The other day there was a post about some Doom map viewer Notch had written in Dart. One of the top comments said something along the lines of "This is why we all need to be rich, so we can work on stuff like this." I thought the comment was so sad because honestly, almost no one is going to benefit from a mostly broken Doom map viewer in Dart that's abandoned after a few days. Same with the numerous games he's started (often with no idea where he's going) and abandoned after a few hours/days. Don't get me wrong, I like watching his coding stream as much as the next person, but compare that to the millions of people who benefitted from the sustained and focused effort on Minecraft.
Notch says:
> If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.
So sad. Imagine if Jobs/the PayPal guys/etc had taken this approach after their initial succcess.
Now I'm all for people being free to do what they want and only this guy owns his life and no one is entitled to have him work for them (hat tip Ayn Rand), and obviously this guy has had a bigger impact on the world than I have, but I tend to agree with Immanuel Kant (and Jesus) that we all have a duty to develop and use our talents in a way that benefits humanity and not just indulge ourselves in idle amusement once we're comfortable. And to be honest, this probably applies more to me than to Notch.
From "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals":
> A third finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capacities. He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law although men ... should let their talents rest and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of their species- in a word, to enjoyment; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him and have been given him, for all sorts of possible purposes.
What you are suggesting is impossible. No one, not even Steve Jobs sits down and says "My life mission is to benefit humanity". This is because we really do not know which efforts will have the largest impact on humanity. You could waste a lifetime trying to make a better battery - but it might never happen.
Or you could hack around on a game and watch it explode and impact millions of lives around the world.
In my opinion the important part is that you are doing something meaningful to you as an individual. If it ends up exploding and benefiting humanity all the better. But the world would be so much better off if we just had everyone doing this.
> No one, not even Steve Jobs sits down and says "My life mission is to benefit humanity".
Musk might be considered a counter-example here. In fact, part of his mission is literally to "make a better battery". Of course in depends on how much you buy into his mythology. Certainly he could have comfortably retired after Paypal though. (Rather than moving on to run two groundbreaking companies - something I'm not sure how one person manages to successfully do.)
I wasn't saying that I think no one should do things that benefit humanity. Rather I was saying that you should only do what is meaningful to you as an individual.
Musk clearly finds what he does meaningful to himself and is not doing something he does not enjoy simply for the greater good of humanity.
Notch did not enjoy being part of something so large. I find it odd to belittle him for choosing the path of doing small things, since that is where something as impactful as Minecraft was created in the first place.
I'd say Minecraft was grown in spite of the way Notch works. The way he works has been the bane of a lot of modders, who are (arguably) the reason his game is so successful.
> In my opinion the important part is that you are doing something meaningful to you as an individual. [...] ...the world would be so much better off if we just had everyone doing this.
You can't separate yourself from humanity as a whole. That's like saying your liver should do something meaningful for itself as an organ, and if it ends up helping your body, all the better. We don't work individually. Humans require other humans, and all of our motivations and desires are influenced by this requirement.
Notch may not have begun Minecraft with the larger gaming community in mind, but he certainly continued development in some small part because of it.
I know this is outside the topic, but to critique your analogy - you could spend a lifetime trying to make a better battery, and share the knowledge of 1000 ways to not make a better battery, which is useful in and of itself.
I wasn't trying to imply such a pursuit wouldn't be useful, rather that you should only do it if you find it individually fulfilling and not solely because it might benefit humanity as a whole (because it might not, no one can predict these things).
But of course this is all just a personal opinion and highly subjective.
While we cannot predict the future with perfect certainty statements like: "A better battery will benefit humanity" are safe bets. There are many things that we know with a high degree a certainty will benefit humanity.
And if you find that individually meaningful you should go for it!
Notch however, clearly did not enjoy working on something with so much publicity whether it benefited humanity or not. I don't think we should belittle him for that.
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the way he works or toy projects or experimenting or not knowing beforehand what will be successful. I'm just a bit concerned that if he actually takes the attitude of (paraphrased) "if something I do is appealing to many people I'll abandon that and find something nobody cares about," he'll end up shortchanging himself and others. And in fairness to Notch, he probably does mean something more nuanced, transitory, and reasonable.
I think the op just suggests that it would be a pity if Notch killed something he did because it turned popular; not that he should strive to build something popular or benefiting humanity.
> No one, not even Steve Jobs sits down and says "My life mission is to benefit humanity". This is because we really do not know which efforts will have the largest impact on humanity.
Not knowing how to do something doesn't stop me from trying to do it. Why does it stop you?
No one is obligated to make themselves miserable by forcing themselves to assume a role in life that they do not want. It might be debatable if he was some sort of political leader or humanitarian icon or something, of the sort where humanity's misery index actually increases in their absence.
However, for all of his good qualities, like 99.9999% of humanity, Notch is not wired up to be a hugely public figure, who is constantly interacting with the public, and is under continuous scrutiny to make another Minecraft. That's right, for the rest of his career, everything he does will be held up to the yardstick of being "the guy who created Minecraft".
