Could have been a neat personal story, "hey you know I wrote the ending text to Minecraft?" Instead, it's this.

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.

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".

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.

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

Late at night, having defeated the Ender dragon, having spent months in the game, it turns that moment into an almost spiritual experience.

I think most HN readers reacted to that weird poem the same way the aliens in Blindsight reacted to attempts at communication

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

I went more in depth here about my perception.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just saying that I found the story interesting and well… lovely (in a way) but perhaps that’s different backgrounds at work (I dabble in art) so I wonder what makes this such an unbearable thing to read, perhaps a very practical person? Not necessarily directed at you dcow.

So the sour aftertaste, for me, is likely related to the juxtaposition of positive and negative elements and I think ultimately is a reflection of the balance he chose to give each. Suffice to say, I think there's a not-so-different delivery of this essay which would have left me with a much better aftertaste.

I share your beliefs about IP, and I hope one day the world breaks free of the concept. But maybe try to be a little less mean. It’s worth it if only not to be one of those people that just post dunks for internet points. (I’ve done it a few times and usually regretted how I sounded after the dust settled.)

Cheers for openly expressing “down with copyright” though.

IIRC, back before the "favorite" feature was introduced, people would use - and some still use - upvotes to bookmark interesting threads.

Second thing I learned is to always at least skim the comments before opening the submission itself, to gauge whether the latter is even worth it. Quite often it isn't. Here I thought it is, but the text was so long and... off somehow, that I got back to comment thread and read it more carefully, and now I know why it's off and that it's not worth it (for me personally) to read it more carefully.

Exactly the picture/cover/person I thought of while reading this (nicely written but still a) rant.

I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostly his own doing. And probably his own choice. He wants to live in a world that's not about money, but he also wants to be able to pay rent.

You're trying to ship a game. This writer keeps hitting your inbox with prose that I assume that is about as annoying to read as the original article. He's wasting your time and not getting to the point. You don't know what the guy's deal is and you stopped trying to figure out two emails ago. Compared to all the other things that you need to be doing to actually ship the game, this is incredibly minor and taking up your time daily. You finally tell him, "look, it's 20k or we go look elsewhere".

From that story, the only thing Mojang did wrong is that they didn't send him the contract straight away. We all know he would have signed whatever was on it back then, as he clearly didn't know what he wanted. Looks like someone regretted behaving completely irrationally when closing a deal, then regretted it some more than he never attempted to get more compensation even after the fact (he could have easily gotten something a couple of years later if he had tried, and once more the article completely omits as to why he didn't try to reach out through his agent or anyone that can behave as an adult after the launch) and is now screaming at the universe that he's not being showered with riches and glory when all of this was his own doing, even after he had multiple opportunities to come out winning.

wrong. by that point they are trying to close a business deal for a lot of money

Of course when the Microsoft deal came along, stakes were much higher and patience for his reluctance a lot less.

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?

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.

20000€ would in most European countries be a pretty good compensation for about 3 months of work, after taxes. It doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of it.

> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.

In this framing, these are examples of being treated as an outsider.

> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.

(Since the author seems to have spent about a month or so working on the game, you could reason that his compensation is about on par with the employees who worked for a full year. But he doesn't seem to see it that way, or he thinks he should be compensated better than them? I don't know.)

I'm speculating, but having known "artists", some of them think very differently to the average HN crowd.

He outright says it in the article, about how it wasn't about the money. If it was, there are more effective ways of going about getting that compensation than putting the story into the public domain

However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits.

They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him again except for legal reasons.

Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.

the point is the gift economy

(I just wish the essay was edited down by 1/3, but that’s me)

We can disagree with him, the writing is rambling and takes for ever to get to the point, and then hits it on the head repeatedly, but in the end it does not matter. I suspect what is important (to him) is that he’s written it, not that you read it.

Anyway, I am surprised to see so much hostility here.

I didn't say he was greedy; by the sounds of it he's happy with very little. It is 100% correct to say he's entitled. He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does, and in a way that protects his interests. He feels entitled to that.

Yes, sorry, that was in other posts and it got blurred. I did not want to put words into your mouth.

