Minecraft's End Poem - Unanswered Questions

[Jinsye]

Despite being a discussion rule, I got the go ahead by Ultima to bring this up again because both he and I have both decided the way the previous thread ended wasn’t very good. A mess of circular arguments and the staff just decided to cut off the whole thing before it got any worse.

My opinion can be swayed here, so feel free to debate. But I do not believe the reasoning provided in the thread of deletion proved that the End Poem cannot be properly indexed on the site.

Luckily Bambu summarized all the points nicely. So I’ll go through the biggest points.

Addressing the Previous Thread​

If this were accepted as legitimate, the argument of "exceptional claims require exceptional evidence" has been made several times, where the only counterargument was from Ricsi, who was so bold to say "but this is exceptional evidence" with no further elaboration. It is not, in fact, exceptional evidence. So even if we were to assume the End Poem was factual, which we are told it is not, it would not be sufficient.

The feat itself (and this is an extremely minor point, one should add) is vague- so vague that even those defending it cannot agree on where it falls, ranging from 2-B to 1-C. This is an unacceptable range for one feat, and represents some 4 levels of transcendence of disparity between the low-end and the high-end. Even if the feat were legitimate, it seems far too vague to actually reliably list. Given this is the case, even if the page were to exist, it would be at best "Unknown"- this has actually been suggested to me by some, but these people failed to account for the above facts.

I’m not sure what ‘exceptional evidence’ means at this stage. The End Poem itself is pretty vague on what it’s themes are but there are direct feats to be tiered here. It goes explicitly in detail about what a universe is and how the player can create them, what level the Entities are, etc. You can’t just say the evidence is insufficient without an argument.

Also, the fact that the feat can be debated is not a reason for deletion. Just because one interpretation of it is tier 2 and the other is tier 1 doesn’t mean that we can’t debate it and figure out what would be a reasonable tier for it. The fact that it varies by 4 levels of transcendence is irrelevant.

But that’s small stuff, let’s tackle the biggest unaddressed argument. Is it a metaphor? Yes. Not sure why that stops it from having profiles, so let’s take a look at the arguments.

The End Poem is a metaphor, a myth even in regards to the game-
What does “in regards to the game” even mean? It’s not like this is a story found in an ancient scripture of a temple or something. The End Poem itself in this context is supposed to be a person being reached to by the higher beings themselves and reading their thoughts. That’s definitely not a myth.

This much is stated plainly in the interviews.
Let’s read the big argument again, shall we?

JG: “The word "dream" gets used, but it's really a story about the dream of a game, and the dream of life. It's dream as metaphor.”

So, the argument here is that the poem is metaphorical because he states that ‘dream’ is a metaphor. I am going to end up repeating Ultima’s points on the previous thread because they never got answered in regards to this question. (Technically they did, but it was dismissive in regards to the argument itself)

What Julian is saying in this statement is that the poem has themes, and he also views Minecraft with these same themes as well. The ‘metaphor’ that the author is referring to is the entire game, not just the End Poem.

Reiterating these points, if the entire game is a metaphor for a dream then the verse would be deleted, which is unreasonable obviously. So why is the entire game a metaphor and not just the poem?

TC: The gaming pioneer Richard Bartle talks about games in mythic terms: how your personal encounter with a game space maps quite closely to the mythical idea of "the hero's journey." You go in as this novice, this noob, make your way through perils and challenges, become heroic and powerful, and triumph over adversity.

This surely describes our experience of so many game-worlds. At the very end of Minecraft, you slay a dragon, for goodness sake! Markus has gone for the mythic bullseye.

JG: Yeah. I'm a huge fan of the original book about the hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I've read it quite a few times, and love his idea that there is one mythic story through all cultures – the monomyth – and that if you tease out the elements of any myths in any part of the world, they are the same story.

The next step, which is the one that interests me, is that this monomyth is essentially a metaphor for the individual journey that we all have to go in our lives. Whether we leave the house or not, whether we pick up a sword or not, we are going to have to go on a journey, encounter the universe, and try not to be destroyed by it – try to grow, and to come out of it with knowledge. The trouble is that we start to believe that a myth is actually a set of facts, and that destroys it. If we think it's actually a story about a guy who got nailed to a tree, or who went up to heaven off the top of a building – if we think these things actually happened, it kills it for us, because these are stories that are trying to go beyond language and words, beyond what we can say, to the unsayable truth.

