| -CraZed- said: Thank you for that post. I'd also like to add that as a parent of an 11 year-old autistic boy who absolutely LOVES Minecraft and who at this stage in his life wouldn't be able to even ask a question at Minecom due to his expressive delays I found the awkward questions from those kids (who all probably have parents who love them greatly and are most likely on the spectrum themselves, seriously did anyone notice the behaviors of those kids?) funny, as I do whenever my son says something off-the-wall or weird because he doesn't have the capacity you and I do for speech. I'm sure the developers took them in stride as best as they could, and I'm also sure this wasn't the whole of the questions they got either. What I find cringeworthy is the lack of awareness and compassion for people with disabilities here in a community I generally like to say I identify with. Yes they are VERY awkward but to start a post to publicly shame these kids by suggesting that Notch sold Minecraft because some special needs kids asked a bunch of cumbersum questions is low. And the worst part is there are people actually trying rationalizie it. Seriously, these are children no. 1 and no. 2 while not all of them may have been disabled YOU know there were plenty who are. Tacky, straight up tacky yall.
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I'll tackle the bolded part first.
Neither of my kids have disorders or disabilities, but when one of them got pulled up on stage by a comedian in a theatre and was given a microphone to speak into, he behaved pretty much like some of those kids in the video. It was cringeworthy, and it got a huge 'Awwwwww' from the audience. If you'd been sitting in that audience, would you have labelled him as being 'special needs' because his body language or behaviour matched some traits you recognise in the short time he was up there?
I'll reiterate one of the points from my previous post - while it's wrong to mock those who are disadvantaged, it is also wrong to make a casual diagnosis based on a few minutes of footage, and then use it to judge other peoples' reactions, not least because if you're wrong you could be insulting some ordinary kids that were just struggling in an unusual situation. To read my point properly and in context, see the previous page.
Now for the underlined.
I don't think anyone has taken the thread title as literally as you have. The notion that Notch would sell up for those reasons is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. If there was any indication that the OP was being remotely serious about that suggestion the thread would have been killed by the mods straight away. The OP posted the video without giving their opinion on the kids. It was you (and others) who took it upon yourselves to label some of them as having special needs, and from there you've moved on to take the thread title seriously and accuse the OP of "suggesting that Notch sold Minecraft because some special needs kids asked a bunch of cumbersome questions".
I don't know about anyone else, but I interpreted the OP as being in the same spirit as the famous quote attributed to W.C. Fields: 'Never work with children or animals', simply because you never know what's going to happen.
Example: During a kids live Saturday morning show, a kid announced the upcoming F1 Grand Prix qualifiers from autocue:
(Little Girl) And this afternoon at two, we go to Murray Walker who will commentate on the Grand Pricks of South Africa
(Producer) I think you'll find it's pronounced "Grond Pree".
(Little Girl after a second's consideration) Well it says "Grand Pricks" here!
The clip was featured in a popular series of British TV shows about TV and movie outtakes, shown before the days of the internet, where no doubt ITV obtained permission for every clip used. We live in different times now, sadly, where it's easier to share stuff publicly and without the permission of those involved.
This YouTube video was entitled 'Most Awkward Moments at Minecon 2013', and the opening comment made by the person who published that compilation was 'Don't be rude with these kids'.
To me, the video and this thread were intended to show how kids can create the most cringeworthy awkward and funny situations without realising they're doing it. That one or two of the kids included in the compilation might have been disadvantaged in some way is sad, but while there are a fair number of ignorant comments here, I doubt very much that either the video or this thread was originally made with the intention of mocking disabled kids.
