
Peter Molyneux: My Next Game a 'Significant Scientific Achievement' - breily
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/05/molyneux-my-nex.html
======
henning
You have to admire someone trying to do better than just "a better
EverQuest/Ultima Online" (which is basically what World of Warcraft is) or a
better Quake (Half-Life, Unreal Tournament) or whatever, but it can also
really backfire on you.

The micromanagement in Black and White was terrible. "Villagers need food!"

------
motoko
""70 percent of people will be good," he says. "20 percent will dabble with
evil, then be good. Only 10 percent will choose to be evil all the way
through. What's fascinating is that this is very regionally dependent. It's
different from Germany to the U.K. to Asia.""

So, what is the regional dependence?

------
LogicHoleFlaw
_"The way games are made now is fundamentally flawed," he responds. "If I was
a betting man, I’d imagine that in the future, this business of getting more
than a hundred people together for three, four years will look really odd.
It's so incredibly expensive. I predict that we'll see a core of deeply
talented people working on games beforehand, then a big team comes together
for a brief period of time."

So, I say -- game design is moving toward something sort of like a movie, with
years of preproduction by a small team, then a big production with set
designers and key grips that only lasts a couple of months?

"Yes, exactly."_

If you can solve this problem, you will transform the face of the game
industry and usher in a new era of creativity in the face of the current
method of massive teams and budgets. Is it a good idea for a startup? Beats
me. It's a large, open question. I don't have an answer as to how to approach
a solution. Yet.

~~~
as
Agreed. I'd personally love to design a game world and story, but am not
willing to devote 4 years of my life to just making something rudimentary.

~~~
marvin
There's a host of interesting startup ideas in this field, most related to 3D
graphics. We need higher levels of abstraction for creating textures,
architecture/models, decoration etc. The tools we have today are awfully
rudimentary, and there's research indicating that much better solutions are
possible.

See for instance
[http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Docum...](http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Documents)
\- a higher-level language for describing architecture. In the marketplace
there are things like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree>, which is
already in use in a great number of games.

It is obvious that we could create a huge amount of tools to this purpose, and
also that there is a huge market for software that makes game development
easier. What's the sense in creating the 5000th 3D model of a human? Humans
don't change that much. Not even fictional bipeds do. Have you ever heard a
game developer or pundit complain about 'spiraling costs' for game
development? It's because human developers have more and more work to do to
make the games keep track with developments in hardware. It should be obvious
to anybody that this development isn't sustainable; there's no way every room
of a game designed by humans can have even as much detail as the room I'm
sitting in right now. But most of this architecture is predictable, and could
probably be generated by the right program.

Consider a lower bound of game development costs for this 'generation' of
consoles at 3 million dollars. If even five percent of that cost could be
eliminated by better development tools, that would mean savings (and potential
for profit!) of 150,000 dollars. But the potential savings from automating
menial modeling tasks are a _lot_ higher.

Seriously. We need software to make stuff like this easier. There's a major
can of worms in implications of sorting this out - a lower barrier to entry,
more creative freedom, better-looking games and so on and so on...

------
Tichy
This morality thing was already done nicely in the early Ultimas (I think
starting with IV, or V). I remember the one dungeon where you are attacked by
a monster called "little children". Before you had been trained to never fight
children because it immediately makes you lose your virtues.

I don't think Molyneux approach sounds very scientific, though. What is
scientific about giving game figures an artificial idea of morals? Scientific
for me would be to not make those inbuilt, but let them evolve and see why
certain morals make for more successful societies than others.

Sorry to rant about this, but it is one of my pet peeves with games (like
civilization). They claim to be simulations, but they are not - they are just
projections of the game designers limited perspective and morals. Of course
the same could be said for many books and movies, too. I don't like it there,
either, but somehow I feel that with games it is another dimension. The
pseudo-simulation somehow makes the opinions of the game creators seem more
legitimate.

~~~
teamonkey
"What is scientific about giving game figures an artificial idea of morals?"

I got the impression that the "next" game he was talking about, the scientific
achievement that would be on the cover of Wired, would be the one _after_
Fable 2.

~~~
Tichy
True, but he didn't mention anything new, so I assume he is just taking AI to
the next level or whatever...

------
zandorg
I once emailed Steve Jackson (UK, Games Workshop, worked on Black & White)
about a signed copy of Warlock of Firetop Mountain (paperback first edition).
It had a 'dedicated to' the best guest house in that region of Scotland, and
he actually remembered it. It's a pretty cute treasure.

------
Novash
Unfortunately I can't read it at work, but it does interest me. So what's the
proposal about?

------
schtog
anyway i dig Molyneux, he boasts a lot but it comes from loving games.

he has done some remarkable games and always try to be inventive.

a true visionary and one of the great game designers.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
He really does love his work. I admire his enthusiasm and dedication to
ideals. It's infectious and he tends to bring out the best in otherwise jaded
gamers. His Achilles' heel is that nobody can completely live up to those
ideals. His audience feels disappointed when they see the flaws in the final
product.

We need someone like him to keep pushing us forward. Bright futures don't
_come_ , they are _made_.

