[pgsandstrom]

Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece. Yes, the author expresses many negative and self centered emotions. He is very clear about that. It is part of the story. It is a story about being a flawed person.

I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making this whole text a weird misunderstanding. But that does not mean that the text is bad, or boring, or uninteresting. Rather the opposite.

[cmeacham98]

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".

[robertlagrant]

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

[shmageggy]

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?

[thrashh]

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.

[ascendantlogic]

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.

[peterashford]

I was thinking just this as I was reading.

[roperj]

Rounded it is still likely 0.

[OOPMan]

Tattooed on themselves?

Wow...uh....that's kinda daft

[kilbuz]

Possibly less than 0.

[feet]

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

[lantry]

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

[feet]

One line is not "having a poem tattooed"

[sipjca]

Yeah he is claiming people have it tattooed. Reading the story shows you one such image. A Google search also validates the claim.

[dsabanin]

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.

[orlp]

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.

[pbhjpbhj]

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.

[tokai]

I thought it is way too much, and not at all in line with the feeling of mc. Cringe is the word the youngsters use AFAIR.

[mrguyorama]

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.

[snowwrestler]

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.

[ineedasername]

>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.

[robertlagrant]

There'll be a vast number of people who never completed it or only played the non-story mode.

[lukas099]

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.

[wickedsight]

> 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.

[cmeacham98]

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.

[StingyJelly]

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.

[rcxdude]

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.

[wink]

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.

[nigamanth]

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.

[cmeacham98]

> I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.

He did get paid, $20000. How was Mojang supposed to know he wanted more when he accepted that payment?

[mcv]

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.

[cmeacham98]

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.

[armada651]

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.

[mcv]

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.

[wslack]

I don't think he wanted "more," exactly - he felt excluded. It felt like something out of the character of friendship he wanted.

[cmeacham98]

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.

[Jarwain]

They also agreed to give him and his other work "exposure to the Minecraft community", which didn't end up happening and was explicitly reneged on.

[cmeacham98]

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.

[peterashford]

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.

[ineedasername]

>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)

[dwild]

> 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).

[erikstarck]

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.

[somrand0]

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.

[disruptiveink]

He had multiple opportunities to get his agent (and he had one the whole time, which he mentioned early in the story) do the grown up talk for him, and he passed it up every single time. Every time, it's excuse after excuse about why he either sent nonsensical emails when trying to talk to people about compensation or just stayed silent while resenting Mojang for not actively coming after him and shower him with millions out of nowhere.

Honestly very little sympathy from me. I would be beyond pissed if I was trying to close a deal with someone who kept sending me novels over email instead.

[jrochkind1]

Agreed. This whole comment thread is making me feel more negative about HN than I have before.

[TheCapn]

I'm actually kind of shocked at the majority reaction here. I can relate in many ways to the author and can feel his struggle through the story. I empathize even though I can see where the mistakes were made.

I figure we just have a lot of Carls in here. There's always been a very business-oriented culture here: people are looking for success in their careers and monetary success is a big part of it. Contracts and IP are big parts of the business brain and I think people just struggle to see things from a different perspective.

All I can say is I'm very appreciative for the author to share the perspective. He says it clearly, there aren't any bad guys there and I think so many people in this forum want there to be one.

[jrochkind1]

It's actually pretty hilarious when you put it like that. Oh, you are insisting there are no bad guys and you refuse to make a bad guy? OK, then YOU are the bad guy! For... having feelings. Bad feelings you should feel ashamed for having. Or at least keep them to yourself for god's sake! Teach you to have feelings but still decide there are no bad guys! There's ALWAYS a bad guy if there are Feelings!

But yeah I'm shocked too, not what I would have expected from an HN comment thread. Maybe if he had been a coder instead of an author? I mean, HN threads reliably are on the side of coders who release their code open source but then have that code used by someone else to make billions, thinking they have the right to be mad and deserve a cut despite literally putting an open source license on it saying otherwise! (which this guy didn't do... until now) I really don't know what's going on.

Are people actually not mad that this guy was (at points in his life) upset he didn't get a cut, but actually mad that he released his thing CC0 in the end instead of trying to get a cut? Because he didn't do a good enough job of getting a cut, and has only himself to blame for that, and should be blamed for it? But I don't want to assume people mean something different than what they say, when they say they are actually mad at him for having the temerity to have feelings about not getting a cut. I'm just bewildered.

[Tossrock]

I think most of them didn't actually read it and instead skimmed a few paragraphs, saw "$20,000", and rushed back to comment.

[wikfwikf]

I read the whole thing. It was somewhat overwritten. Not my favorite ever post-hallucinogen-trip essay.

