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 describe the End Poem as a quote "Priceless Gift".
You really think that a poem that people have tattooed on themselves, put onto tee shirts and mugs, inspired emotional emails to the author, and so on has inspired exactly zero excess recommendations to friends, zero dinnertime discussions or social media posts that have led to purchases?
If it was any other thing, it would have been tattooed or put on t-shirts as well.
People are putting Minecraft’s ending on things because it’s Minecraft and Minecraft left an impact on them. The actual poem was a commodity that was tacked on to make the game complete as a muse.
It sounds harsh but that’s the truth and why OP isn’t entitled to any more than they got, especially with that attitude.
Keep in mind you're arguing with engineering types about this. Over the course of my career I've come to find that a not-insignificant % of engineers value art and artistic contributions very little or not at all.
Did you read the ending text? It's incredibly long. Are you claiming that people have the entire thing tattooed on themselves? I definitely can't see it fitting on a coffee mug in any readable fashion
Did you read the article? There's a picture of someone with one of the lines tattooed on their arm. Obviously people aren't putting whole poem on things
I think the original point is to say that people felt moved enough by the poem to "permanently" integrate some feature of it into their lives. Critiquing the "whole poem" thing feels incredibly pedantic.
To be fair, some people make tattoos with all kinds of silly things, the bar is pretty low. One can argue that whatever the ending text was, someone would make a tattoo with it eventually.
So then would the artist who created that ending not be entitled to the recognition they deserve for their part in it? If not this author, then another? Would the same story, but from another person change anything?
I've never even looked at the poem and have beaten Minecraft many times. I'm probably not the target audience though, I generally skip quest text in games.
You should read it. IMO it transforms Minecraft from being just an ordinary game experience into being art, it makes the context of what you've been doing, in playing Minecraft, into something like folklore.
Late at night, having defeated the Ender dragon, having spent months in the game, it turns that moment into an almost spiritual experience.
I was 14 and it brought the silly little block building game where I farmed trees and made dirt houses and turned it into a meaningful story, something that made me think, something that moved me.
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.
>The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars
That may be the author's point, but their egotism also then seems to believe that a significant portion of the non-monetary value of Minecraft is a result of their own brief work on an unskippable wall of text that has a nice sentiment but is quickly forgotten by, I'd guess, nearly everyone that plays the game.
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.
> the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success
Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it.
Would I have played the game without the song? Probably. Would it have made the same impact without it? I don't think so. Emotion is a large part of why people play games, so that poem might actually have an impact.
Does that mean he deserved more? I don't know, €20k seems reasonable. But I think you underestimate the impact something like a poem can have.
I'm not saying that all poems in video games or all endings to video games are as little impact as Minecraft's. Portal would be a great example of an ending that was a significantly greater part of the whole.
I'm specifically referring to Minecraft, where the poem is largely disconnected from the rest of the game and doesn't pertain to any narrative or story (Minecraft doesn't have a story, it's a sandbox game). It's a cool poem, but it isn't part of the important bits that made Minecraft the colossal success that it is.
I've played both and it's apples to oranges, dry rotten oranges. In portal the story slowly builds up into the grand finale and the ending is indeed emotional knot to tie up the story with a bow.
In minecraft you have a a long preparing to do before frustrating boss fight followed by some scrolling text you likely won't be bothered to read and skip thinking "Well, that was a waste of time." (Not by a fault of the poem but by a fault of game design.) Minecraft is a great sandbox and world exploration game. I see why they wanted to add an "ending" (to make it clear it's out of beta, (releasing on time)) but the ending doesn't make much sense game-wise.
Eh, the ending to Minecraft was very much an afterthought. A huge number of players have never even attempted it. And the poem at the end is... frequently skipped, even on the first go-around. It's nowhere near the level of the ending to Portal.
I'm not taking any side here but I don't think your comparison holds.
Portal is as much a story-driven game as it is about the mechanics. I know very few people who played Portal after they finished it, except maybe replaying it.
Contrast to Minecraft, where at least my peer group (adults already as of 2011), just spent hours, days, months building stuff on a map, completely ignoring the "story". I actually heard about this poem for the first time when I read this piece.
I've never finished Minecraft, but I guess I spent a few hundred hours building stuff and in my opinion, "played" it more than other games. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way stating an opinion about compensation or who did something wrong or how important anything is.
Sure, Minecraft would have still sold as much if the ending screen said "You won" or much simply "The end".
But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.
I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.
He certainly seems to struggle with talking about money. Like he said: he should have let his agent handle it. But he didn't, because he saw this as something other than what it was: a friendship instead of contract work.
It was an awkward relationship because both sides had a completely different view of what the relationship was, and didn't really communicate that with each other. It's great that he was finally able to write this down. It sucks that he struggled, and Mojang could easily have just given him $1 million to sign the contact, but his inability to talk about this, to talk about money, is probably the main reason for this as well as possibly many of his other financial troubles.