Campbell's argument – he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces just after World War Two – was that we live in a time when all the myths are dead, and this means that we're in trouble, because it means that we don't actually know how to achieve wisdom. We don't have a stable myth that works, and so it is the job of the artist to try and make myths that are alive again. Campbell was really excited when Star Wars came out, because George Lucas had famously based Star Wars on The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And by god it worked – in every single culture around the world!
I think computer games can serve the function of religion. They can do the good bits that religion used to do, and hopefully not do the bad bits…

We’re going to have to argue authorial intent here. The tl;dr is simple: All stories are built off of this one concept, ‘the hero’s journey’. I’m sure you learned about it in high school. The hero’s journey is the idea that all mythological stories serve as metaphors for the journeys in real life (That is, the surface level fantastical narrative of a mythic story is not to be taken at face value, and instead is meant to convey a deeper meaning to the reader that goes beyond, for example, "A great hero slayed an evil dragon"). The story of Minecraft (traveling through the world, killing the Dragon) fits the Hero’s Journey according to the author. This is straight up stated in the interview.

JG: The fact that we write the stories of our own lives is very interesting. We're hardwired to be storytellers, and when we look back on our lives we build them into stories. And the more we find out about the nature of human consciousness, the clearer it is that we are making up stories after the facts a lot of the time, to make sense of decisions that we've made at a totally unconscious level: we have to make them into a story in order to navigate our own personal universe. When someone goes into therapy, for example, you see how they can build two totally different stories about their life from exactly the same materials. When you're playing a computer game, especially a very open one, you're creating a self and an epic adventure that you're the hero of. But you're also doing that in real life when you're walking down the street.

The game of Minecraft in its entirety, according to the author, is a metaphor for the same journey one can make when walking down the street which also happens to be his viewpoint on the Hero’s Journey. This has more to do with the fact that stories have themes tied to them than anything else. Making the ‘metaphor’ rule arbitrarily apply specifically to the End Poem does not make sense if the entire game is supposed to be a metaphor in his view.

And once again I’ll reiterate, it’s not impossible to tier stories that are supposed to convey deeper meaning and themes than what is presented at face value. We do it all the time on the wiki, for example, Umineko no Naku Koro Ni has a very large metaphor for the ‘truth’ and people’s memories being overshadowed by other people’s perceptions and theories (With the Meta-World in its entirety in fact being entirely a metaphorical space whose events and characters are simply correspondent to mundane things from the verse's "real world," contextualized into a fantasy narrative). And in the initial upgrade thread, Ricsi also pointed out a few verses of the Xianxia genre whose protagonists are supposed to be allegories for ideologies like capitalism.

There are many other verses like that and we’re not going to delete them because they’re an allegory to a philosophy or have more subtle themes beyond what is literally presented. The presence of meta-text doesn't suddenly make them untierable.

That’s the main crux of the argument. So no, it was not plainly stated in the interview that the End Poem is a metaphor. It was stated that the author viewed the entire game of Minecraft as a metaphor, which is a notable difference. It should also be noted that the author intending for ‘the player’ to be ascending to higher planes is meant to be literal too. But that’s a minor point.

Regardless of how much this is argued over and bickered about, the fact remains that the interview paints this poem as being nothing more than a grab for emotional fulfillment rather than an actual "plot" element-

I dunno what this means. From my understanding, it seems to be saying that since it acts as emotional fulfillment for the reader, then it is not literal. Which is a strange argument, because most endings are supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. The authorial intent states that the poem is supposed to be the ‘reward’ or ‘goal’ after you complete your hero’s journey. This is akin to ‘the hero learns a lesson at the end of a story’, within the game itself. He says this pretty clearly.

JG: I wanted a dreamy kind of feeling, like you'd broken through something. When you're playing Minecraft in Survival mode, you're performing a quest that is difficult and takes a long time. I felt that at the end of the quest there should be some moment of enlightenment, some ambiguous wisdom. That you should have something to bring back – and you should feel you've broken through into some other level. That is the feeling I wanted, and I liked the idea of an overheard dialogue to create it.

So yes, it is a ‘plot element’ in the poem writer’s sense due to the fact it is the reward you get from completing the journey of Minecraft’s Survival Mode.

this point is made even more notable by the fact that plot itself is hardly an element in basic Minecraft to begin with.

This is irrelevant. Just because the story isn’t the main focus doesn’t mean it’s not present in some sense. This is hardly a point.

What Should Be Done?​

One needs to prove that the author statements are only applying to the poem and not the entirety of the game. Because, from what it seems the ‘metaphor’ argument centers around it only applying to the poem.

If we agree that it applies to the game as well, then deleting the verse is unreasonable, so we should instead discuss how to index this poem’s ratings.

Thanks to Ultima for writing out parts of this post, and also helping with the discussion of this, again.

 

[Moritzva]

This entire argument doesn’t explain why The End Poem should be accepted, it just concedes on several points and says “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t right!”

You’re also using a lot of whataboutism in bringing up Umineko and whatnot, I don’t know those verses and I can’t claim or debunk their scenarios being similar. Furthermore, not only does this argument rely on author intent which is invalid under Death Of The Author, but it relies on your interpretations from those statements rather than the statements themselves.

