I've been following Notch's blog for a while now. For those of you who somehow don't know, Notch is the founder of Minecraft, one of the most successful, if not the most successful indie games ever made.
There is a bit of a thing going on with Mojang (Notch's company) right now. Apparently they are working on a game called "Scrolls". A much larger company, familiar to all, called Bethesda, is working on a series of games called "Elder scrolls", in which the latest release called Skyrim is to be published on November. I am actually pretty excited for that release. I've played Oblivion, which is the previous game in the series and it was amazing.
Bethesda served some legal papers to Mojang regarding the trademark of the name "scrolls". It was a cease and desist letter with some mentioning of legal fees... I won't go into that.
This generated some buzz in the net, with Bethesda being the evil malicious corporate and Mojang being the innocent victim. I was caught up with the resentment and anger towards Bethesda.
Now, to set things straight, I have a pretty strong apathy towards things that don't concern me directly. It comes from a belief that the world is an evil place and life sucks, and we can't do anything about it. However I do want to care. I remember days when I was young and innocent and I felt very strongly about... well everything, and I really want to feel that again.
So I decided that I want to care about this whole Mojang/Bethesda thing. I thought about it, got myself pretty fired up, and this morning I started the day by thinking "Today, I am going to start a world wide protest against Bethesda!"
The thought was something along the lines of demonstrating to Bethesda that their consumers are angry at their petty and evil legal tricks. So angry, in fact that some of them will not buy Skyrim... this year. January is good.
So, riled up as I was, fuming and muttering, I went to Facebook and open a page which was called "Bethesda, we can read" (which was supposed to clarify that we know the difference between a game called "Scrolls" and one called "Elder scrolls: Skyrim"). And then Facebook asked for an image for the page.
This never happens in the movies. It should have been a done deal. Open protest page -> bang! millions of angry consumers -> Bethesda retracts their lawyers and I saved the day. An image? Fine! I went to Flickr and searched for scrolls. And then I went for thirty minutes through thousand of scroll images. Eventually I took one myself:
However, something happened during the time I was looking for an image. I stopped caring. I suddenly couldn't be bothered. I also read this post by Russ Pitts which made me doubt Mojang's stance... Who is right? who is wrong? Meh, what do I care.
Eventually I deleted the page, and went on with my day.
Final thoughts: I am still with Mojang about this issue, but I also don't want people to cut the rain forests in Brazil. However, I am not doing anything for either things.
A new version in the game! The skills have tooltips which explain them! Events with skill tests have some clear explanations! Yay!
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