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Microsoft Games

Microsoft Confirms It's Distancing Itself From Minecraft Creator 'Notch' (onmsft.com) 808

Minecraft creator Marcus 'Notch' Persson, who sold the title to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, won't be part of 10-year anniversary plans for the game because of his "comments and opinions," Microsoft said in a statement. From a report: Minecraft's creator Marcus Notch Persson has recently made some seemingly controversial white supremacist and transphobic comments via Twitter that have all but forced Microsoft to put some space between itself and the games creator. "His comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of 'Minecraft'," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Fortunately, Persson's has had little to no involvement with Minecraft since its sale to Microsoft for $2.5 billion back in 2014, so it's been easier for the company to remove loading screen text that referenced Notch as well as uninviting him from future Minecraft events such as the 10-year anniversary shindig coming up soon.
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Microsoft Confirms It's Distancing Itself From Minecraft Creator 'Notch'

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  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @09:10PM (#58513542)

      I'm so tired of hearing this comparison. Every time some bigot is ostracized for saying horrible things bigot-apologists come out with their persecution-complex McCarthy comparisons. Free speech in the United States has never freed one from the consequences of speech. The First Amendment forbids the government from restricting speech. It does not require citizens to put up with your bullshit. If you say something in my house and I don't like it, I can ask you to leave. If some guy Microsoft once had a business relationship says things they don't like, they're under no obligation to invite him to events they stage. There is no analog to McCarthism. Social consequences for being a jackass are in no way equivalent to being persecuted by the government.

      In one sentence you demonstrated that:
      1) You don't even have a basic understanding of the First Amendment
      2) You don't know anything about the McCarthy era
      3) You will grasp at straws to defend bigotry

  • I read the tweets. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:09PM (#58510418)

    Doesn't seem worth talking about, much less acting on. That John Oliver hit piece on WWE before GoT with the CM Punk tweet...ok I understand how that was pulled.

    • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:12PM (#58510440)
      I think all the people calling Notch racists are of the opinion that its not OK to be white since the comment that kicked off the witch hunt was, in fact, Notch tweeting "Its OK to be white"

      In other words the only non-racist in this story is, in fact, Notch.
      • You make it sound like that statement exists in a vacuum. The implication is that some believe that it's not okay to be white, that white people face some kind of persecution. It doesn't exactly take a student of history to understand how untrue that implication is and how insulting it is to many non-white groups in this country who do in fact face persecution. The ideas that efforts to curb systemic racism are "reverse racism" and that white people are disadvantaged in today's society are not only false, b

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:10PM (#58510428)
    Here are examples of "controversial white supremacist and transphobic comments" by Notch:

    https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
    https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
    https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
    https://www.newsweek.com/minec... [newsweek.com]

    These are examples of "wrong think" as far as the progressive woke crowd is concerned, but it isn't white supremacy or transphobia. I disagree with most of these comments, but it is super scummy to slag people with false accusations, just because you disagree with them.
  • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:11PM (#58510436) Journal
    Tweet 1: [twitter.com]

    It's ok to be white.

    Tweet 2: [twitter.com]

    Privilege is a made up metric used to silence and repress. We are all different, and that is ok. We listen to individuals and help each other based on individual strengths and needs.

    We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot.

    Tweet 3: [twitter.com]

    (protip: believing in race based privilege needing to be checked fits the literal definition of racism)

    These aren't racist, they are definitely not white supremacist. They are insensitive.
    Someone else can look for the "transphobic" ones, I'll bet they're just insensitive, too.

    • by sinij ( 911942 )
      Very clearly, these heresies against intersectional thought are alt-right and deserve full excommunication and deplatforming. Consequently, fatwah was issued that no woke person should play minecraft, as doing so is now considered alt-right adjacent.
    • by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:17PM (#58510490)

      Look like Microsoft is using these nothing tweets as a rationalization to push Notch out of the picture.

      And these are "insensitive" only if you define insensitive as things SJWs don't want to hear.

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @04:19PM (#58512486) Journal

      We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot.

      Except we really do.

      At the point you're denying racism exists you're basically part of the problem no matter how you work the semantics of "techincally" racist.