Basically, everything above is fallacious for a massive number of reasons and has no backing in actual fact. It relies on personal interpretations of what the author intended and uses an absence of evidence against something being added as evidence for something being added. I stand with Bambu, this has the same problem as last time. Burden of proof is on you, not us.

Edit: And the fact that this thread only exists to debunk the points of the previous thread proves this isn’t even a standalone thread, it’s a continuation. Anyone reading this for the first time won’t even have the context or information to decide on this revision, and if you’re forcing people to re-read a closed thread to form an opinion, I would love to hear why this thread exists. Threads aren’t closed just so people can make a new thread to continue the debate anyways, and I would love to know why Ultima approved this.

 

[Moritzva]

By the way, I am genuinely tired of the current VSBW debating meta of “If a proposal is denied, just keep making it over and over again“, and I have no plans to continue debating this topic. My reasoning is the exact same as last time, and I’m more annoyed than anything that this topic both came up again and that Ultima actually approved this.

This isn’t even new evidence, it’s just repeating the same stuff again with a dash of author intent.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

You’re also using a lot of whataboutism in bringing up Umineko and whatnot, I don’t know those verses and I can’t claim or debunk their scenarios being similar. Furthermore, not only does this argument rely on author intent which is invalid under Death Of The Author, but it relies on your interpretations from those statements rather than the statements themselves.

Death of the Author doesn't exactly always mean "the author is strictly wrong," though, so much as it means that their interpretations do not necessarily take precedence over the viewers', or that of other authors, if a verse has them. This is largely applicable to stories that are delibrately left up to interpretation, but even then, the mind behind a certain fictional work should by all means have enough of a background to state certain things with authority, since, after all, the work is theirs.

Morever I find it odd that you claim to stand with Bambu here, given his argument and that of several others relied largely on that same interview. Namely, the main point was Julian Gough saying the things in the text are metaphorical, which, as an exposure of authorial intent, would also fall under Death of the Author under your logic. So, either you use this interview or you don't, and switch arguments regarding why the Poem is invalid for the latter.

I'd also like you to dissect what's written in the OP, since the statements are fairly straightforward. You say that these arguments have no backing in fact but hasn't substantiated that very much, as far as I can see.

 

[Blackcurrant91]

I mean you say there is clear and defined ways to tier the Poem yet they aren't brought up here? This would be alot more convincing if you also provided a way to tier the End Poem in a way that makes sense in the context of the rest of the verse but good luck with that.

 

[Moritzva]

Death of the Author doesn't exactly always mean "the author is strictly wrong," though, so much as it means that their interpretations do not necessarily take precedence over the viewers', or that of other authors, if a verse has them. This is largely applicable to stories that are delibrately left up to interpretation, but even then, the mind behind a certain fictional work should by all means have enough of a background to state certain things with authority, since, after all, the work is theirs.

Morever I find it odd that you claim to stand with Bambu here, given his argument and that of several others relied largely on that same interview. Namely, the main point was Julian Gough saying the things in the text are metaphorical, which, as an exposure of authorial intent, would also fall under Death of the Author under your logic. So, either you use this interview or you don't, and switch arguments regarding why the Poem is invalid for the latter.

I'd also like you to dissect what's written in the OP, since the statements are fairly straightforward. You say that these arguments have no backing in fact but hasn't substantiated that very much, as far as I can see.

If you find my stance odd, you can read the points I, myself, made. Bambu believes what I do, and I’ve provided my arguments for such, mostly revolving around insufficient evidence from the accusing side. Pointing out a flaw in Bambu’s argument is fine, and he can defend it, but that doesn’t assault my own. Don’t strawman my argument to depend on an interview it never depended on.

And.., yes, that’s what Death of the Author is, you’re right. If your argument relies not only on statements, but your own opinion on what they mean, it’s not a good argument for that exact reason.

Finally, I’m tired of repeating the same arguments over and over because people can’t take ‘no’ for an answer. I’ve already made it clear how this thread is a flagrant violation of the entire point of closing threads, and demanding that I repeat all the stuff I said months ago is insane. Not to mention, the thread relies so heavily on authorial intent that I’ve already substantiated my point significantly with little effort in the first place.

I am incredibly disappointed, Ultima, and I find this to be a really annoying use of power that only serves to annoy and overturn the decisions of everyone involved in the previous thread. Seriously, why did you approve this?

 

[Ultima_Reality]

If you find my stance odd, you can read the points I, myself, made. Bambu believes what I do, and I’ve provided my arguments for such, mostly revolving around insufficient evidence from the accusing side. Pointing out a flaw in Bambu’s argument is fine, and he can defend it, but that doesn’t assault my own. Don’t strawman my argument to depend on an interview it never depended on.

