Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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I get the impression that Notch may not actually be all that talented. I mean, he's probably more so than the average Joe, but not super exceptionally talented.

It seems like he got lucky, and was good enough to leverage his success into more success and was good enough of a businessman to profit handsomely from the whole thing, but that's about it. I understand that he hasn't done anything on Minecraft in quite a while. His attempts at something new don't seem to have gone anywhere. (That weird space programming game from a while back got a lot of attention but never resulted in anything.)

So, maybe that was it. Notch is a one-hit wonder. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure he's already contributed more to the world than most of us ever will. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all losing out on anything significant if he doesn't keep trying to make more big things.

And from the other side of things, it seems like Minecraft came out of one of these ridiculous idle amusements. If you had described Minecraft to people before it was made, they would have thought it was ridiculous. Oh, a volumetric 3D world with a 1990s-era renderer. Great. Sounds about as useful as a Doom map viewer written in Dart. Yet it turned into something huge. So if Notch does have another hit in him, it will probably come about the same way, through more strange messing about.

You may confuse talent with algorithmic or scientific skills. Which, in the case of videogame is just one small part of the whole.

People like notch and other indie developpers are looking for things beyond immediate technical prowess or easy instant fun. They are after something you may call poetry, and how to explore new opportunities created by technology.

In this regard and judging by the large interest of children for minecraft, this man is talented.

I don't confuse talent. I understand that making a video game fun is completely different from raw programming talent or whatever.

But merely looking at what Notch has done, it looks to me like he got lucky rather than having some vast talent for making fun games.

And yet you casually quantify talent as being about making a fun game. There are so many flaws in this line of thinking.

At the top is the idea that if you make a game fun enough it will take off like Minecraft, but virality is not simply a product of fun, there are so many intangibles that go into blockbuster successes, and the people who get really good at wrangling those elements and distilling out a formula are not renowned for their talent (eg. Hollywood blockbusters).

But unpacking further, talent is something that needs to be developed. Natural talent is nothing without practice upon practice. Talent in some area requires years of practice that laymen will never really understand or appreciate. We can all talk casually about various kinds of talent, in programming, in art, in game design, in music, etc, but any kind of serious discussion needs to touch on the nuances of the specific work they are doing. Claiming Nickelback is more talented than Arcade Fire because they've sold more albums is a sure way to kill a conversation about music.

I honestly have no idea what your problem is with my comment anymore. Are you unhappy that I didn't mention the other things needed for success under "talent"?

What do you mean "anymore"? I only responded once.

My problem is simple: you define talent as being "successful" by your opening sentence. From the beginning you question his talent because you haven't seen more successes from him. That's what I'm taking issue with.

Of course I don't want you to define other things needed for success, that's precisely the problem. Success is not a barometer for success, more like a very very loose correlation.

Where did I define talent as being related to success?

I question his talent because I haven't seen anything interesting from him since Minecraft. If he had produced something great that nobody bought, I wouldn't be saying what I'm saying. But he hasn't made anything of interest.

He is talented, at least insofar that he is a great programmer, and has a knack for gameplay mechanics. Just watch his streams or look at this game (even the ludumdare one, they may not be much, but they're slick).

I sure failed to deliver a follow-up to Minecraft, but that was never his goal. He just wants to tinker and have fun, which is also why most of his game projects just stay at the embryonic stage; it seems to burden him greatly to follow up on the ideas, when the initial glee of tinkering with a new idea has worn off.

He's not so much a great programmer as a productive one (not that those are concepts that can't coexist, he just isn't both).

He's very good at taking an idea and making it work, then building new stuff on that, but less so at actually making things robust in an architectural sense. Moving on to the next thing that interests him also doesn't help that.

A lot of the biggest hiccups in Minecraft's stability are more-or-less directly caused by having to work around stuff that was coded in a way that made sense at the time, but gradually fitted less and less well to the game as it now stood.

I'd say at this point a lot of Notch's original code is outright gone, and that's a good thing. His vision is still at the core of it, and that's what he really brought to the project.