  • White supremacist? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can someone point to a post or tweet of his that can be considered white-supremacist (or however its spelled)? This tactic of labeling people so we don't have to discuss uncomfortable realities has to stop.

  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:14PM (#58510466)
    Must be pretty bad. Should have no problem showing what 'white supremacist' or 'transphobic' comments has he made?
  • Once you or your creation "goes public", it's like running for the top office in your country. You are now owned by the public - and the thin-skinned public sphere you or your creation live in.

    You are no longer free to say what you want, and the First Amendment no longer applies. All that matters is not making people angry and maximizing popularity (and thus profit) off of your (or your creation's) image.

    If he said anything that's off-putting to said public, that's the way the $2,500,000,000 cookie crumbles

  • by Shane_Optima ( 4414539 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:18PM (#58510496) Journal

    seemingly controversial white supremacist and transphobic comments

    You know, if I had read a headline like this five years ago, I would be shocked and intrigued and perhaps above all instinctively disappointed in the person (Notch, in this case) even before I'd read any of the details. As a liberal, that would be my default starting point.

    But this is 2019. And in 2019, if I see a headline that says someone is accused of making "white supremacist" and "transphobic" comments...

    Tell you what, slashdot. Let me throw it to you. If you haven't RTFAed yet, what do you think the story is gonna be about? What goes through your head? What do you expect and what do you feel? And is it any different from what you would've expected or felt if you saw this headline 5 years ago?

    I'm interested in hearing from all parts of the political spectrum. I'm curious about what these words actually mean and do these days.

    Or, you know, we could leap straight into the SJW vs. anti-SJW slugfest. Amimojo, where ya at?

    (I seriously, honestly haven't clicked anything or Googled it or checked Wikipedia. For all I know he's been extolling the joys of cross burning. Yet somehow I feel like the odds are actually over 50% that he said something entirely reasonable and non-hateful...)

    • by sinij ( 911942 )
      You must be new here, we don't read TFAs here. So your question is moot.
      • That's actually why I posed the question/challenge; I figured many of the people reading the comments hadn't yet read the details about what Notch said. (As it happens, the article doesn't give the full details about everything he said, either. I mean, why waste column inches reporting facts? That's precious space that could've been spent virtue signaling.)
    • by Shane_Optima ( 4414539 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:47PM (#58510828) Journal
      [glances briefly at TFA, sees exactly what I expected/feared to see]

      Actually, you know, I think this really calls for some Netherrack cross burning. Maybe with some custom skins. Nothing actually racist but framed in such a way to, you know, draw attention to the fact that Microsoft believes that it's absolutely not ok to ever say "it's ok to be a white person."

      Has MS done any takedowns on fanmade Minecraft videos yet? Well there's one way to find out. You'd just need to be sure to spell out the irony on signs nearby so there's no mistaking it for any sort of actual KKK sympathy. I dunno, though... liberals have become so tone-deaf about irony and satire and the alt-right has got so good at trolling that on certain topics I'm not sure it's possible (i.e. permissible) to use anything other than blunt literalisms.

      Hmnm. Burning bookcases, perhaps? Well, to be fair they're not actually censoring anyone right now, but maybe it's a thought if they did start doing video takedowns. Man I wish I had the energy to do something like this. (But speaking of burned, I'm just too burnt out myself. Exhausted from the constant enjoyment re: all of this glorious white privilege, I guess.)

      It's just so fucking stupid. Notch was completely right on that point. Privilege in its most common formulation IS a dumb and made-up metric. It should be called "potential privilege", which isn't at all the same as actualized privilege. I've been somewhere between poor and dirt poor my entire life, but because I'm white (with a little native American mixed in, but not enough), that means that some spoiled black millionaire brats at Yale have less privilege than I do. It's absurd on its face, and it's a fucking joke, it is a ridiculous oke that is actually turning the entire left wing of this country into a joke that actually saying any of this out loud can now be equated with white supremacy.

      I haven't stumbled on the details of his "transphobic" comment yet. Maybe he said he didn't quite like the idea of injecting hormones of the opposite gender into healthy 12 year olds just because they say they want it? Maybe he said that *biologically speaking* there were only two genders (plus intersex, I would hasten to add.)? Man, I'm giddy with anticipation.

