Jinsye
She/Her- 10,455
- 1,538
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.