I can understand that your argument is different from his, yes, since, as far as I recall, it hinged more or less on the question of whether the End Poem can even be taken at face value, since it's mostly just dialogue with no context or framing device. I believe this is solved by the interview above, though, which Ed already quoted, namely:

I wanted a dreamy kind of feeling, like you'd broken through something. When you're playing Minecraft in Survival mode, you're performing a quest that is difficult and takes a long time. I felt that at the end of the quest there should be some moment of enlightenment, some ambiguous wisdom. That you should have something to bring back – and you should feel you've broken through into some other level. That is the feeling I wanted, and I liked the idea of an overheard dialogue to create it.

Which fairly clearly states that it is indeed meant to be a moment of enlightenment in regards to player, which he substantiates by saying you've "broken through into some other level" (Recall, then, the two entities saying that you reached a higher level in the Poem itself). You may argue Death of the Author regardless, of course, but I don't see how it may apply here, given we only use it as a tool when a work blatantly contradicts what the writer states, or similar cases. This was the main response to calling upon "Death of the Author" as a counter-argument for the Poem being called metaphorical, too, which was largely accepted. So, the precedent is set regardless.

I'd also like to point out, like Ed did, that Bambu never properly countered my last argument beyond basically saying "In my opinion, this is irrelevant" and then reiterating things I had already addressed. So, yeah, I think this is grounds for dismissing that Discussion Rule, as has been done plenty in the past.

I'd further point out that, again, you're just calling things baseless interpretations and opinions without building on why that is the case. Shouldn't do that, methinks.

 

[Promestein]

I mean... he's just talking about the feeling it should give. That's as vague and WoG as it gets, and I'm definitely not gonna support an upgrade based on "Well, I wanted it to feel like you broke through into some other level".

 

[Moritzva]

I can understand that your argument is different from his, yes, since, as far as I recall, it hinged more or less on the question of whether the End Poem can even be taken at face value, since it's mostly just dialogue with no context or framing device. I believe this is solved by the interview above, though, which Ed already quoted, namely:



Which fairly clearly states that it is indeed meant to be a moment of enlightenment in regards to player, which he substantiates by saying you've "broken through into some other level" (Recall, then, the two entities saying that you reached a higher level in the Poem itself). You may argue Death of the Author regardless, of course, but I don't see how it may apply here, given we only use it as a tool when a work blatantly contradicts what the writer states, or similar cases. This was the main response to calling upon "Death of the Author" as a counter-argument for the Poem being called metaphorical, too, which was largely accepted. So, the precedent is set regardless.

I'd also like to point out, like Ed did, that Bambu never properly countered my last argument beyond basically saying "In my opinion, this is irrelevant" and then reiterating things I had already addressed. So, yeah, I think this is grounds for dismissing that Discussion Rule, as has been done plenty in the past.

I'd further point out that, again, you're just calling things baseless interpretations and opinions without building on why that is the case. Shouldn't do that, methinks.

That quote you mentioned is additionally vague and does not “clearly” state anything. That could mean just about anything. Another level, etc, none of this is grounds for higher tiered anything even if it was in the verse itself, much less a statement by the author that doesn’t have any bearing, because again, Death of the Author.

And I’d further point out, again, I made a perfectly fine argument and I made even better arguments in the previous thread. If you’re going to repeat the same argument, then reread the previous thread for all my arguments that counter your own, because they’re all there.

Shouldn’t be reviving dead threads and demanding that people with actual lives invest themselves in completely pointless and redundant nonsense, methinks!

 

[Moritzva]

I mean... he's just talking about the feeling it should give. That's as vague and WoG as it gets, and I'm definitely not gonna support an upgrade based on "Well, I wanted it to feel like you broke through into some other level".

Yeah.

I need a very good reason to not close this thread right now, because not only are these arguments simply really bad, but they’re not even new and this is a continuation of a closed thread. If anything, the arguments got worse with time.

 

[FinePoint]

JG: “The word "dream" gets used, but it's really a story about the dream of a game, and the dream of life. It's dream as metaphor.”

"What Julian is saying in this statement is that the poem has themes, and he also views Minecraft with these same themes as well. The ‘metaphor’ that the author is referring to is the entire game, not just the End Poem."

That's literally not what he's saying. You're just guessing that's what he was trying to say in your opinion, with "source: dude just trust me".
We don't need to do that, because we have his exact words right here.
"It's really a story about the dream of a game." - The story is a metaphor for "the dream of a game".

He's not talking about Minecraft's story, why would he be talking about Minecraft's overall story with such authority? He didn't write Minecraft's story (not that it has one), he just responded to a request to write "silly over-the-top out-of-nowhere text". He's obviously talking about his story, meaning the end poem. That's what this statement means in context.

 

[FinePoint]

In conclusion, I have to agree with Moritzva basically.
This entire post is just the same evidence as before, but with OP's subjective analysis presented as argument.

I don't think that's enough to warrant bypassing a discussion rule.

 

[Wokistan]

Locked by OP request