What exactly makes you think he's not talented? Because I on the other hand think he's extremely talented. That's the opinion I have based on occasionally watching his streams and reading his writings, not even considering the huge success that Minecraft is.

The fact that he hasn't followed up Minecraft with anything noteworthy despite having plenty of time and way more than enough money, and apparently wanting to build something new and successful with 0x10c.

He has followed it with several noteworthy projects.

People confuse popularity with merit. Things become extremely popular because of chance network effects. Humans are herd animals. You get a big hit if you are lucky enough to start a stampede. (Or if you spend a lot of energy carefully engineering a stampede).

Not getting a stampede doesn't mean you didn't make something amazing.

He did build something new and successful with 0x10c. That demo is amazing. Its a 3d shooter with an awesome laser gun and a _full 80s computer emulated inside of it_. And an abstraction for virtual peripherals, a virtual monitor, and a virtual 3d vector display. Its fucking awesome.

Did he make $100 million selling that? No. Does that mean it isn't awesome? No it absolutely does not. For starters, it was never for sale.

Here is a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBAtAM7vtgc that is an absolutely horrible parody of itself (intentionally, for comedic effect (we hope)) that was in the top five of the charts for its category. It sold quite a lot of downloads, purchases and products. Incredibly popular. Complete crap.

Judging the merit of something on the basis of how excited the herd gets is completely wrong.

I don't get it. At least two of you have replied as if I based my comment on the lack of any popular followup to Minecraft. What did I say that made you think that?

As a creator, I don't envy Notch. Imagine having the question "will this be another Minecraft?" in the back of your head EVERY TIME you sit down to try and make something. It's the same fear that comes after even a modest Big Success; will my next book beat the big one? Will my next album? It's easy to fall into a hole of just cranking out more of the same - my friend Ursula Vernon, for instance, is on something like her fourteenth book on her successful "Dragonbreath" series of illustrated kids' novels. Or look at how harshly J.K. Rowling's post-Harry Potter books have fared.

You can't always catch lightning in a bottle again. And I don't envy having that hanging over the heads of oh who am I kidding I would totally love to be in the position of potentially disappointing thousands of fans when my next comic doesn't appeal to as many people as my most successful one did.

I think you have to just ignore what people think and do what you do. This seems to be Notch's way of doing it. More power to him, I say.

I'm sure Steve Jobs didn't care what people thought of him either. He just defaulted to "they will love what I do because I will create something great", whereas Notch seems to be more like "people are trouble, so go away." Which would probably be how I'd do it too.

If you're looking for an appropriate timeframe, you have to put his whole career in games in context. The first game he's credited for is Wurm Online, which he worked on between 2003 and 2007. He was also employed by King at least through 2009, when he started on Minecraft.

That is 6 years. Minecraft has been around for 5 years. If we take the premise that Notch comes up with really good ideas once every 6 years he works on games, he'll hit this timeframe next year.

Alternately, the clock might only start from the moment he stopped personally working on Minecraft, which was in November 2011. In that case we will have to wait another 3 years for him to collect ideas.

Is the definition of talent that one does something noteworthy on a regular basis?

I think that Phil Fish video that he linked really hit the nail on the head.

If you wanted to prove someone has talent, you would point to them pushing out noteworthy things on a consistent basis. Sure, someone can be very talented but have only a single thing to their name, but it's just as likely they got lucky.

> If you wanted to prove someone has talent, you would point to them pushing out noteworthy things on a consistent basis.

That's not a very good proof. If anything, that would show that they are productive. "Noteworthy" is very subjective, and it's not a measure of talent, though there can be correlation. If I have a big marketing team, I can make something noteworthy by someone's standards.

> Sure, someone can be very talented but have only a single thing to their name, but it's just as likely they got lucky.

Notch is talented. He got lucky with Minecraft. That doesn't make him any less talented. And now that he's "famous", his odds for being lucky have increased since he now has a bigger audience, more connections, more money - basically more opportunities.

It's only been a few years. Not everyone can churn out smash hits like clockwork, even if they are really talented.

If he ever does create another big game, I'd expect it would be many years down the road, after he's toyed with a lot of ideas and had more than a few false starts.

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