> He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does

He explains why he did not involve his agent, and also that he does not expect anyone to do it. Otherwise he’d have plenty of opportunities to do it. He sounds entitled in that he has weird ideas about love and friendship but he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought.

In the end, his struggles seem to have lead to a lot of personal growth, and that's great, and he does seem to understand that he mostly created this problem himself, and could easily have prevented it by involving his agent. But I'm not so sure that he understands that this was never about friendship; he was hired to write an ending, had a profound artistic connection with the guy who hired him, and somehow he seemed to think that entitled him to a friendship rather than a business relationship. I'm not sure he understands that that was the core misunderstanding here, and that his belief in a friendship that was really a business relationship, made the business relationship really awkward and dysfunctional.

He didn't file a wacky lawsuit like Wyn Cooper's friend from "I Wanna Be Yours", instead he's reflected on a brush with greatness, and he's still doing art. Seems ok.

Perhaps he is better off not having Notch's riches considering that the guy went full QAnon?

Rule #1 of getting paid for your work is don't do a bunch of work without signing a contract first. Even if you're an artist. I highly doubt he could have released that poem on his own and turned it into millions of dollars or whatever he thinks a "fair" contribution is.

Contributing an asset doesn't give you any entitlement to share in the company. If you want some equity in the company you better ask for it up front, because they probably won't give it to you and would just hire someone else and you can save your hard work. 20k seems fair and helped the author out a lot at the time. Posting a long rant about it probably hurts his future work opportunities.

I'm fairly sure that no credible lawyer would give him the time of the day if he did try to get more now. He did work, he accepted money for that work and only later he thinks he's entitled to more and wants to re-negotiate.

I don't know about his jurisdiction, but here even as a layman I'm confident that doing the work and accepting the money would be seen as acceptance:

"As well as using words, a contract could be implied by conduct of the parties, for example, by jumping into a black cab and stating your destination, this conduct would be taken as an agreement that the taxi driver will take you to your destination and that you will pay a price for it."

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/notes/division/...

The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking and I'm surprised that no-one he's previously told this story to has pointed that out to him.

I think it's more interesting of a legal case than you give it credit for. He isn't denying he was paid for his time but that the rights for the finished work are still ambiguous.

There is a written contract. They agreed on the price on email and he then took the money.

There are other cases, though, where the courts have declined to imply transfer of copyright or license - even with a written contract - when it hasn't been explicitly specified.

cf https://www.albright-ip.co.uk/2013/04/implied-assignments/ for one example

> The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking

IANAL, obvs., but I think the situation would be "the implied contract would imply a license to use the poem but not transfer of copyright" - the key point would be whether that license was "perpetual, exclusive" to Mojang. If not perpetual, he could revoke it at any time and Microsoft will then have a copyright problem for any copy sold after that point. If exclusive, the license may not have transferred to Microsoft in which case they have an extremely large problem given the number of copies sold since the buyout.

I can tell. None of what you wrote, which is mostly wrong, matters. Microsoft bought Mojang not specific property of Mojang.

[1] says "When licences are acquired as part of an asset transaction, the contracts are taken over. In that case, the selling and buying parties need the cooperation of the licensor. This cooperation can take place before or possibly after the takeover. If the licence is not transferable, there will in principle not be a legally valid transfer unless the IP right holder in question gives his consent to the transfer of the licence."

Do you have a link to suggest that these definitely-are-lawyers are wrong in this interpretation?

[1] https://www.blatterlegal.com/en/intellectual-property/transf...

He owns the copyright, hasn't transferred the copyright, he clearly owns the rights in the work.

> I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work.

I think you're right that there's an implied license for them to use it but the scope of that license was never specified and I'd guess a clever lawyer could make reasonable hay from the case that it's now much broader than he wanted.

Can you quote the bit of the article which says that? All I can see is that he said "ok, what's your offer?", Carl returned with "€20k", and "in all the confusion someone sent me the money, even though we still didn’t have a contract worked out" - no contract, no license.

