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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

>It's like Bruce Wayne deciding to spend the rest of his life playing with legos.

I like this image. Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right. The idea that someone would have all the power and decide to play with toys makes me worry about the rest of us. I would like to see people like Notch (creative, thoughtful people) having a say in what the future holds. However, it seems inevitable that after a certain point, you have to choose between living the life you want or ceeding at least some of your time to the whims of the masses of the public.

Someone else mentioned Jobs and Wozniak - Notch feels like Wozniak and Mojang has no Jobs. How can we keep the Wozniaks and Notchs of the world involved in making decisions in a way that keeps them happy? We don't want to have to choose between scale and creativity.

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Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right.

No, Bruce Wayne is incredibly myopic. If you have billions of dollars and you want to fight crime, the last thing you should be doing is developing fancy equipment so that you can personally go after criminals one by one. If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs.

Getting off-topic of course, but the key insight here is that Bruce Wayne does NOT really want to 'reduce crime'.

Instead, he wants to take revenge on criminals, like the criminals who killed his parents. 'reduce crime' isn't the same as 'fight crime', he requires the FIGHT part, and the revenge part.

Yeah, that makes him somewhat less sympathetic, but isn't that what everyone likes about batman these days, the darkness?

Yep. See Watchmen (the book, not the movie) for an extended look into what kind of batshit people would ever want to be a "superhero".

Relevant: http://wondermark.com/939/

> If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs.

To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-priming charity would probably also be increasing that capacity and enabling Wayne to shift more money into those approaches productively, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat counteracted by the rather extraordinary frequency of supervillian-initiated civic destruction in Gotham, which probably has a negative impact on capacity-development efforts.)

So we could say that Bruce Wayne knows well how to purchase fuzzies and utilons separately [0]. He spends a lot of his resources to help effectively by donating to local charities, and he gets the fun and good feelings from helping people by chasing criminals himself as Batman.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...

I wouldn't say that. After a certain amount of charity work is done, the Batman work gets to be as effective on a per-dollar basis by reducing crime through the method of intimidation.

Mark Zuckerberg tried just dumping money into a school system. Didn't work because the school system was itself corrupt

Exactly this. That money is already done and gone, with little to no benefit to the children themselves. Such a shame.

Batman's superpower is literally class inequality and money.

He's not called the "Dark Knight" without reason.

And removing lead paint and lead from automobile exhaust and putting more cops with better technology on the street and funding abortions and birth control and funding internet pornography and keeping funding prisons to criminals in there longer.

Well stated.

> I would like to see people like Notch (creative, thoughtful people) having a say in what the future holds.

I don't. I have absolutely nothing against Notch, in fact I have the deepest respect for the guy as a hacker and as a person with, clearly, a lot of personal integrity. However he says quite clearly himself he's just interested in tinkering. Minecraft wasn't a deeply though out, perfectly executed, planned exercise in mass market game publishing. It was an entirely accidental result of pretty much randomly hacking ideas together. He had absolutely no idea what the future held for Minecraft when he produced it. Expecting him to have any deep insights into 'what the future holds' is projecting attributes and expectations on to him that I don't think he'd welcome.

> It was an entirely accidental result of pretty much randomly hacking ideas together. He had absolutely no idea what the future held for Minecraft when he produced it.

That the game became a financial success is indeed somewhat accidental. But that the game was fun was certainly not. Since Notch was "just tinkering", he optimized for a fun and interesting game, not for a profitable game.

I think this is the distinction aeturnum had in mind and I agree with him. We need Notches, Wozniaks and Musks to have more say in where the future goes, because they care primarily about the problems they're solving, and not about the money they're getting.

> That the game became a financial success is indeed somewhat accidental. But that the game was fun was certainly not

Yeah, it's amazing to me how many people who even play Minecraft and enjoy it don't understand this. The default state for games is not fun, and it's an incredibly deliberate (and usually difficult) process to get them there.

> How can we keep the Wozniaks and Notchs of the world involved in making decisions in a way that keeps them happy?

I think you come up with a publishing model. E.g., you front them money, provide staff, orchestrate delivery/maintenance, handle legal issues, but otherwise you leave the creative control in the hands of the author. This has worked in movies, music, literature, etc. The key is that creative control can never be challenged by business priorities (and if it is, the author needs to be able to take their IP and find another publisher).

Edit to add: at a certain point, a project ends and people like Notch need to move on to actually contribute (to society). No one complains when bands switch labels or directors stop making sequels.

He's 35 and totally burnt out. Give him time, hopefully he'll do something ambitious.

How is what he's doing not ambitious? I really don't understand the majority of comments in this thread.

He's taking the exploration path, instead of iterating on something which has already proved successful.

I can't wait to see what Notch does next.

I think notch summed up what we're all focusing on here:

>If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.

He doesn't want you (or anyone) excited about what he's doing. He doesn't want people to like what he creates - he wants people to like the process of creation. The product is much less interesting to him.

Many people here are working towards the sort of success Notch achieved. Strangers everywhere enthusiastically adopted his creation. His considered reaction is to cut all ties to what he made. He's been to the top of the mountain and he thinks the mountain sucks.

Now, that's fine. It's his thing, he can do whatever he wants with it. I'm not of the school that thinks he "owes" anything to anyone. But I think we should all worry a little about this as a 'case study.' Notch did a good job keeping minecraft on track. Some people might quibble over its direction over the years, but ultimately it's continued to be updated be extremely popular. But, even with massive financial success, near universal acclaim, abundant funding and total creative freedom - he decided he would rather build toy games on his own. Maybe that's just how Notch is, and it doesn't say anything about how we've organized the industry most of us are a part of, but I think it probably says /a little/ about the industry.

Notch had (nearly) every advantage a creator could have if they wanted to take a small project and scale it up into something else. He decided to walk away - I just think we should examine the forces that led him to sell Mojang. We may find we're focusing on the wrong things in our own attempts to make ourselves happy.

> He doesn't want you (or anyone) excited about what he's doing. He doesn't want people to like what he creates

I don't think that's what he's saying at all. He's simply saying the spotlight makes it difficult for him to stay sane (see first and last paragraph) and he doesn't want to be pushed into roles he's not (e.g. CEO, entrepreneur). He wants to be himself without all the issues that come with fame (see the video he linked).

> he wants people to like the process of creation. The product is much less interesting to him.

He likes the process of creation, but he doesn't necessarily want others to like it too.

> Many people here are working towards the sort of success Notch achieved.

That's the big difference. They are working towards this sort of success, Notch was not -- it just sort of happened (see first paragraph).

> Notch did a good job keeping minecraft on track

Yes, ultimately he's responsible for that, but there are others that deserve at least as much credit as Notch for keeping it on track.

> But, even with massive financial success, near universal acclaim, abundant funding and total creative freedom - he decided he would rather build toy games on his own

This isn't surprising. Many of us would only be able to do what we really wanted with the freedom that comes from (financial) success.

> Notch had (nearly) every advantage a creator could have if they wanted to take a small project and scale it up into something else.

And he still has those advantages should he wish to do that.

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