End Poem
The end credits of the video game Minecraft include a written work by the Irish writer Julian Gough, conventionally called the End Poem, which is the only narrative text in the mostly unstructured sandbox game. Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson did not have an ending to the game up until a month before launch, and following recommendation by Twitter followers, he invited Gough to create a narrative for the ending. The work, which debuted in Beta version 1.9 of the game and was included with the full release, takes the form of a 1,500-word dialogue between two unspecified entities who discuss what the player has done in the game.
Gough conceived of the work as an overheard conversation which would compare the blurring of video games and real life to the space between dreaming and wakefulness, two forms of being "between two worlds". He experienced a phenomenon during writing where he felt he was not in control of his hand, and later said that "the universe" penned the latter part of the work. Originally referred to as a short story, it is now usually described as a work of poetry.
The dialogue, set in green and teal, scrolls across the player's screen over the course of about nine minutes; certain parts are obscured as intentionally glitched text. Most critical reception of the poem has been neutral to positive, often emphasising its atypicality. Several commentators have focused on its comparison of both video games and life to dreams. It has been positively received among Minecraft fans, some of whom have had quotes from it tattooed.
Gough wrote in 2022 that he never signed away his rights to the End Poem, having failed to reach an agreement with Mojang AB prior to the poem's addition to the game and then having rejected a contract in 2014 on the eve of Mojang's acquisition by Microsoft. He argued that Microsoft's continued use of the poem was copyright infringement, but said he did not want a legal dispute with them. After two psychedelic experiences with psilocybin, he said that he had a revelation following a conversation with the universe—who he attests was the true author—about the situation, and was motivated by his own words in the poem that "you are love" and the affection he had received from fans to release a version of the poem into the public domain. Microsoft has not commented on Gough's characterisation of the poem's status.
Creation
In October 2011, Minecraft creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, was preparing to launch the official version of the game, and his company Mojang had even prepared a launch event, though at that point he had no ending for the game. Persson tweeted that he was seeking someone to write "a silly over-the-top out-of-nowhere text for when you win". His followers recommended the Irish writer Julian Gough, and Persson became convinced after reading Gough's earlier short story "The iHole". Gough had played Minecraft in alpha at a game jam in Berlin years before but had not thought much of it. Gough remembered the game was only small at that time and he was unaware of its popularity until Persson emailed him about writing the ending. Gough realised how big Minecraft had become after research, which he said scared him. He downloaded the game and engaged with friends about it, taking up a "crash course" with the game to immerse himself and "get it into system".Gough remembers that Persson felt the death of the Ender Dragon should trigger a narrative, but since Persson "wasn't a word guy, and hadn't a clue what that narrative should say", Gough was given freedom in composing the work; Persson's email asked Gough to deliver a surprise. Gough was not directed to explain the origin of the Ender Dragon or deliver a comprehensive narrative tying into a greater story, which he agreed was a stark contrast from usual writing for video games. Once Gough realised his vision for the End Poem, he told Persson, who agreed with the idea: Persson had no desire for a conventional piece of writing but rather wanted an "interesting and original" work reflective of the game itself, such that it would subvert the players' expectations for the ending. Gough said that playing the game to the end in survival mode was a demanding task, and that the ending should provide enlightenment and "ambiguous wisdom", a feeling that the player had "broken through into some other level"; he felt that an overheard dialogue worked well with this concept.
Gough decided this ending should not be an explanation of the game, as players had already formed their own stories about it, but rather something outside of it. He described this work as "the dream of a game, and the dream of life". He was fond of the concept of people becoming "lost" in a video game such that it "becomes a world", a metaphor he felt was exemplified in Minecraft. As the player started to return to reality after beating the game, Gough wanted to "play with that moment, where you're between two worlds, and for a short little period you're not sure which one is more real". He felt that "there are mental states accessible through computer games that similar to those accessible through drugs or meditation or religious experiences".