Edit: I’m rate limited, but Microsoft doesn’t need a transfer. They bought the entire company. Just like you buying some shares on the stock exchange, except they bought all of the shares in a private transaction. Had they done an asset purchase instead, your point might be valid.

But the terms of that license are unknown - a court may well decide that it did not apply to Microsoft since he didn't sign that contract. And it also means that he did not assign copyright to Mojang or Microsoft which removes that avenue of them claiming they can use it for free.

A court may well consider that becoming a wholly owned subsidiary would violate a license, despite being a distinct legal entity[1][2]. Especially when it's just an implied license with no actual agreed definition on both sides.

[1] Which is similar to what we're seeing with ARM vs Qualcomm and it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.

[2] Mojang into Microsoft sounds like "forward triangular merger" on this page: https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2003/...

Also, Mojang is in breach of the informal contract because they did not give him the promotion they promised.

And that's the kicker - his agent could have negotiated 100k, which would have been more than fair for that moment in time. But still be wayyy underpaid for eventually what the game would sell for.

But of course, it's not about money. I understand his point - and I wish I could find it now, but I can't, so I'll just describe it.

I saw some meme a while back with a kid sitting next to and hugging a giant frog. The text read, "Beware, the people you love don't always love you back". The second panel showed the frog swallowing the child. I've certainly had these sort of one-sided friendships, and periodically reflect on them. It sucks. It's probably worse if you're a very emotionally deep person (which writers and other artists frequently are), but I still understood well what he was talking about.

The epic-length post is like those movies that would've been 10 minutes if the people just talked with each other.

In this case, if the artist had just told the agent what they wanted, agent would've gotten to do their job, and artist would've avoided years of turmoil.

(I'm sure a real agent could negotiate much better than I could; I'm only suggesting that an agent could straighten this out and maybe get better terms, without threatening the deal.)

If you're talking directly to someone about buying their house and you go, "your house is a piece of shit, everything is broken, knock $XX,000 off or I walk", they're going to tell you to go fuck yourself. Once you filter it through two agents they hear "well, the buyer is concerned about X, which is very reasonable, but Y is just being picky, we should come back to them with an offer for $ZZ0,000 and I think that's very fair." Sure, they're not happy about selling their house for less, and maybe no agreement can be reached, but the agents take a lot of the emotion and confrontation out of haggling so that you don't end up hating the other party before you can reach an agreement.

So it goes with all negotiations.

I was thinking this throughout a large portion of the article. Imagine how different things would have been if Julian and Carl stopped emailing each other "rapidly" and "frantically" and picked up the phone (or setup a Zoom meeting or whatever).

Your point that OP would have been way better of if they did let their agent handle it from the beginning was made quite clear already:

> Looking back, I can see that I should, at this point, have handed the conversation over to my agent, Charlie, who negotiates my book deals with publishers, and who is a complete darling, and good at this sort of stuff. But I got stuck. I think I thought that bringing in my agent would potentially mess up this pure art relationship. Maybe he would be too ruthless, and it would all fall apart! Of course, now I can see that it would have had the opposite effect; Markus and I could have talked art, and Carl and Charlie could have talked money, and everyone would have been much happier.

He kinda (but not fully) admits that he had a parasocial relationship with Notch and really though he cared about him (although for Notch the author was probably just a random contactor who would fill the writing for the ending to justify an official release.) Seriously, who thought making the text unscrollable was more than just a light joke? It's probably a jab at the frustrated player who wants to desparately skip the poorly-written wall of text, not a well-thought appreciation of its artistic integrity! He really thought that Notch really liked him as a friend, even though the only time he met him in person was in a random game jam two years ago.

I think the lesson here is: even when the famous person you admire notices you and gives you positive attention, don't assume too far that they really genuinely like you, or even worse, that you two are already "friends". Maybe this is a bit cynical... but in an age where poor artists need to fight to the death on social media for any recognition to sell their work I kinda understand how people would fall for this.

It was quite clearly phrased that the person thought it as poorly written. That’s their opinion and they are allowed to have it. Criticizing someone for sharing their opinion is what is uncalled for.

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

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.

