So I had a weird back-and-forth email conversation with Carl, where I just misunderstood what was going on.Ĭarl was indeed Markus’s friend, but that didn’t automatically make him my friend. Not negotiate ruthlessly work out what was fair. I felt we were all friends, making art, and that the point of the conversation with Carl was to, as friends, work out what was fair. And I talked to Carl, by email, absentmindedly, in parallel to working on the ending.īut this is where things went wrong, because I was so thoroughly in art mode, making art with Markus, that I didn’t change gear when talking to Carl. So I said, OK, I’ll talk to your friend Carl. Because we hadn’t talked about money – I was just doing it making art, the bit I enjoy. One of the most satisfying artistic experiences of my writing life.īut while we were engaged in this deeply satisfying artistic collaboration, something else was going on.īecause Markus said at some point, oh, you should talk to my friend Carl about getting paid. (It took about 9 minutes.) But he didn’t want to change a word. I asked him if I should cut it, because it was very long for something that was supposed to scroll up the screen at the end of a game. He told me that I had articulated his philosophy of life better than he could ever have articulated it himself. Dick) dictated the ending, and I polished it up a little and delivered it to Markus.Īnd Markus got back to me immediately, and said he loved it. So, the universe (or my unconscious, or Thalia, or the ghost of Philip K. More concretely, I wrote it longhand, and, as I did so, sometimes my wrist sped up, and I would watch words simply appear on the page before me, without my conscious mind having any idea what the next word would be. Or, if you are an Ancient Greek, you can imagine Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry – or Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Poetry – or, sigh, perhaps Thalia, the Muse of Comedy – working through me to write it. ![]() If you are religious, you can imagine God – or indeed the other guy – inspiring me. (If you are a reductionist materialist, and uncomfortable with the thought of the universe addressing people through a disorganised Irishman, no problem you can interpret it as my unconscious writing the ending. In some ways, it seemed to write itself that is, in writing it, I had a strong feeling that the universe seemed to want to address people directly, and it was doing so through me. And when I felt I knew those things, I wrote the ending.Īs I have recently said elsewhere, writing that ending was a particularly unusual writing experience. I asked him a couple of technical questions: could he code it so that my story addressed the player by name? Could he make some of the words look encrypted, or obscured, in some way? He said yes, and yes no problem.Īnd so I played the game, day after day, often alongside my daughter, trying to understand it trying to understand Marcus's philosophy through it trying to understand the essence of Minecraft. ![]() That was why he wanted me to get involved. But he wasn’t a word guy, and hadn’t a clue what that narrative should say. I was intensely aware that this was a very personal game for Markus, very much his vision, and so I asked him did he have anything in mind, any guidelines? He said he had no idea he just felt that killing the Ender Dragon should trigger a narrative of some kind that would wrap up the game. He loved it, and said I was definitely the right guy for the job. Now I’m a pretty strange writer I was worried he might not know how strange, so I sent him a deeply peculiar short story of mine called The iHole, as a sample of my work. So that night, Markus emailed me, and asked if I would be interested in writing the ending to Minecraft. And I’d met Markus two years before, at the Berlin Indie Games Jam, and liked him he’d been kind to my daughter. I’d also written the first short story ever published by the Financial Times, and the lyrics to a top ten hit single, and so on: I liked writing short, weird, interesting narratives, to appear in unusual places, and I was good at it. Though I certainly wasn’t famous, I had (a couple of years before this) won what was then the biggest prize in the world for a single short story. This was surprising, but not entirely unreasonable. Thus the modern avatar | sub-140 character length combo.Īnd someone who knew my work immediately recommended me to him. ![]() Recent screenshot of a 2011 tweet by Markus (Notch).
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