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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

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

You really think that a poem that people have tattooed on themselves, put onto tee shirts and mugs, inspired emotional emails to the author, and so on has inspired exactly zero excess recommendations to friends, zero dinnertime discussions or social media posts that have led to purchases?

If it was any other thing, it would have been tattooed or put on t-shirts as well.

People are putting Minecraft’s ending on things because it’s Minecraft and Minecraft left an impact on them. The actual poem was a commodity that was tacked on to make the game complete as a muse.

It sounds harsh but that’s the truth and why OP isn’t entitled to any more than they got, especially with that attitude.

Keep in mind you're arguing with engineering types about this. Over the course of my career I've come to find that a not-insignificant % of engineers value art and artistic contributions very little or not at all.

I was thinking just this as I was reading.

Rounded it is still likely 0.

Tattooed on themselves?

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

Possibly less than 0.

Did you read the ending text? It's incredibly long. Are you claiming that people have the entire thing tattooed on themselves? I definitely can't see it fitting on a coffee mug in any readable fashion

Did you read the article? There's a picture of someone with one of the lines tattooed on their arm. Obviously people aren't putting whole poem on things

One line is not "having a poem tattooed"

I think the original point is to say that people felt moved enough by the poem to "permanently" integrate some feature of it into their lives. Critiquing the "whole poem" thing feels incredibly pedantic.

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

To be fair, some people make tattoos with all kinds of silly things, the bar is pretty low. One can argue that whatever the ending text was, someone would make a tattoo with it eventually.

So then would the artist who created that ending not be entitled to the recognition they deserve for their part in it? If not this author, then another? Would the same story, but from another person change anything?

We need a gofundme for the previous comment to be tattooed on someone.

I've never even looked at the poem and have beaten Minecraft many times. I'm probably not the target audience though, I generally skip quest text in games.

You should read it. IMO it transforms Minecraft from being just an ordinary game experience into being art, it makes the context of what you've been doing, in playing Minecraft, into something like folklore.

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

I 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.

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.

Haha, it's interesting to see that perspective

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

The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars.

That’s why the author lets go of the dollars and gives the story away for free at the end.

Maybe the game would have made the same money. But it’s also true that Markus asked for an ending story, selected this one and put it in, and kept it there.

>The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars

That may be the author's point, but their egotism also then seems to believe that a significant portion of the non-monetary value of Minecraft is a result of their own brief work on an unskippable wall of text that has a nice sentiment but is quickly forgotten by, I'd guess, nearly everyone that plays the game.

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

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.

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