I think I understand the jist of what you mean, and I can agree that, if the...I don't know what the right word would be, the "meaning and essence"(...?) of the thing is more "Here's a philosophical concept" rather than "Here's an A to B story" then I can see why it would be seen as more subjective. I suppose someone could judge the logic of a philosophical concept, but that's way, way outside my depth. :)

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.

I suppose I can understand that. I think that there could be some "wiggle room" there, but it would depend on how hard something like an ending would clash with the thematic elements leading up to that ending. I.e. a dreary, dystopian future leading into Baby Elephant Walk for the credits would probably be an objectively poor choice unless could be executed in some sort of "perfect" way. There's just such a wide array of small choices that can dictate the final product that, yeah, I can't really disagree with what you're saying. There's always an exception to an exception, or even a mere alternative to the standard.

In a way, it's frustrating because I do think it would feel more satisfying if the general principals were more concrete, but in the same breath, that lack of precision is also what allows for enough variety to help spark creativity and unexpected twists and turns. I do think that there is something to be said for, say, arbitrary restrictions, to help encourage someone to be more creative with limited tools, but the variety of options also has clear and obvious benefits as well.

Yes they got paid for producing the work, yes they were jealous. Yes they reacted like most humans would.

But, that €20k did not cover the copyrights to the work. Just the creating of it. Regardless as to whether you think the original payment was really good. The copyright sits with the artist, not those that commission it, unless the artist signs it away. That didn't happen. That's Mojang's fault not the artist. And the fact they were trying to pressure the artist into doing that shows that that is the real issue.

This post is not about the money or the jealously. It is about the emotional journey the author went on, with their human emotions, and what they thought of as friends. And the different stages of said journey.

If I was more cynical about this piece I would suggest that releasing the poem under CC was easily the worse thing the author could have done from MS/Mojangs point of view. Clearly a decision was made by them that should a lawsuit come about they weren't worried. Releasing it as it has been side steps this completely, leaving the power with the author.

Ultimately though I enjoyed the story.

Honestly think that’s very debatable he was contracted by the company he can’t just rugpull because decides there is an extra different secret ownership he never handed over and has never mentioned during the transaction and never brought up till years later when he got bitter. Don’t think his claims would stand up at all of lawyers were involved.

He needs to take the W, he’ll never have his work in anything as large as MC, he got paid 20k for something no one else would pay for honestly things could be worse, his poem could be removed.

I mean it’s now time to ask if he actually even has the rights to license the poem at all.

Absolutely 100% would stand up. If the US and UK have one thing it's strong copyright protections that favor the copyright holder. You can't accidentally transfer owner of your copyright with an off-handed remark and this is well established. If I commission an artist for a work the artist retains the copyright unless it's explicitly transferred to me or if the artists is my employee -- contractor isn't enough.

> his poem could be removed

That wouldn't stop it in general. It comes down to the specific license terms. Copyright deals with performances and his work has already been performed millions of times. That can't be undone. Pirating a movie, watching it, and then deleting your copy doesn't make it not copyright infringement. If the contract said only for use in Minecraft then any merchandise or Minecraft: Bedrock. Worse, licenses aren't by default transferable. If I give your band a license to play a song I wrote and you leave to join another band it doesn't follow you unless it was explicitly stated in the contract. So if Microsoft did something with the licensed work that wasn't under its legal subsidiary Mojang that might also be a problem.

I'm not saying any of this happened but hopefully it's enough to demonstrate that "obviously a judge would rule that a reasonable person would have assumed the work came with copyright assignment" is very unlikely doubly because the fact that they asked him for assignment later means they knew.

b) If I had wanted to make merch with this text on it last week but had been deterred by fear of M$ lawyers, I wouldn't really feel any different about it after the author 'releasing the poem under CC'. His claim to own the rights in the first place is totally dubious. He seems erratic and will probably go on to perform other stunts and legalistic trolling before he gets bored.

b) INAL, but in the UK: "you automatically get copyright protection when you create: original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work, including illustration and photography original non-literary written work... ". Assuming it's similar around the world there's nothing dubious about their claim, they didn't sign it away.

Regardless of your opinion of the person or their motives it seems they are within their rights to do what they've done.

