The end of Minecraft and the gift economy

December 8, 2022 5:09 AM

There's a poem at the end of Minecraft, but Minecraft doesn't own it. Quite a story by an author who lives in the gift economy as much as he can.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz (29 comments total)

I sent him a bit of cash, but Jesus, he should have been a millionaire off of this.
posted by jscalzi at 6:11 AM on December 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

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

Which was great, because I was beyond broke, and I desperately needed that money.



I've only gotten [that] far, but this is really starting to sound like an unreliable narrator.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:15 AM on December 8, 2022

Two thing I've learned about human beings over the years I've been one:

1. Almost all of the good advice we hand out is advice we'd do better for taking ourselves.

2. All of us all suck so bad at taking good advice.
posted by flabdablet at 6:49 AM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Sometimes, you look back on some situation in your life, and you think "Jesus Christ, WHAT was I thinking?" And you have no explanation. He could have contacted his agent at any point. He could've asked others for advice. He could've done a lot of things.

For most of us, most of the time, such situations are not what makes a difference between us paying off credit card debt and becoming millionaires (billionaires, even). I can absolutely understand how all of this mess happened, but oooof. The other people involved could've set this right. There was (and is) so much room for improvement for everyone involved.
posted by gakiko at 6:57 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Living for the purity of the art sounds pretentious, but only because our culture has so weaponized capitalism. And he seems very aware that getting paid would have led to its own problems (you have only to look at what Notch did to himself). I played a lot of Minecraft with my son but never aspired to the End. It was good to read, and beautiful and true. But of course everything is more complicated.

Glad the author found some way to resolve his inner conflict.
posted by rikschell at 7:01 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don’t buy the “it’s not about the money” bit that the author is telling himself. Like the situation wouldn’t have been totally different if Minecraft had bombed and not made so much money for everyone else? The game’s financial and commercial success seems to be a central plot point in the story as told.

I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be about the money, or that the author is wrong for feeling upset about the whole situation (though, holy cow buddy, why didn’t you at least bring your agent or a lawyer in at the point of the Microsoft sale? I don’t usually have any concern for the Carls of the world but I feel like I can fully understand why he would have gotten so annoyed with the author). It’s also likely the best resolution possible at this point that the author has found a story to tell himself that lets him move on. Even though it is not a story that seems to hold water from the outside.
posted by eviemath at 7:20 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

OK, the dude didn't negotiate the contract at all, and Mojang screwed things up badly, but "I'm one of the 5 people who created Minecraft"? "I'm more important to the game than the people who worked on coding it"? I don't think so. In discussions I've seen online, there are two big camps. The first is, "there's an end?" The second is "yeah, after the end is when you can start building really cool stuff." I don't think very many people care about the end itself.
While I think money's a part of it, I really think that the author wants recognition. He's upset that the employees at Mojang are recognized for their work (via money), but he isn't being recognized for his very important contribution. The problem is, that few other people think his contribution was that important. I don't. (I've played Minecraft a bit. I've played locally, visited my child's world that she and her friends built, and played online games in shared worlds. I also paid for a hosted server for my kid for a couple of years.)
posted by Spike Glee at 7:47 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well that was life changing. Thank you. That basically IS my life and worldview minus the billion dollar game and Microsoft. But the rest is me.
posted by scunning at 7:48 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also each day passes and the labor theory of value seems less and less ridiculous.
posted by scunning at 7:49 AM on December 8, 2022

One of the other central inconsistencies in the story: the game developer was a patron of the author’s art, not a friend. They had met once, prior to someone on the internet (who, it sounds like, didn’t actually personally know either of them?) suggesting the author for creating the end-of-game closing text. The game developer approached this transaction professionally, separating artistic matters from business matters, and was happy with the artistic product produced. Yep, they should have had lawyers telling them not to use the story without a signed contract, or should have listened if they did have such lawyers. So not completely blameless for sure. But it’s not a story about a friendship gone wrong - or, even within that framing, the author arguably made the first unfriendly move by his highly unprofessional behavior in the original negotiations.

My armchair psychologist read: the author is angry at himself for having missed this opportunity. Maybe there were entirely valid mental health reasons - the relationship to paperwork that he describes would certainly be consistent with a number of possibilities and certainly seems to reflect above average anxiety in that area. But he seems to have difficulty dealing healthily with that self-directed negative emotion, instead redirecting it outward. Notice that when he admits to other personal failings, they are non-specific, unconnected to this situation/siloed to his first marriage, and brought up only in the context of how he has done well since by growing and improving, or how he was harmed by the Minecraft situation. This is a surface non-admission of personal failings, consistent with the larger grandiosity with which the author seems to view himself. He can’t just say, “I screwed up and missed the opportunity of a lifetime for financial security” without minimization or blame-shifting.


There is a broader, serious question here of: is it fair that artists can sell their work for a pittance and not realize any material benefit if the larger project they contributed to makes a killing? We legally prohibit people from being able to sign away some things in contracts, maybe this should be similar? That question ties in to the controversy du jour around AI (machine learning) generated art, and many past controversies from the music industry, as well as some of the industry issues that have led to the current uptick of labor organizing activity in the video games industry, and is a conversation worth having despite this issues with this particular narrator and story.
posted by eviemath at 8:03 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow.

