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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

#731

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

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.

Author is writing many things with the clear implication that he felt that he was owed much more that what he received. Everybody here understands that he feels that way, and vehemently disagrees with him.

The common critique is not that the author made mistakes, it's that he's self-centered, a diva, etc for feeling like he deserves a huge chunk of the worth of minecraft for writing the end-poem on a contract. He thinks he should get more, people disagree because $20k is much more that you would have expected for such a thing anyways.

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

#732

Post by dang »

lelanthran wrote: post #163

Quoted post unavailable.

Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? You may not feel you owe an author better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#733

Post by 1970-01-01 »

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,…

I like this ending better.

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

#734

Post by pes23 »

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…

I like how you've defined value here and its separation from critique.

A related idea is that of perspective. Creating something often requires picking between multiple options, and to do that successfully the creator must keep in mind their goals (evoking an emotion, telling a particular story, conveying an idea, etc) along with the desires of their target audience. The creator's goals and their intended audience forms the perspective that they view decisions from.

Critiquing something involves choosing a particular perspective (our own, the creator's, or the target audience's), and which one we choose is based on the subjective value we give each perspective. When we describe a creation as bad we must remember that it is bad relative to our chosen perspective.

For example: imagine a funeral scene that has a soundtrack playing that would be considered happy by its target audience.

* From the creator's perspective they wanted a sad and solemn scene; which, makes the soundtrack an objectively bad choice.

* The target audience in general regards it as one of the funniest and best scenes.

* We find the scene too funny to be sad and too sad to be funny.

All of these perspectives are correct relative to themselves, and which one you choose to let color your view of a creation is a personal opinion.

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

#735

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

nl wrote: post #4

This is a great (long!) piece. I think one important thing for people on HN here is this: > I think Carl, with his background as a Corporate Finance guy, seeing the world through that filter, must have believed that I was trying to blackmail them; trying to maximise my revenue, like the “rational agents” that populate economics textbooks; that I was refusing to sign it to hold up the deal, because I wanted to get pai…

> Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.

Well, when most of the essay contains references to how much money Mojang made, how much Notch went home with, the many billions thrown around, the bonuses paid out per employee, the dividends from Mojang, over and over again, one gets the strong impression that he is concerned about how much money he didn't get.

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

#736

Post by Karawebnetwork »

sbst32 wrote: post #638
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this with all the love in the world: it's hard for engineers to think like artists and vice-versa. As an engineer, I understand the importance of logic, precision, and efficiency. But as an artist, I also know the value of creativity, expression, and intuition. These two ways of thinking are often at odds with each other, and it can be challenging for an engineer to understand the artistic mindset and for an ar…

I totally agree with your points but parent is talking about empathy, not about thinking like each other. The author was trying to convey his thinking, his emotions, his struggles and his flaws. To me - he did that quite successfully.

He did, but if as an individual you don't value empathy then it will be superseded with cold hard logic.

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

#737

Post by NavinF »

"I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don't own it. I do."

"I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was."

"Because we hadn’t really agreed on anything. We’d simply had a failed attempt to find a fair price for using my work as part of Minecraft."

"Carl decided the answer was €20,000 (and a vague promise to help promote my other work), and in all the confusion someone sent me the money, even though we still didn’t have a contract worked out."

Wat

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

#738

Post by microsoftdoes »

birken wrote: post #712
microsoftdoes wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes he did. Do you people read the article before arguing about what’s in it? “and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was.”

Just because it’s his story doesn’t mean he can’t be immature and wrong in it.

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

#739

Post by kergonath »

true_religion wrote: post #209
kergonath wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a strong feeling MS will put out a statement that they own the end poem and it is not public domain. I don’t think they would do that. That would be unbelievably stupid from a legal department. The funny thing with this sort of IP in most of Europe (though this could be different in Sweden but I really doubt it) is that nobody except the author can own it. All they can have is an exclusive license. If they a…

It doesn’t matter because they have a license to use the work, which is all they have been doing. They aren’t running around saying it’s their property because no one has asked them that. Now even though they are put on the spotlight, they don’t really need to do anything.

> It doesn’t matter because they have a license to use the work

If they don’t have a contract, they don’t have a license. Again, in some common law jurisdiction they do things like implicit contracts and informal agreements. This is not going to fly in most European countries. No contract = no agreement = no license.

> Now even though they are put on the spotlight, they don’t really need to do anything.

Well yeah. The best move in their situation is not to move. Particularly once the text is published with an open license.

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

#740

Post by kergonath »

jaywalk wrote: post #563
kergonath wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the exchange of emails and payment sound like some kind of contract Beware that this is very dependent on jurisdiction. There are places where such informal agreements are completely non binding. IP laws vary quite a lot as well. So your intuition might be completely wrong. Just sorting this out would be a nightmare (the author was working in Germany for a Swedish company; which law should apply? Then there is Micr…

Well, Microsoft's legal team obviously came to the conclusion that the emails and payment were at least sufficient to grant Mojang a license to the artist's work. So there's that. They could have been wrong, sure. But absent further legal judgement, I'm willing to side with the decision reached by the team of lawyers over random Internet commenters.

> Microsoft's legal team obviously came to the conclusion that the emails and payment were at least sufficient to grant Mojang a license to the artist's work

Who knows. They might have thought that litigation costs would be small enough, or it might have slipped through the cracks. We don’t know what Carl told them.

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