Whether you care for him as a human or not is entirely irrelevant to the rights to his work.

If there was no legal agreement, he retains the rights to it.

It’s not ambiguous.

The entire situation is very messy. Mojang fucked up by failing to get the contract signed and failing to even notice it. OTOH the writer seems like a contractor from hell who you wouldn't ever want to deal with, and that's based on his side of the story.

And that is why:

> His claim to own the rights in the first place is totally dubious.

Is flat out wrong.

Not to say they have no case, sure, verbal agreements are agreements too.

HOWEVER, when the written contract is significantly different from the verbal agreement, the case that the written contract is binding, is highly dubious.

What, if I agree to pay you a dollar for a stick figure drawing and you send me a contract saying I agree to give you my house, is it binding if I keep the dollar? Did I implicitly agree to 'whatever you want' in an unwritten contract because I agreed to some verbal agreement?

The answer is definitely not.

There's a reason companies use legal written contracts. ...because they unambiguously assign rights; they did not do that. Therefore, it's Mojang's claim to the rights which is dubious, not the author.

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.

For me, the real issue for an artist that is actually not talking about the money would be the part of the verbal contract that was not fulfilled: Some type of promotional support for the author's other works. Exposure of that work the hundreds of millions of people seems like it would have a staggeringly massive non-monetary value (and in fact could have led to significant monetary gain). Instead though, the author goes to great pains to say it wasn't about the money while mostly talking about the money.

If it wasn't about money, than what was it about? "Fairness"? So money?

Oh I'm sure. But feelings and money aren't mutually exclusive. Why do you think he posts donation links under the heading "THIS IS WHERE YOU GET TO SAVE MY LIFE"?

They can be money, they can be something more vague like recognition, or truly nebulous like "a sense of human connection," but you've got to have goals. Otherwise you're just a child stumbling in the dark and yelling out.

Reading the post, I don't know what the author's goals are, and I get the impression they don't either.

It sounds like they weren't sure about their goals to begin with, didn't do anything to achieve them, felt robbed because other people's goals were misaligned with theirs, before finally accepting they can't change the past, which

Duh.

However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.

> So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending

Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft?

> Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending

It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.

I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set.

That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.

If he wanted more than $20k he should have asked for it then, but I think the appeal of putting your writing in front of over a hundred million people and a $20,000 check was "enough" compensation for the work, at the time. But resentment grew as the game continued to succeed.

To me this feels like it was written after seeing the Doom music story...which is entirely different as the music of the first (new) doom game was a huge part of its success. This is literally the opposite as the text was tacked on after the game was already successful (Just not yet at its peak success.) And in some ways feels like it is inviting MS lawyers to intervene, but he has much less of a standing.

There is no real ending in Minecraft. "The End" is just the name of another dimension - where of course you have to battle the big bad dragon and get the "end credits" afterwards and so on. But the dimension is literally just called "The End" and is indeed just a pun - you can mine, build, explore, and play there just like in the Overworld or in the Nether, and go back & forth between the three at any time.

In fact, most of us consider visiting The End as the real beginning of the game - exploring it gives you access to two items (shulker boxes and the Elytra), that we consider about as fundamental and essential to the game as the pickaxe or the crafting table.

"Wait what? You can craft a pickaxe? I've been punching rocks all this time!"

You probably know what The Nether is, that hellish looking place you access by making a portal. Reaching The Nether is progress, by getting there you get access to stuff you didn't have before, sure you can do whatever you feel like in Minecraft, but by getting there you can do more stuff than before because you have access to more stuff.

By defeating the Ender Dragon you are free to roam The End (which is the name of the whole place) and thus you finally gain access to everything the game has to offer.

To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft.

Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials.

The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.

But she straight up does not UNDERSTAND a game like Sim city, or rim world. Why would anybody "play" that, is her perspective. It doesn't have a sufficiently, singularly clear narrative, flow, goal, beginning and an end. We talked about such games a few times and I have not really succeeded in moving the needle - not in her being interested in such games, but even remotely comprehending their existence or allure.