Sure, it's possible that's true, but I don't see how that reflects poorly on anyone but himself. He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
We can write justifications for why he did this, but that he seems to believe he was entitled to more money than the offer he accepted is entirely a problem of his own creation.
Expecting Mojang to deal with his communication and mental health issues is absurd.
Ultimately this is simply where ape brains and business economics collide. It reminds me of the experiment with two monkeys where one gets a cucumber and the other a grape.
As he said in his writing he simply assumed that whoever he is dealing with would give him what is fair. So he accepted the $20K and he was probably perfectly happy with his cucumber. Then later after a bunch of extra money is funneled into the company he sees a bunch of other people getting grapes for what he perceives as a similar effort to his own. Now the deal stops being fair in our monkey brains and we are hard-wired to demand equivalent payment.
However business economics has an entirely different concept of what is fair. It assumes everything is fair as long as promises are kept and deals are honored. There is no concept in business of renegotiating compensation of old contracts if someone else gets more compensation for a similar effort. This is why collective bargaining by unions is the only way for everyone to get equal pay for equal work.
Why would it reflect poorly on anyone but himself? Well, I guess he has appearances going for him: he's a struggling artist while the other party is a wealthy corporation. But him being a struggling artist seems to be a clear choice, even if he hasn't quite made that choice explicit for himself.
> He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
The way I'm reading it is that he didn't even want to talk about the money. It had to be all about the art. And yet he clearly has lots of feelings about the money. Like I said, it's mostly his own attitude that's his problem. And although he claims lots of personal growth because of this, I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others.
Still, he's probably right that he still owns it and Mojang only had a license, and giving it to the public domain is a nice gesture, if made with some grandstanding.
Well, we're all here under a comment on HN asking why the article is getting such negative reactions. And when you describe the author's position as "I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others", maybe you can understand why the author is getting such negative reactions.
But he did want more, that's the whole point of the first half of this article.
> I admired the fact that he was, again, giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game
> I couldn’t understand why I was again being treated worse than them. I had helped him create the actual game, I had given him the ending he wanted but could not write
He acts as if he's some creative designer that played a huge role in the creation of the game. To be frank, an intern at Mojang that was with the company for a few months and added 2 blocks to the game would have made a bigger contribution than he made.
This is, in my opinion, the core disconnect the author has with reality, and is driven by the fact that to him his work is the center of the universe and he struggles to understand why that isn't the case for everyone else.
The author genuinely believes they made contributions to the game on the same level as Jeb, and that's why it feels unfair when he sees Mojang employees getting a $300k bonus and him getting nothing. But the reality is he made a very minor contribution to the game and got paid $20k, which is a pretty nice sum for a few days of work.
You see, I might be a little biased here, but as we don't have the email in front of us I'm going to have to take a guess.
I'm fairly confident that was was meant by that was exposure in the form of his poem getting put into Minecraft, not exposure in the form of a shout-out or other promotion.
Unless the author releases the email we'll never know the context, but I've been a spectator to these types of negotiations enough that I strongly believe the context would support my interpretation.
He was paid to write a poem to end the game. He was not paid for all rights to that work, forever. Its reasonable to assert that if Mojang wanted contractual rights for the work, they should have provided a signed contract which explained the rights they were purchasing.
>as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game
I think members of the modding community contributed much more in material terms, and both they and YouTube content creators contributed much more in driving it's rise & popularity, than the author of this poem. It seems the author had a pretty clear verbal contract on their compensation, and received the money.
They author didn't receive the promotional support for their other work that was promised, and I think should be their much bigger gripe. For an artist/creator I would think that would be the big pain point, not having their other work broadly exposed to an audience of millions, instead of the $$$ aspect they spend so much time on in this article. (Especially when that exposure would possibly have lead to significant financial success for their work as well)
> The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees
C418 made the music... plenty love it, I don't. Doesn't means it has no value, it has none to me, just like the End Poem has none to you, but yet still some people got a tattoo of it.
You are the only one belittling anyone though, you are belittling what Julian did, saying he deserve less recognition than C418, while Julian just said they got recognition while he didn't (without saying if he deserved it more than them).
Right. My initial reaction was “what!? Minecraft has an ending?”. Finishing the game is not at all part of the appeal of the game. It’s like having an ending to your LEGO pieces.
well, that person is an artist, artistry is all about SELF expression... people who make it along that path have a strong trait of wanting their EGO (their selves) to be seen and attended to. that's why they are artists.
the end poem is a priceless gift because they made it so: they refused to sell it, they consistently refused to put a price on it.
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 describe the End Poem as a quote "Priceless Gift".