Gough says that the writing process was "quite odd", and that around halfway through it he felt like "my hand started moving faster than my thoughts and was just watching", while his conscious mind did not know which words would "simply appear on the page" before him. He says that he changed very little in the final third of the piece because he was satisfied with what this phenomenon produced, and by the end he mused that he was "taking dictation from the universe". Upon submitting the finished work to Persson, Gough wondered if he should cut it, but Persson was pleased that it related to his philosophy of life and wanted it kept in full. It debuted alongside the rest of the end credits and the full endgame mechanics in Beta version 1.9. Gough and Persson originally referred to the untitled work as a short story, and at one point Boing Boing reported that the name "Wake Up"—a reference to the piece's final line—had taken popularity, but it came to be seen more as a poem than as prose, and by 2014 was generally referred to as the End Poem, a name Gough went on to adopt. Other sources have used the appellation "End text" or not assigned it any name.
Use in ''Minecraft''
After players kill the Ender Dragon and step into the exit portal, the poem appears on-screen. It plays alongside the track "Alpha" from C418's soundtrack album Minecraft – Volume Beta. It begins with the words "I see the player you mean" in teal and a reply of the active player's name in green, followed by about 1,500 words of dialogue between the two speakers, whose identities are never established but have been described in The Escapist as "god-like". Small portions are intentionally rendered as glitched text. The poem culminates with twelve consecutive lines starting with "and the universe said". The poem ends with:The poem scrolls across the screen over the course of about nine minutes. It is the only narrative text in the game, and the only text of significant length oriented toward the player. Gough's original version has not been significantly modified since its creation.
Reception
An early impression by Eric Limer in The Mary Sue was sharply critical, calling the End Poem "nothing but a bunch of text that scrolls down the screen excruciatingly slowly for an excruciatingly long time", which "reads like a stereotypical JRPG ending mashed up with some stuff written by a highschooler who just discovered post-modernist literature". Subsequent commentary leans more favourable: Kevin Thielenhaus in The Escapist calls the poem "mysterious, and kind of weird, and probably not what most of us were expecting from a Minecraft ending". The Atlantic James Parker calls it "a goofy/beautiful metaphysical text". Ted Litchfield in PC Gamer describes it as "warm and humanistic" and compares it to the 2015 video game Undertale and the 2017 multimedia narrative 17776. Lori Landay, writing in the anthology Revisiting Imaginary Worlds, calls it "weird" and unlike anything else "except maybe" the ending of Battlestar Galactica ". In Boing Boing, writer Tom Chatfield compared the ending to the film Inception in the way that it dealt with the experience of "coming up" after being in a game world, capturing "this image of someone falling in slow motion as music grows louder around them". Gough himself has called the work an "oddity" and "peculiar".Jason Anthony in gamevironments and Matthew Horrigan in Acta Ludologica both highlight the End Poem's comparison of video games to dreams; Anthony also discusses the poem's relevance to the theological implications of Minecraft players' ability to create and destroy worlds. Jacob Creswell in Comic Book Resources analyses the poem's commentary on dreams and its reference to life as "the long dream" in comparison to "the short dream of a game". Creswell notes the dissimilarity between the lengthy poem and the minimalist game, but concludes that they fit well together, writing that "he poem disagrees with the idea that the player is nothing compared to the grand scale of the universe" and that "he game's code creates a world that players invest time and care into, much like their real lives". Similarly, in MIT Technology Review, Simon Parkin observes that most players will never encounter the poem in-game, but finds that the two share a sentiment of creation through dream, which Parkin views as revealing the game's "somewhat evangelical" nature.
Landay, agreeing with Parkin, reads the poem as a reward for making it to the End and finds it to echo her own thoughts about dreams and video games. She points to its rhythmic nature to explain why the text is often called a poem, even though Persson and Gough had initially called it a story, and compares it to a prayer or meditation through its repetition, as in the closing "And the universe" lines. Regarding the final exhortation to "Wake up", Landay writes that some interpret it as a call to do things offline, while others view it in the context of the myth of Herobrine, a supposed supernatural Minecraft mob. While Gough was not aware of the Herobrine legend, the two are combined by some in the community into a shared "mythology and genealogy". Landay views this reading as "one more thread" in the poem's metanarrative, part of Gough's commentary on the transition from game to real life, citing his comments to Chatfield about playing with the "moment where you're between two worlds, and for a short little period you're not sure which one is more real".
The Irish Independent describes the End Poem as revered by the Minecraft community, and RTÉ reports it to have been widely quoted by fans of the game. A number of fans have tattoos of excerpts, particularly from the "and the universe said" portion, which Gough has described as "beyond moving".