Thread became a big boy pretty quickly, eh? In any case:
As said above, over and over, being a metaphor does not mean something cannot be indexed. The story of Midas is about how money can't buy you happiness. The main character has the power to transmute anything and anyone he touches into gold. Revered Insanity, a chinese novel, presents the MC as a metaphor for capitalism, including the worst of it like the MC disregarding their own family's lifes because they have nothing of worth to give him, but he is still an indexable character since he is a cultivator with magical powers. And I can go on, being a metaphor=/=being non-indexable.
^ This post pretty much encapsulates my thoughts on the subject, for the matter. While, as said before, I do obviously agree that the End Poem needs to go if interpreted as a pure metaphor, I believe the arguments pushing for that front are a little silly, for reasons that Ricsi and Leotamer articulated nicely enough in the posts above.
I'd also like to argue about the exact rating of the End Poem's statements, in the occasion where we take it literally, but it seems like that topic was swallowed by more important shit, at the moment
The whole argument, I think, comes mostly from people conflating text and meta-text when it comes to the Poem, and, if we really want to delve into Julian Gough's statements regarding the interpretation he had while writing the story, I think it's fair to point out a few more tidbits of the interview linked above, where he elaborates more on his intent:
Born in 1966, raised in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and now resident in Berlin, Julian Gough has been many things: lyricist and singer for cult Irish rock…
boingboing.net
Here, for one, him and the interviewer seem to pretty much agree on the notion that Minecraft is a reflection of the concept of
The Hero's Journey, and Gough then talks about how all mythical, heroic quests are really just metaphors for the journey that all people go through in their lives, and not meant to be taken literally when it comes to their core meaning.
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…
And, again, this is not just empty words from the author, since the aspect of the Hero returning from his Journey with some form of wisdom and enlightenment is reflected in the End Poem itself:
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.
Now, here's an odd thing. When writers look back over stories, they make up a story about the story and say, oh, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. But that's not actually true to how it feels at the time. If I went back and told you what it was like writing it, it was quite odd, because I started trying to write my way into it and thinking, what do I want – but about half way through it, I had an odd feeling that doesn't happen very often, where my hand started moving faster than my thoughts and I was just watching my hand.
So, really, I don't think him saying "yo, this is a metaphor" means much, especially since, as shown above, the dude thinks of
any heroic tale as a metaphor for something that informs an aspect of our lives, which I think is enough to shed a light into the division between text and meta-text which Leotamer talked about up there.
Moving on: In another part of the interview, Gough also comments about how he wanted the End Poem to come off as an actual spiritual experience for people, which is also an element present in the text itself; after all, it's entirely comprised of the Universe itself telling a story to The Player and talking about how special they are in the grand scheme of all things, and whatnot.
TC: But more interestingly than that dislike, for me, was the fact that this ending really got to some people emotionally. It's remarkable and strange – but entirely of a piece with reactions I've seen to other games – that some people seem to have gone away and thought about it loads. Those ten minutes have been a kind of miniature spiritual experience for them.
JG: Brilliant! Because that's what I wanted to do. And I have been getting messages on Twitter from people for whom that's what seems to have happened: they can't stop thinking about it, or are thinking about it a week later. I'm not going to take all the credit for it, but it's like I've triggered some kind of emotion that was in them already. I've had some extremely touching messages – it's kind of embarrassing to talk about – from people saying "thank you", and that it really made them think, or that it was beautiful.
And he then (In a few excerpts that were already posted in this thread, I might add) goes on to talk about how the Poem is also related to his belief that computer games are special, and can in fact cause people to access higher states of mind (Or, as he himself puts it: Frames within frames) normally only brought to people through drugs, meditation and religious experiences. And all of this is really just an extension of what was said in the above quote.
TC: I think this is another reason why I'm so interested in the film Inception, to go back to that, because part of its message is that if you go deep enough into the dream – or into a game – you can seed an idea in someone, and it will get to them in that paranoid, strange little place where myths are born or perpetuated.
JG: That's certainly what I wanted to do. And I was greatly relieved when it turned out that it was working for some people. In fact, I would say that there are mental states accessible through computer games that similar to those accessible through drugs or meditation or religious experiences. You can break the shell of your mind, and find that your mind is bigger than you thought it was: there are frames beyond frames. This probably sounds terribly pretentious, but **** it. I'm fascinated by computer games. They are capable, I think, of helping us achieve any of the mental states that we are capable of achieving. They are not a genre, not a toy; they are infinite, and we haven't begun to explore what they can do.
And, again, this intent is expressed very explicitly in the text, too, since the entities talk about how The Player has the potential to ascend into "the highest level," which is beyond the long dream of life, just as it is beyond the short dream of the game. And this is pretty clearly supposed to be taken as a higher state of being, because the entities say that The Player would be able to visualize concepts that it can't even comprehend in its current state.
It worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of the [scrambled], and created a [scrambled] for [scrambled], in the [scrambled].
It cannot read that thought.
No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game.
So, yeah, to reiterate, in case people still didn't catch that: I don't think the text being stated to be a metaphor means shit here, because, in the author's view, the whole journey that you experience in the game is also a metaphor for something else. So, I suppose we may as well delete the entire verse because of that.
Hell, even the stuff about heroic quests having the objective of conveying some universal truth that is ultimately unspeakable and beyond what words can express is found in the Poem, too, since the entities explicitly state that the story which they tell the Player is itself just a convenient metaphor, because the plain truth is too much for their mind to handle:
I will not tell the player how to live.
The player is growing restless.
I will tell the player a story.
But not the truth.
No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance.
With that, I rest my case. And I can explain it again, if needed.
Another argument I've seen being brought up here (Mainly by Alonik) is that the End Poem is not indexable anyway, since it is meant to address the actual, real world player, and not just a fictionalized version of them. In my opinion, this seems a bit silly to consider: Since, for indexing of verses with a thin fourth wall to even be
possible to begin with, we treat the metafictional elements as being contextualized within the verse, since they obviously are part of it, regardless of what they say.
The fact that the End Poem introduces the existence of characters even higher than the Player is another thing that I believe points to this necessity, too: Regardless of the fourth wall breaking stuff, they are obviously fictional characters, and thus conceptualized within the boundaries of the verse itself: They don't belong to our Real World, much like, say, TOAA, or any Supreme Being that's identified with the author doesn't. It's pretty immersion-breaking and can potentially undermine what a lot of stories are trying to tell, but it's a fairly solid standard, as far as we are concerned, and I don't think it should be changed solely for Minecraft (Although I admit this may come off as a bit of a strawman to Alonik, since he may just be not familiar with how we behave in relation to such verses.)
