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

[emeraldrafael]

I'll say the same thing I said on youtube:

<quote=Tenlosol>Notch won't win. I'd be surprised to see Psy win in all honesty. You're talking about&#65279; these guys like they did something special, when one made a game, the other made a music video. The egyptian president is causing egypt to dive into more unlawfulness and what hsnt been said about KJU (and oh yeah, he's trying his damnedable hardest to make another war).

sorry escapists fans, much as id like to see it, lets be realistic. besides if he does win its a sad show of the worlds priorities.

Honestly if notch wins, as impressive as minecraft is and I guess what you can do with it (though really there's nothing particularly new that hasnt been done before), I'm going to view it as the same was as if the Hunger Games girl won. No matter what you say int he end its an entertainer against people who are literally changing lives and nations in a real way (i.e. ending them). I mean, should the guys who run EA win this, seeing how hated they are theyve influenced more people than notch has. if notch were to win, it should have been in 2011 or 2009 when it releaesd in full or in alpha respectively.

 

[Zeh Don]

Influential? Er, no. He built a fun game, and then his team made it better. But he himself hasn't been terribly "influential".

If entertaining large numbers of people is all it takes, Psy should be number one. Hands down. Shit, James Cameron should be higher than Notch, and he's actually influential - re-started the whole "3D" thing and helped maintain it, helped popularise CGI in cinema and helped others adopt the tech, etc.

I think maybe Peter Moore was correct... and man, I hate admitting that!

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

The point I was making is that Notch has made multiple slip ups regarding his attitude. Another example was him criticizing Valve for the cut that they take from sales. Which is ironic considering the XBLA is notorious for raping the wallets of indie developers and Notch decided paying MS thousands of dollars to a) register Minecraft on the XBLA and b)patch the game.

You're not forced to use steam on the PC. Notch has also praised Steam for what it's done, and how useful it is for indie devs. But when releasing for the 360, it's not like you have much choice but use live. Steam is great for indie devs, letting their product get some spotlight without bankrupting them. But Minecraft doesn't need steam. They have their own publicity, and their own release platform that they can use without any kind of third party verification processes, and no one else telling them what they can and can't do. Why add something they don't need?

There are a bunch of hypocritical things like that which Notch has done. Don't get me wrong, Notch has done amazing things for gaming, but in some aspects what he's done is overrated and people look at him through rose tinted glasses every time legitimate criticisms come up. Like I said before, as it goes for influence in the world, Notch's placement on this list shows how internet polls are frankly invalid.

You imply that he's done a lot of hypocritical things, yet the example you gave wasn't very good. Why not just go for the best example, or was that it? You say people look at him through rose tinted glasses. I say a lot of people try really hard to hate him.

For example, in my town there was an internet poll discussing what the new high school should be named. The highest voted option was to name the school after Malala Yousafzai.(This poll was started shortly after she was shot. The thing is, while what Yousafzai has done is noble and great, there were more votes on this poll than there are people in my town. By a lot. Every other option was a person from our town that are a part of its history.

Internet polls are to be taking with a grain of salt unless its a website like this with a more tight knit community.

Did I not just say any large mass of people is stupid?

\

You didn't seem to get the context of what I said at all to the person I was speaking with.

1st point was about how it was ironic that Notch criticized Steam for the cut it takes in sales while MS charges thousands of dollars for simply patching and putting the game on XBLA.
You retorted to neither point. You instead rambled on about how Minecraft has publicity and didn't need Steam. Not the point I brought up or was contesting. My example was to point out the irony of handing MS thousands of dollars on a piss poor version of Minecraft while saying that Valve takes too big of a cut. You clearly missed that.

Your retort to my second point really was just another example of showing that you skimmed through my post rather than read it. I pointed out the hypocrisy of complaining about having to give a company some cash while simultaneously giving another company more cash for an inferior version of your product for patches and registration on top of the cut they would take.

3rd point. Yes you did say that any large mass of people is stupid. But you do realize that you't3 quoting my point to a completely different person right? I was reiterating my stance on internet polls to another person I was speaking with, why challenge it when it wasn't directed at you?

Why did you quote me again just to barely argue my point? To waste my time?

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

Influential? Er, no. He built a fun game, and then his team made it better. But he himself hasn't been terribly "influential".