      This is such a waste of... everything. I just want the left to grow the fuck up already. I AM a leftist. (I even recently made a lengthy post on /. recently about the time I spent the night with a transsexual person. (FTM, preop/post-T.))

      Do you have any idea how disheartening it is to look around and see that most of the Jon Stewarts and Sam Harrises of this generation are right wing? How the hell did this happen? How can it be it that anyone in their right mind thinks that the proper reaction to the 2016 election is to double down on this particularly humorless, ironyless, anti-intellectual flavor of political correctness?

      Fuck.
    • by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @01:08PM (#58511036)

      As a center-leftest, honestly I just feel tired. I assume the person in question made a comment someone didn't like and then didn't immediately back down/apologize profusely. To a vocal few that makes them part of the "enemy", who are seen as completely monolithic and unchanging in their opinions, and who cannot be acknowledged or reasoned with, only destroyed. It's a weird punitive mindset that has no goals save discouraging apostasy, even now it's starting to fail as people see that there really are few consequences. I guess Notch can't go to a promotional event? I'm sure he's heartbroken.

      The ironic part is that all this recrimination hasn't made anything better, if anything racist views are becoming more prevalent and accepted. Every time the cry goes up fewer people care, eventually the racists won't have to even have to hide it anymore.

  • by Al Al Cool J ( 234559 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:31PM (#58510638)

    Everyone knows Hatsune Miku created Minecraft. Notch even conceded the point.
    https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]

  • This has to stop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @12:57PM (#58510930)

    This is insane. Look at this GQ article covering the tweets, look at the comments by the author:

    https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets

    " I saw some exit poll data that said the only two demographics to vote for Trump were white men and white women. As a result, I tweeted "Fuck White People." And then tweeted it again, giving more context and including a screenshot of that exit poll data. A huge number of people got pissed at me, and though the countless death threats I got were uncalled for, I understand why people were mad. I didn't phrase that tweet correctly. What I should have said was "fuck whiteness.""

    What do you think would happen (not threaten to happen) if this person had tweeted "Fuck Black People" or "Fuck Blackness?" GQ would have fired them immediately and they wouldn't be writing any articles, they would be subject mass destruction and infamy in the court of public opinion. There have been more than enough instances of exactly this happening to public figures in our society who have done far far less to say this with absolute certainty. How thick does your bias have to be to blind yourself to this rampant racism and means justify the ends mentality?

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Just going to point out that a lot of things people are getting in trouble for recently are things they said or did many years ago that were "acceptable at the time".

      Today it's acceptable to say things like "fuck white people", but 20 years from now it may well be the case that this tweet keeps an otherwise mainstream F-M Trans African American candidate from becoming president.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29, 2019 @01:07PM (#58511022)

    I learned a long time ago to try to dig in to stories and be a least a little cautious in treating a story at face value. That doesn't mean everything is "fake news", it just means journalists aren't always very reliable.

    But these days I've found that whenever someone is said to be "a racist" or "a sexist" when I look for the actual quote, it's only racist about 50% of the time. Even that is sometimes questionable since you don't know the context. The other 50% it's just outright not racist, and either blown up by the media, or blown up by idiots on twitter or both. This case is the latter, not the former.

    20 years ago I didn't have to do that. Media stories about racism were by and large about people that were actually being racist.

    • Racism has largely been redefined as a bunch of ingrained cultural attitudes that have almost zero to do with the actual biases or intent of the people saying them.

      Probably because there's not anything like the overt, intentional and malicious racism there used to be, and it's hard to maintain a siege mentality unless you have a siege.

  • by brxndxn ( 461473 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @03:03PM (#58512048)

    For a company that makes the vast majority of its money from large multinational corporations - many of which lean conservative - it seems Microsoft's SJW stance against Notch doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I have a hard time finding anything actually racist coming from the people that the left loves to label as racist. Meanwhile, it looks like merely having vocal conservative opinions is the easiest way to be labeled racist by the left.

    Also, calling someone racist merely for being conservative is missing quite a bit logically to make that connection. People that do it over and over are liars. Some conservatives are racist; the vast majority are not. Saying conservative equals racist is false.

    For transphobic - who decided one day that this debate was settled?

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