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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

#711

Post by mcv »

plastiquebeech wrote: post #496
krisoft wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth Maybe. Maybe not. People say these kind of things, but it is often a retcon aimed to help them deal with some emotion. Maybe he would have asked his agent to agree on a deal. The agent would have got him a tiny percentage and he would have spent the money to bring something wonderfull to the world. During which process he would have attained even more personal…

Call it what you want. If you spend all your time whinging about misfortune, you'll never grow. As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE: >It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. ... >So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no m…

Sounds very Nietzschean.

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

#712

Post by birken »

microsoftdoes wrote: post #699
birken wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well first of all it seems like (a) the author of the poem didn't explicitly agree to sell it at the price and (b) people are often willing to pay unfair prices for things in times of duress (IE... how much would you pay for a bottle of water if you were dying of thirst?).

And either way, the author isn't making a legal or moral argument one way or the other. He's just telling a story about his emotional response to this complicated and unique situation. The fact that the people on the other side of the story effectively have infinite wealth and still made the decisions they did is important to the story! It makes it easier for us to understand their motivations. He's a writer who wrote a story, it's not a wikipedia entry.

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

#714

Post by rubylark »

DrammBA wrote: post #543

Reading the post and then HN comments makes me realize the average HN user lacks a lot of emotional intelligence. People are criticizing the post based on the cold hard mistakes the author made while completely glossing over the emotional introspection the author went through to acknowledge all their mistakes and finally close this chapter of their lives. Stop treating this post like you are code reviewing a PR.

I find this kind of assumption that "coders can't understand feelings" as a harmful stereotype and baseless assumption just because many of the comments here disagree with your take. Emotional intelligence* has nothing to do with it; sympathy does. You can recognize the emotions of others without feeling sympathy for them. You think the author is sympathetic, others here (myself included)...don't.

*Emotional intelligence is the recognition of your emotions, the emotions of others, how your actions influence the emotions of others, and how to regulate your own emotions. Ironically, by this definition, the author is the one lacking emotional intelligence. They didn't understand why they were angry, why others were frustrated or how to mitigate it. They still don't understand that just saying that you are at peace doesn't mean that you are. To me, the author is still brimming with hurt, anger, jealousy, greed, and pride, and because of these last three, I don't have much sympathy.

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

#715

Post by lukas099 »

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".

No it wouldn't have. The poem brought minecraft into the realm of the spiritual. It might not have had that effect directly on you, but it did for many players which is enough to elevate the game in the zeitgeist of humanity.

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

#716

Post by pksebben »

registeredcorn wrote: post #698
dwaltrip wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

as a representative of someone who the poem spoke to, I'd like to comment.

The themes in this piece run fairly deep; and to call them trite or predictable is both a completely fair statement of an opinion, and revealing that one may not be reading with the intended context.

It's very common to end a story with "it was all a dream". It's not quite so common to embed vedic scripture within and talk to the philosophy that we are all components of the universe experiencing itself, and that our individual egos are as fictional as the player character. This is the statement the piece makes.

As the author mentioned, it would be easy to read words like that and miss the point for lack of context. At the risk of being labeled a pedant, which may be fair, I agree that without a meditative practice or other such deep, self reflective experience it would be hard to see the value in the words. What is an introspection into the soul for one will look like pretense to the other.

To be critical of this piece as a piece of narrative is to judge it by the wrong terms. It's a philosophical argument that looks like a story.

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

#717

Post by Jarwain »

password1 wrote: post #499
Jarwain wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the post is about how he wrote a story for a friend, that friend didn't treat him like a friend, and how he was hurt by that. It sounds like the post was about letting him vent his pain and frustration and reach some level of emotional catharsis, as well as officially releasing the story to the public domain.

But they were never friends to begin with, which is one of the many flawed premises of this author thoughts.

I find some people don't draw strong distinctions between friends and acquaintances; they treat acquaintances like friends. After going through a collaborative purely creative journey, I could almost see that boundary being broken down further.

So yeah, they weren't friends. But he thought they were, between whatever interaction they had before the poem and the collaborative effort of creating the poem. So does that really make it a Flawed premise?

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

#718

Post by Gigachad »

zimpenfish wrote: post #585
Gigachad wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? There are, I believe, a non-negligible number of companies who will write software for you, to a specification, and grant you a (sometimes non-exclusive) license to use that software but absolutely will not give you the copyright. Pretty sure there's a lot of IT companies, for example, that UKGOV contract to whic…

Because they are exploiting incompetent government processes.

Get the tax payer to pay you to build a product and then continue looting the public to rent it out perpetually.

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

#720

Post by lukas099 »

kramerger wrote: post #630
spritefs wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because they sent the money before fully coming to an agreement and getting a signed contract

But they were all "friends"... They had a general agreement and by taking the money he basically agreed to the arrangement. I think they could have easily taken this guy to court and won. Technically, Microsoft can sue the crap out of him for giving away something they have bought and paid for.

They paid for the rights to use the poem in the game, not ownership of the poem.
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