I never got to the ender dragon - I stopped paying shortly before the game was "finished." all I cared about was the Lego aspect of it, building a replica of Diocletian's Palace is a on the mefightclub server.

A decade later, I still listen to the ost, I still love watching videos about Redstone computers. Maybe I should buy my husband and myself the game again, and we could try to survive together.
posted by rebent at 8:52 AM on December 8, 2022

OK, the dude didn't negotiate the contract at all, and Mojang screwed things up badly, but "I'm one of the 5 people who created Minecraft"? "I'm more important to the game than the people who worked on coding it"? I don't think so. In discussions I've seen online, there are two big camps. The first is, "there's an end?" The second is "yeah, after the end is when you can start building really cool stuff." I don't think very many people care about the end itself.

At least one person cares about the ending. If millions of people have played this game, I have a hard time believing that's the only person who cares about the ending. I've never even played Minecraft, and it's a good ending.
posted by aniola at 9:44 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wanted to blockquote the part that starts at "Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living" but it was too long. I think it's worth doing a control+F if you're not going to read the whole article.
posted by aniola at 9:46 AM on December 8, 2022

Hopefully the author has finally gotten some legal advice, because making a public domain claim for something called "A STORY FOR THE END CREDITS OF MINECRAFT" after you've cashed a check for writing it seems like an summoning for Micro$oft lawyers. (of course if he really wanted to troll the lawyers he would have made it GPL)
posted by credulous at 10:33 AM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed reading this. I too have fallen into the trap of relating to people in a professional context as human beings and realizing later that I would have been materially much better off being coldly professional. Luckily, unlike this fella, my mistakes didn't cost me untold riches.

Nowadays, lessons learned, I still try to treat people as I'd like to be treated in a professional context, but I'm also much more inclined to cover my ass (be a pedant about requirements and expectations) and state clearly, loudly, and repetitively what I think I'm worth and what I expect from my employer and co-workers. The past few years, in my yearly reviews, I've been asked what I want from my employer and the answer has always been simply "more money, and more time off" - I don't beat around the bush anymore or fear how I might be perceived for being clear and straight about my relationship to my employers. I like them, we get along fine interpersonally, but they are not my friends and I'm not going to pretend they are.

I love that he's given the story away, and I love that he's living his convictions, but oof when I hear married with a kid and can't pay the bills that's just like fight or flight reflex for me. I'm not strong enough to live my ideals all the way to the poorhouse. I hope the universe returns the love he's putting out there.
posted by signsofrain at 10:37 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Guy wrote ~1500 words for a game with notable success that was likely to continue succeeding.

Been in the industry enough to have a agent

Didn't contact agent a single time

Dicked around in negotiating for self.

Accepted yearly median salary check, cashed it.

Still hadn't read contract sent by game company.

Name listed in game credits.

Upset when reads offered contract X years after cashing check.

Sigh. Guy wonders why he isn't getting residuals for something he wrote when most companies tend to buy the work outright.


The poem is deeply lovely and meaningful and only slightly pretentious in that stereotypical 'I do psychedelics ' way. It produced tears. It's been seen by millions. He had a extremely human reaction to business, but had every resource to not cause this mess. Does he deserve any of the Microsoft windfall? I don't think so. Did he repeatedly throw himself on the rocks of his own issues? Oh very much yes.
posted by Jacen at 11:36 AM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

As do we all.
posted by flabdablet at 11:39 AM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

A writer didn't give the rights to their writing away to a company that makes billions of dollars off the people who play the game it is written for. Writer, who prioritizes art, decides to release this writing into the public domain, instead of spending years fighting a legal battle in court over money. Everybody wins. I think it's a sweet story.
posted by aniola at 12:02 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Here is the first part of that section I particularly wanted to share.

Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40.

posted by aniola at 12:05 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I never knew you could win Minecraft.

I guess he didn't either.
posted by Mchelly at 12:29 PM on December 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really enjoyed the story. If you didn't make it through, he does takes full responsibility for not engaging in the right way to get the money he should have been paid, and is grateful because he believes his life is better for it. Spoilers ahead, and it doesn't really work out of context of reading the whole story, but his final insight:

It was during that second trip that I finally got a clear view of why I was still so upset about the whole situation, and yet why I, nonetheless, didn't want to bring in the lawyers. Because up until that night under the Dutch stars, I had assumed my anger must be fundamentally about money. (Isn't that what we are supposed to get angry about?) But that left my reluctance to go after the fairly huge amount of money I was now owed by Microsoft as a weird mystery to me. Why not just reach out and take it?

LESSONS IN LOVE
Coming down off the mushrooms, though, the core of the whole complicated, multi-year problem was so clear to me, I could say it in a line: I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.

