$20,000 is actually an insane amount to be paid for for the amount of effort it takes to write a poem like that. Even if it took 40 hours a week for 2 months.
Which, I really doubt it did. I read a fair amount of poetry and while it is nice, it's not particularly deep, it's also a prose poem with little to no effort put into metrical style. I feel like I could write something similar in 2-3 hours if given the prompt. To be fair, part of the value is the ideation of the universe-intelligent-being vagueness, but given the context of the game, that doesn't seem like it would take that long to think of, either.
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO