What’s A Minecraft Poem Worth?

A writer got €20,000 to compose the “end poem” for the game — a few years before Minecraft was sold for $2.5 billion

A tattoo — of the Redditor “syceried” — quoting part of the “End Poem” written by Julian Gough for Minecraft.

How much might a poem be worth?

I thought of this while reading about the origins of the Minecraft “End Poem” this week.

If you’ve never played Minecraft — but are aware that it is a thing — you probably know that it’s a famously open-ended game. You can use it as a set of infinite Legos, to build all manner of wild stuff.

But you can also play it as a game with an ending: To reach the realm of the “Ender Dragon”, and kill it. If you manage to do that, the game ends, and then something quite interesting (and unexpected) takes place. A long poem begins to scroll up the screen. For the next nine and a half minutes, you sit there and read what is, in essence, a work of Minecraft literature.

The poem is a dialogue between two entities, who speak to you, the player. It’s a cryptic text, but as the two entities talk (one in green text, one in blue), they seem to suggest that they are an embodiment of the universe, and are speaking to us, the player. While playing Minecraft and living our lives, as these entities say, we humans are merely dreaming a dream — if a quite meaningful one. What’s more, in…