Embrace The Absurdity

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers! Let’s talk about a cruel twist of fate.

While loving your fate, embracing absurdity, I just watched this video on this YouTube channel. It’s called “People Make Games”, and it tells the story of Zack Barth, which is not a very common name, it’s not a household name but known to his fans from his game production studio Zachtronics and, of course, the more common household name is Notch.

That is Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft and in this video, I’ll put a link in the show notes, on the sides so you can watch it, tells the story about how Zach created this game Infiniminer, which, six months later, became the inspiration for Minecraft, and then Minecraft went on to be this huge success basically, in fact, definitely the most successful game of all time, at least, speaking commercially.

And how did Zach deal with this, realizing that his game was so very similar to Minecraft, but Minecraft gave those extra touches, turning into something a little bit different and a little more creative, or that is, aloud a little more creativity in certain ways that helped propel it to success.

And Zach saw none of the millions or billions of dollars that Minecraft went on for. So, when you’re in that situation, how do you feel? I mean, is all like a missed opportunity.

Zach said that he felt bad for literal years, and there is a memorable quote in his video where Zach says, “Oh, I still got stuff done. You can feel sad and still be creative, you can feel bad and still be productive.” Which is an important lesson to remember, like, even if we do mess things up or miss some grand opportunity.

Well, we can still get on with life and do interesting things, and that is exactly what Zach has done and, apparently, according to his fans, he is one of the most creative people in the video gaming industry.

He says that, the point when it all changed, when he stopped feeling bad about this, when he embraced that absurdity that I was talking about, was when the game sold to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars, 2.5 billion dollars, imagine that.

Imagine someone build a little bit on your creation while turning it into something a little bit different. Giving it a little more mass appeal and they get paid 2.5 billion dollars and you get – zero.

You think that would be the point when he actually got more depressed, but no, to the contrary, what happened was Zach realised, “Hang on, this is just, this defies all logic.

This is just completely absurd, and maybe this is just a signal of the realm of nature, of the universe, or something like that”.

But that was the point where he embraced the absurdity and said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what happens with his game.” T

he other thing that Zach doesn’t mention, which I imagine I would take solace in if something like this ever happened to me, was that people enjoyed what he created. That he helped build something that was a source of entertainment and creativity and critical thinking skills and many other things for millions of people all over the world. So, maybe if we do mess up, or we do miss the mark, or we don’t get credit.

Actually, I remembered, came to think of it, there was a similar thing that happened to me, nowhere near on this scale.

What happened was, I did this project, I was studying at technical college, studying sound production. And I did this project with my classmates. We came up with this son and we did this video and send it to Rage, which is the Australian music channel, or music show, where they play basically anything.

If you send it to them, they will fly it. At least that’s how it was in those days. And we created this video and it had this distinctive style, I suppose, there was something distinctive about it.

We wanted to lampoon the prime minister of Australia at the time, and the bets way for us to do it, we found was to print out a copy of John Howard’s face and stick on card board and tie to our friend Steve’s face with a piece of string.

And so, we sound very simple, very low tech, but it ended up looking kinda cool on camera. Specially when he is like, moving his head back and forth, pumping in and out. It looks like it’s almost like a computer generated effect, which we didn’t have the budget for.

A couple of years later there was a mailman group called “Kisschasy”. And, they had this song, I think it was called “Your opinions won’t keep you warm at night”, or something like this and, you can watch this video and they basically took the idea that we had. I imagine somebody was up at 3 am watching Rage and turned out to be the assistant of this producer or director of the video for “Kisschasy”, because the video that they put out had absolutely nothing to do with this sing, in the video they put out was a better elaborated version of our video.

So, it’s got like Tony Blair and George W. Bush and John Howard, and they all have this funny bubbly faces. Very similar to what we did in our video and they go in around, getting into mischief, like George W. Bush was taking Tony Blair on a date or something like that, and it was pretty amusing.

So, I could be sore about that, I could be sore that they took our idea. Actually, I don’t think I ever was when I found out about it. I was pleased, because they had taken our idea and done something better with it.

So, you cannot copyright an idea, you can’t own an idea, and who knows really where ideas come from, anyway.

So, if our ideas are a source of pleasure for somebody then I can be a source of happiness, why not?

Why not embrace the absurdity?

Why not enjoy it?