I guess it was my wife's friends that felt minecraft really needed an ending :-)

Now, you can start with a toy (like The Sims or a regulation basketball or a pencil, paper, and dice) and create a game around it by applying rules, goals, and objectives. They may be defined by others or you may be creating the game in your own mind -- either way the toy is a piece of equipment used to play the game, it is not in and of itself a game.

Your wife may not enjoy electronic toys like Sim City or Rim World, but perhaps you could pique her interest by working together to come up with games that the two of you could play using those toys?

We engage in many other "pointless" pursuits: beauty, love, culture, civilization, and indeed, life itself. Everyone "plays" for a different reason, and that makes us human.

But I don't believe this would stand up in court. There was a verbal agreement before he signed a contract. He was paid for his one-off contribution; I don't know how much work he delivered or how many hours he put into it, but 20K is half a year's income for some people, not to be sniffed at.

This has come up recently as well in some drama about voice acting on the one hand, and video game soundtracks on the other. Normally you get paid for the time spent, or the amount of your contributions used. But in the case of the voice actor, they decided the normal amount - or as it turned out later, a chunk well above the normal amount - wasn't enough and they threw it onto the internet.

But in the end, I think this is just a business transaction - one part of one part of the game, paid for with a five figure sum. The author neglected to do his due diligence and neglected to review and sign the contract in a timely fashion. Mojang and Microsoft may be susceptible to a lawsuit because the author never surrendered the rights to his work until now, but his unwillingness to cooperate while accepting payment for work delivered won't work in his favor.

And while he gave the text up into the public domain, I don't know if this holds up in court; iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright. Which means that if the author's copyright is voided, then Microsoft's copyright for Minecraft and all it contains might take over, and they might sue him instead. I'm not a lawyer or versed in copyright law, so this is just fantasizing.

     iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright.

Copyright always applies and is automatically assigned at the time of creation. Belongs to the author by default unless created in the context of some other agreement (e.g. work for hire)

The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.

But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO

I inherited a server hosting and came across the ending by accident. It was a moment of "What? I can win Minecraft?". Kids were "Yeah. Winning is boring."

I know basically nothing about the life of artists in general, but this interests me. Where can I read about this? Would appreciate a link that deals with the business side more than a general biography. Thanks.

All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.

> However, in some circumstances, for example when copyright is not dealt with in the contract to commission the work, courts may be willing to find that there is an implied licence allowing the commissioner to use the work for the purpose for which it was commissioned. This does not necessarily result in a transfer of ownership. Instead, the commissioner of the work may only get a limited non-exclusive licence. This situation demonstrates the importance of establishing who owns copyright through a contract.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ownership-of-copyright-works

That is the move by Mojang that I didn't understand. They were about to be paid 2.5 billion. Why not offer 1 million for the signed contract? They could easily afford that, and with his financial troubles at the time, Julian would probably have signed it.

And he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth, and we wouldn't have gotten this beautiful story, and the universe wouldn't have gotten the End Poem, but Microsoft would, and the world would have been more normal, predictable, corporate. But he would have been able to eat and pay rent.

Because they believed (erroneously or not) that they already had paid for the thing the contract was about, and were offering a "peppercorn" payment for the signature itself to make the exchange complete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law)

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 growth.

Totally made up story, but so is the hint that if he would have had a contract he would have missed out on personal growth.

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 misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good fit for modern times, because it conflates virtue with foregoing strong emotions, and leaving other people to their mistakes.

It does have its share of worthwhile lessons though, and if you dig a little deeper you'll find that it encourages guiding and explaining when people are wrong, rather than getting upset with them about perceived moral or practical failures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33532078

Julian's story is more a story of a misunderstood artist caring more about the art than the money, mistaking contract work for friendship, struggling with the consequences, hating himself for it, and finally coming to terms with it.

That seems to happen quite often. People forget that it's impossible to be friends with someone who's employing you without some major conflicts of interest on both sides.

Given the blatantly deliberate blocking to get the OST done and getting a moron to ghostwrite it makes me think id deliberately decided to ruin Mick's reputation so the fans would eat him alive and then they went for straight up libel to complete it. Marty Stratton, what a complete piece of shit.