I know, boo hoo and all that, given that he is now possibly a billionaire (on paper at least, and maybe only before taxes, but still!). But that doesn't instantly change his psychology- it doesn't flip any of the axes of whatever his Meyers/Briggs personality type is. If he's not comfortable and not happy being a public figure that everyone stares at waiting for the next Minecraft to pop out, no one should be able to hold that against him. He's not obligated to continue being that guy if it's not who he is.
After a few years out of the limelight, if he wanted to he could be a Mark Shuttleworth kind of guy: someone who struck it big while still young, and decided to invest a chunk of that money (and most or all of his time) to a passion project. I've gotta think that after the Microsoft deal, Notch won't have to work, but maybe in a few years he might decide to reinvolve himself with the community in a role that is a better fit for him. Or not, it's up to him. I would personally like to see some kind of Act 2 from him, because he is clearly a very creative and occasionally inspired person, but I won't hold it against him if doesn't want to.
Oh come on. The reality is that most people who get freak success are very often one-trick ponies. They don't often have a second chapter and some/most of the ones that do, do so only because they are highly driven type-A personalities who thrive on competition, which is the opposite of who Notch is, from what I can tell. Notch probably understands this and pardon me if I don't accept your morality argument over whats essentially a mild distraction (a video game).
With Notch's new found wealth, he could, say, start a charitable foundation or whatever he wants which could impact people a whole hell of a lot more people and in arguably better ways than Minecraft 2: Electric Bugaloo.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think it's sad at all. It's great that Notch is doing what makes him happy. And honestly, I think he's much more likely to continue to do things that benefit the world if he follows this intuition rather than feeling duty bound to build things that are as big and impactful as possible.
Honestly I think his is more of an artistic than entrepreneurial mindset. How many artists set out to "change the world" with their art? Not many. But still many do.
At higher state of mind you do things for sack of doing or some intrinsic pleasure or even no purpose at all. G.H Hardy puts this best in his book Mathematician's Apology by describing why mathematicians do math. He mentioned, as a mathematician, he never cared about utility of its work. In fact he avoided anything that he thought could be remotely useful after many centuries. Euclid didn't created Elements to be "useful" in a practice sense. Mountaineers don't climb mountains because it benefits humanity. They climb them because they are there. I'd been kind of person in my early life where everything needed purpose and goals. It took me long time to understand and come to terms with this line of thinking. The reason I call it "higher" state of mind because I think you arrive there when you understand something very intrinsic about universe. I've written tons of code purely for sack of writing with no intent of it ever getting used by anyone. Some people try to explain it by saying that they do it "just for fun" but its akin to explaining quantum mechanics to a pre-schooler by watered down analogies.
There are a lot of artistic types that can't handle fame at all and become very destructive to themselves, others, and their work when they break down. John Campbell of Pictures for Sad Children comes to mind as a particularly compelling example.
I wish I had a pithy explanation as to why this was but I haven't figured it out yet. "some people aren't cut out for fame" doesn't really do it justice, because the problem isn't entirely in the Notch's of the world, but also how we relate to them and how fame is characterized in our culture.
I find it ironic that the laws that allowed Notch to cash out were expressly created to forward the progress of science and arts. Yet we find ourselves at a place where the dream is not to work and perfect craft, but to Get Rich Quick so we can relax for the rest of our lives. I, too, find it sad.
Ayn Rand? What good does that kind of stuff do at all anyways? If you want some libertarian ideas, fine, there are countless philosophers out there for you to cite, even Robert Nozick. But Ayn Rand? That's just disgusting beyond belief, seriously.
It's sad. But it looks like he simply doesn't have what it takes to be the kind of person we all wish he was. Nobody can't blame him for that. Leading of something big is hard and exhaustive process. Especially for introverts like Notch.
Or perhaps he doesn't WANT to be the kind of person you "we all" wish he was. This idea that people who are good enough at a thing must somehow become a CEO or leader creates a lot of unhappy people. Let the managers manage, and the engineers make things. Don't put pressure on people to do something they don't want just because you want to see what happens.
You just repeated what I have said without disagreeing with me, but somehow you made it sound like you are telling something of the opposite of what I meant.
You said he "doesn't have what it takes" which was what I was disagreeing with - he may very well have what it takes but he's chosen to not pursue that path.
Notch says:
> If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.
So sad. Imagine if Jobs/the PayPal guys/etc had taken this approach after their initial succcess.
Now I'm all for people being free to do what they want and only this guy owns his life and no one is entitled to have him work for them (hat tip Ayn Rand), and obviously this guy has had a bigger impact on the world than I have, but I tend to agree with Immanuel Kant (and Jesus) that we all have a duty to develop and use our talents in a way that benefits humanity and not just indulge ourselves in idle amusement once we're comfortable. And to be honest, this probably applies more to me than to Notch.
From "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals":
> A third finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capacities. He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law although men ... should let their talents rest and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of their species- in a word, to enjoyment; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him and have been given him, for all sorts of possible purposes.