If entertaining large numbers of people is all it takes, Psy should be number one. Hands down. Shit, James Cameron should be higher than Notch, and he's actually influential - re-started the whole "3D" thing and helped maintain it, helped popularise CGI in cinema and helped others adopt the tech, etc.

I think maybe Peter Moore was correct... and man, I hate admitting that!

You could throw a dart on people who have shown up with witty tweets and randomly find a person more influential than Notch on a world scale. In the gaming world I'd say he was influential in how indie games are sold to people now, and even that was popularized more by Tim Schafer's Kickstarter success than anything. And Kickstarter has been around long before Mojang was a thing. It was just never used for games often. So many albums, books, movies, and other ideas in recent years have been funded using Kickstarter long before gaming, in my opinion, caught up to crowdsourcing.

Hell, why aren't the founders of Kickstarter higher on the list than Notch, they and the founders of indiegogo have effectively found a new standard model for how indie games are going to be funded. Many indie titles now just use the Kickstarter model for pre-order pricing rather than investment pricing anyways(Starbound, Prison Architect). Desura's alphafunding has been there for years too, and is miles more effective than Steam's Greenlight can hope to be. IMO Greenlight is a fucking mess and let's a lot of unfinished, undeserving crap onto Steam over complete indie titles. I know its a fan voted system but look at how that worked for Time Magazine this time.

 

[invadergir]

HAHA! Some nerds need to get out of the basement. They do know there are real people suffering and dying out there right?

#firstworldproblems doesn't even begin to excuse this.

 

[Risingblade]

Meh to be fair I can't really think of anybody that influential

 

[invadergir]

Meh to be fair I can't really think of anybody that influential

Kim jong Un comes to mind. But I guess an indie developer of a child's game dwarfs a leader who holds the future of multiple super-powers in his hands.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I'm sorry but when people around the world turn on the news or go to their usual news site do they read about Notch? Probably not. I really find this incredibly unlikely that he is more influential than any major world leaders or even celebrities. I'm not on Twitter but I'd bet that there are plenty of people with more followers than him.

Who voted for this? Was it open to anyone? If it was open to anyone than it doesn't surprise me since gamers have shown just how many of them will vote for things on the internet that most other people wouldn't be bothered to do (EA winning worst company in America two years in a row).

Then again maybe I'm just biased because I don't follow Notch on Twitter or really check on anything he's doing ever.

I like Minecraft but I like plenty of other games too.

 

[-Samurai-]

HAHA! Some nerds need to get out of the basement. They do know there are real people suffering and dying out there right?

#firstworldproblems doesn't even begin to excuse this.

I know, right?

It's like, how can people even use the internet while things are happening to other people, right?

 

[invadergir]

HAHA! Some nerds need to get out of the basement. They do know there are real people suffering and dying out there right?

#firstworldproblems doesn't even begin to excuse this.

I know, right?

It's like, how can people even use the internet while things are happening to other people, right?

Using the internet and using the internet to enlighten yourself are two different things. I suggest you do the later.

 

[Phlakes]

The internet has lost the right to complain about skewed poll results after the whole Consumerist business. Twice.

 

[Dimitriov]

Well I know Time has become pretty much a joke, but this takes the cake.

 

[-Samurai-]

HAHA! Some nerds need to get out of the basement. They do know there are real people suffering and dying out there right?

#firstworldproblems doesn't even begin to excuse this.

I know, right?

It's like, how can people even use the internet while things are happening to other people, right?

Using the internet and using the internet to enlighten yourself are two different things. I suggest you do the later.

Says the bleeding heart posting on a forum instead of doing something about the "real people suffering and dying".

Keep pretending to care from your keyboard. Your typing skills will save lives one day. I just know it.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

>Voted.

Internet polls are not reliable representations of anything.

 

[ResonanceSD]

Probably voted by the same guys from the March mayhem polls from 2011

God no, *points at badge*. I don't think he's anywhere near as influential as people make him out to be.

 

[Nikolaz72]

Games like Minecraft and Terraria turned my entire family into gamers.

I certainly don't hate that.

Also, for 'most influential person' I tend to look to the Nobel Prize rather than Times Online Poll.

Sure it might not 'always' be 100% correct, but the founders of Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, UNESCO etc etc

them and their ilk, their followers, and those whom generally want to change the world for the better. Even Julian Assange (If we turned time back a couple of years to before he was put in jail indefinetely)

They are much more deserving of such a prize than entertainers.

 

[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.