I agree with other commenters that the author is greedy and petty. He accepted €20,000 for his work, a decent amount. Then he decided that he should make way more money because the game was successful. Then he tried to take advantage of the fact that he hadn't signed a contract, even though he had obviously accepted the terms when he accepted the money. He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract. He tried to paint it as some huge company legal dept vs little guy thing based on the fact that it's now Microsoft and yes, work for hire contracts drafted by corporate lawyers do look evil. But he had already reneged on his handshake agreement, after spending the 20K, even before big companies or professional lawyers were involved.

Now he's trying to parlay his brush with fame into Substack subscriptions. Good luck to him.

[Jarwain]

Did he not honor the informal agreement?

To me the agreement sounds like they bought the right to use the story as the ending to the game. They didn't agree on signing over the rights to the story, and he said if he knew that would have been part of the deal he wouldn't have agreed. He was caught by surprise when he found that language in the contract. Sure he was negligent in not following up when the contract didn't match his expectations, but so was Mojang for not ensuring the contract was signed before using his work.

[mcv]

I read almost the whole thing but stopped before the End Poem, because I still haven't defeated the Ender Dragon. I admit I'm not really trying, but might still do so at some point.

[zimpenfish]

> I admit I'm not really trying, but might still do so at some point.

It's kinda worth it to get access to elytra and shulker boxes but they do tend to make you a bit OP. Then again to make sensible use of elytra you need a gunpowder farm and once you're building farms like that, you're already on the way to domination...

[yreg]

By the time Minecraft 1.0 came out, modded Minecraft was the only Minecraft for me.

One of the first objectives was always getting something like an Elytra, since it makes the game more pleasant imo.

https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Hang_Glider

Despite clocking hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the game, I too have yet to defeat the dragon.

[dwild]

> He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract.

Did he not honor the informal contract? What did he not honor?

If anything, Carl didn't honor the informal contract, he was the one saying Minecraft would promote his work, and no a name in a tiny credit is not doing that... but I'm feeling generous as let's be honest that's a bullshit clause that corporation always try to use that line without meaning much so it's to be expected.

Julian said he was never giving all its rights away. That was part of the informal contract. That's the thing that made him not sign it.

[peterashford]

I must have read a different article

[Karawebnetwork]

> Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece.

I say this with all the love in the world: it's hard for engineers to think like artists and vice-versa.

[ngc248]

Things are not so black and white. It's not that engineers can't appreciate art. The people commenting are saying that the payment was according to what was agreed and the artist's seller remorse is unwarranted. Thats all they are saying. It has nothing to do with art appreciation etc.

[Karawebnetwork]

To avoid repeating the same comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33909117

I went more in depth here about my perception.

[mistermann]

I think there's something beautiful about the combination of the content of the post and the content of this comment section. It seems almost too perfect.

[dheavy]

My thoughts exactly!

[bowsamic]

Why would you think it's socially acceptable to be a flawed person? Flaws aren't something we excuse just because people express them. Expressing them doesn't absolve you of them. They are still there, as flaws, and therefore people react to them as flaws.

[wickedsight]

> Why would you think it's socially acceptable to be a flawed person?

It isn't, but it should be, because everyone is a flawed person. The fact that we have all have to act like we don't makes our current society so incredibly toxic. It causes everyone to pretend to be something they're really not, because otherwise they become ostracized from their community. This is incredibly polarizing and causes (in US politics) the right to pretend they're Christian, even though they show no actual Christian values and the left to pretend they care about the environment by eating less meat, while at the same time flying everywhere and throwing out clothes after wearing them 6 times.

If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them. Then we don't have to pretend every single day that we are something we are not. Then we don't have to fake a smile when we have a bad day. Then we don't have to marry a person because it makes our parents happy. Then we don't have people who are afraid to come out as gay or trans or anything else.

[bowsamic]

If flaws were fine things to be accepted, then they wouldn't be classified as flaws.

What is society if we just accept all problems as part of the person or else society will be toxic?

Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement? I would suggest that in those societies they simply did not classify them as flaws.

> If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them

We can and do accept that but again that doesn't fix the flaw or absolve the person of the responsibility of the flaw.

I personally think the toxicity of modern society actually arises from the fact that we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws, rather than the opposite.

[donkeyd]

> Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement?

We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.

> we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws

That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.

[bowsamic]

> We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.

No I'm not moving the goalposts at all. It's not socially acceptable to be a flawed person by definition, that's why they are called flaws.

> That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.

Yes because those fulfil our desires of the fact that we don't openly attack others' flaws in day to day life. If anything they are proof of our starvation of healthy judgement.

[Karellen]

Do you have no flaws?

[bowsamic]

Of course I do, but I don't expect people to excuse me of them or ignore them, just because I say them. The OP isn't expecting that, but other people in this thread are expecting it on his behalf. I don't even think the OP wants people to excuse his flaws, like people in this thread seem to want to insist on doing.

[croo]

This is called "empathy".