Similarly, a painter may paint in a style that I strongly dislike, or paint on subject that I don't care about, but the means of how that art was created can be judged as "good" or "bad". The methodology of how the work was made can be discerned.

Sometimes things like the intention of why something was created in the way it was made, can be used to deflect a certain amount of criticism. "It's supposed to be out of beat to create confusion for the listener", "It is drawn with lots of harsh right angels to lead the eye in this direction", etc. but (more often than not) when a fault is found or described, it is unintentional in spite of whatever the creator might later assert.

I think that it would be illogical to offer lots of negative criticism of something, and follow that up by saying, "Yet, in spite of all of those critical issues, it's great!" There might be some strange exception, or someone who would claim that simply to act as the tedious contrarian, but the assessment would be negative.

Getting back to this subject: whether the criticism of the ending to Minecraft is well applied or not, is a different issue. I don't have an opinion on the matter. I've never seen the ending to Minecraft, and don't really care about seeing it. I'm simply trying to say that, just because something exists within a subjective field does not mean it can't also be verifiably bad.

TL;DR: https://youtu.be/RSDmo-gJ8XY?t=64

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

#699

Post by microsoftdoes »

birken wrote: post #689
microsoftdoes wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You went on a rant impugning the characters of the other people involved and making yourself the victim. All that really happened is you got a good deal for a bit of writing, $20k. You wish you had asked for more. Everyone here called your bullshit. Now you wish people just saw your attack on the other people as art or an emotional journey or whatever other nonsense. If you want to make art, then make art. But if you…

I think it's very interesting so many people in this comment thread are so quick to point out that 20k is a fair, or even good, price for writing the end poem, but don't engage with the fact that $1800000k might be an excessive amount for one person to earn for making a video game. The multiples and orders of magnitude of difference in the payouts are what make the decisions that the various people make interesting a…

The exchange value of something is what people are willing to pay for it.

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

#700

Post by mikkom »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #554
mikkom wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why he paid 20000 euros for it, right? I don't understand what this guy is complaining about to be honest.

Is he complaining? I don't think so? He does say he has had hurt feelings. Do you mean you don't understand why he has hurt feelings?

It's very clear that he thinks he deserves more money because the game he write short story for was a success.

20k is a very reasonable sum for this kind of gig.

For me he sounds greedy and yes it sounds like he complains (a lot)

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