Well, that simplified everything. I could see now that I was caught in a kind of psychological, or maybe moral, trap: I couldn’t go after the money, because that would turn all this back into an argument about money; which wasn’t what this was ultimately about.

posted by team lowkey at 1:19 PM on December 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I am reminded of Zach Barth, the game developer who made Infiniminer, the game Minecraft started out as a reimplementation of. He's relatively reflective on being in proximity to but not really part of a billion-dollar game; he's said before that he probably wouldn't have made the changes that Mojang did to steer Minecraft away from an Infiniminer clone and into the thing it is today, and he's doing okay for himself.

If you've heard of Spacechem, Opus Magnum, or Shenzhen I/O, all "Zachlikes" - he's the Zach. He might not be a billionaire, but having a genre named after you is still kind of neat.
posted by Merus at 2:19 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I liked the story. Thanks OP.

Don't really have anything to add that hasn't been said. It's too long, and the ending is "cheesy" etc. But I like psychedelics (a lot), and I "get" where he's coming from, and how it could happen, and all of that.
posted by booooooze at 6:32 PM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

If he wants to put it into the public domain, doesn’t he at least need to refund the money he accepted?
posted by Phanx at 4:39 AM on December 9, 2022

Eh, depends on whether a court would determine if he had retained ownership rights or not. If he has retained ownership rights, then he essentially rented the poem to Minecraft (the money he received thus being a rental or licensing fee), but can do whatever else he pleases with it in the absence of any contract to the contrary. I suspect it would hinge on the details of the author’s original email exchange with the business guy. Given that Microsoft apparently didn’t push on the matter of having a signed contract when they bought the game, in my completely non-expert opinion, I would guess that either their lawyers looked at the emails and thought that it didn’t look good for the author, or that the poem had been used for long enough that some legal details would prevent him from being able to sue them for a bunch of money for its use (as I understand it, if you don’t enforce a copyright for too long and your work becomes in common use, then you can effectively lose the copyright to public domain?), or they decided that if he pursued legal action they’d just jettison the poem from the game.
posted by eviemath at 5:51 AM on December 9, 2022

If Mojang sent him a check before he signed the contract, that’s on Mojang, not on him. Same goes for adding the poem into the game, or for Microsoft buying it without making sure everything in it was properly owned or at least licensed.

Personally I felt the story was neat (but long-winded!). And I like the fact that the poem, which is more Minecraft-adjacent than essential to the game, is in the game but is now not PART of the game per se. When my kid and I first beat the Ender Dragon and we got that poem, I was somewhat startled, I didn’t expect it and reading through it was a neat experience. Of course, once you’ve seen it once, the second or third time (in new worlds) isn’t the same experience, because you know it’s coming and you don’t necessarily pay attention to the words the same way. Heck, last time I killed the dragon, in a creative world where I was simply testing some mechanics, I skipped the poem entirely. Which felt weird, but my goal there was “see if X works” and because it was creative mode I really didn’t feel like I had earned the win.

But in our original shared world, the one that has been running since late 2015? That time, the poem was earned, and it had meaning, and it made us happy.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:55 AM on December 9, 2022

if you don’t enforce a copyright for too long and your work becomes in common use, then you can effectively lose the copyright to public domain?

That's trademark. Copyright doesn't require enforcement, and typically if you own a copyright you have to explicitly transfer it away to lose it. There are some exceptions like "was it work for hire?" which don't apply in this case.

For small freelance art gigs it's not uncommon to work without a contract. You do the job, you get paid, it's understood that the art is licensed in the typical way, and everything is jake until the rare case where it's not, and then usually the artist gets screwed and swears never to work without a written contract again. I suspect that a court would look at the emails, and the author's own statements, and the fact that he cashed the check, and find that Minecraft has a valid license to use the poem.

It's baffling that he didn't refer it to his agent, and it's a bummer that it ate at him for so long, but I see a guy who did some work and got paid and maybe that should be the end of it.
posted by surlyben at 6:31 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

A major takeaway message from this is that people should go listen to Gough's Toasted Heretic albums. It's difficult to emphasise how vital and timely these were to young Irish in the late-1980s and early 1990s.
posted by meehawl at 10:27 AM on December 9, 2022

Seems there's another update, in another long thread:

Hmmm. I just had a bizarre experience, involving a global news organisation and a trillion dollar corporation. (I got caught in the middle, so... owch.)
It’s not the sort of experience the people involved usually talk about in public… so I think I’ll talk about it in public.
🧵 — https://twitter.com/juliangough/status/1611031552472793089

There's no nitter copy (maybe?) and the archive org mirrors were acting up, so in short: a news org picked up the story, fact checked the public domain status of the end poem (true), but ominous silence from Microsoft's legal team - in a reverse Streisand Effect kinda thing - spiked the story.

A less dramatic read on the thread might be "giant multinational has a policy of not commenting on its past legal failings, including those times it did not properly run due diligence on an acquisition. Everyone who cared about the Minecraft end poem is no-one the news desk editor cares about as a customer, so the story was spiked."
posted by scruss at 5:16 AM on January 6, 2023 [2 favorites]