Notch Voted as TIME's Second Most Influential Person in the World

[Frybird]

Yeah, Notch is as much the second most influential person in the world as EA is the worst company in America.

Gamers seriously need to pull out their heads out of their asses.

 

[bluegate]

You know that shit is starting to go down the crapper is stuff like this happens...

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Huh?! In gaming circles, you could argue such a position, but when you look at the bigger picture, it just doesn't hold up. Sure he made an incredibly successful game with no more than spit, string and neat idea, and showed that games don't have to have a massive budget or the best graphics to push millions of copies, but it doesn't do a whole lot of good in the wider scheme of things when you've got war, famine, poverty and so forth in the mix.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

People forget all the good Notch has done for us! Because nothing is as important to our society as a child's/manchild's smile.

One of the things I love about Time's Person of the Year is that the Magazine accept that whoever gets to the top, whatever that position, has to be voted there by a huge amount of people, and so it cannot be denied that their position (for whatever reason) is a valuable reflection on how our society works.

Like when 4Chan spammed their owner to the top of the poll: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html The guy in charge said,

"I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll," he says. "Doubting the results is kind of the point."

Since, although the vote was rigged, it's still a good indicator of the scale and power of these online communities of bored eejits that surf the entire web manipulating and destroying whatever they can simply to relieve boredom. Since then we've seen the rise of Anonymous in the online world, the real world scandals of Wikileaks, Kim Dotcom's courtcase, the Occupy movement etc.

It was a good statement of the then current state of the internet, and has in hindsight been a good prediction of just how important these groups are and how they can spill into people's lives and have real world effects.

Personally I'd say this is a good indicator of just how important comforts have become to many people in the first world. So many people, instead of voting for politicians/humanitarians/soldiers/rolemodels/personal heroes decided that the person they would most like to honour was the maker of an indie videogame.
Look at EA, winning the Golden Poo 2 years running, beating banks, oil companies, loan sharks, corporate monopolies etc., because the majority of the people voting did not truly care about those things, they were just worried about the effect EA were having on their Escapism when they tried to forget all those problems.

It's a good reflection of what we really spend our time thinking about and doing: Not the rest of the world, or political situations, but our own entertainment and fulfilment, and if that isn't an important statement on the state of our society today I don't know what is.