Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux, perhaps best known for being the brains behind Populous, Black & White, and the Fable series, gave an impassioned speech at the Dublin Institute of Technology on Aungier street last week, discussing, among other things, the state of the games industry and Microsoft’s upcoming motion controller, dubbed Project Natal.

Peter Molyneux, industry legend, says '... man' a lot

Project Natal:

When it came to Natal as a device, Molyneux was fairly frank about its capabilities, but passionate about the potential. Over the course of the talk, he introduced one of the titles being developed for Natal, featuring a small boy named Milo. For those who haven’t already seen something of Milo, you can check out the demo video below.

While there are plenty of we’re-not-sure-why-anyone-would-play-this moments in there for some, the whole affair is fairly impressive. Indeed, so impressive that it’s hard not to question the veracity of the demonstration, something that Molyneux seemed all to happy to talk about, inviting those present to say whether or not they thought what they’d seen was possible at all.

Of course, Molyneux is well aware that he is, for most part, talking to an audience of jaded gamers and sceptics, saying,

“How many people here think that what they just saw on screen is completely fake, or scripted? [laughs] You’re sceptics! How many people here believe that David Copperfield, the magician, could really make the statue of liberty disappear?

So, in one sense, what you’ve just seen here, that moment, where that girl, Clare, walked up to the screen and said, ‘Hi Milo, how’re you doing?’ Emm… in one sense, it’s real and in another sense it’s fake…

What this is not, that Milo character that’s there, does not, in any way, understand every word that Clare says. No, absolutely not. We haven’t cracked the hardest problem that computer science has ever faced, and that is natural language recognition and understanding…

But what we have cracked is the ability to feel like Milo is understanding what you’re saying and we had this idea in mind when we thought, “Okay, now imagine if you walked up to a screen and someone said, ‘Hi Clare, Hi Peter, whateveryournameis.’

We can do that, face recognition, can see your face in real time, body recognition samples your body in real time, he then jumps off the swing, and says, y’know, ‘Hi Clare.’

The player starts talking, and behind the scenes there are three systems going on. One is we start looking for key words and especially key phrases, which we’ve programmed into a database … The second thing is, we’re looking at the motion of your voice, the timbre of your voice, and there’s very good papers that have been done about, y’know, stress recognition in voices … We control Milo’s face, so he’ll frown if he picks up the wrong timbre.”

Milo is simultaneously quite interesting and phenomenally creepy...

It’s an interesting array of systems, and indeed, one in which it seems that Molyneux has the utmost confidence. Indeed, he goes on to say that,

“The effect is that people believe it works … lots of people spend ten, fifteen minutes talking to Milo because they believe it. It is a bit of a trick, but it doesn’t matter.”

While it would have been relatively easy not to have explained Milo’s workings so intricately, Molyneux instead describes a situation with Natal in which developers are, effectively, playing a Wizard of Oz style role.

Using that combination of keywords, timbre and body language, the aim is to construct a situation in which the user believes they’re interacting with something more complex than Milo really is… and that belief can be a very powerful thing indeed

Interaction:

One of the running questions that people seemed to want to ask Molyneux was why so many of his games feature dogs (or indeed, other animals in the case of Black & White that seem to serve a similar function to the dog in Fable II). The subject of creature companions in games wasn’t one that was raised deliberately, but came up in description of some of Molyneux’s earlier work, in particular, Syndicate.

Natal's hardware is surprisingly simple, the bulk of the work being done by the Xbox itself...

When users first sat down in front of syndicate, there was a temptation to just shoot everything they came into contact with – shooting being the primary form of interaction offered to players. Molyneux notes, with interest, that,

“People felt absolutely fine shooting ladies with prams… but they’d never shoot a puppy dog.”

If nothing else, it helps to explain the role of the creature companions in some of his more recent work as a means to tether the player to the game environment.

Another aspect of gaming in which Molyneux expressed a pronounced interest, and one of particular relevance given the fact that the speech was given as part of the Jameson film festival, was the manner in which games are consumed by the player, as media. According to Molyneux,

“… what I find fascinating is – that fascinating difference between film, books and computer games, for me; it’s my choice how I want my entertainment to be delivered. If I want bad things to happen, why shouldn’t I be looked after and paid attention to…?

… Why don’t we do a game where you’re a God and you can be as good or bad as you want to? …”
He then goes on to desrcibe the ways in which that interaction can move in the opposite direction; when Black & White became the fifth most searched for term on the Google, enough fan-sites sprang up that rumours began to take on a life of their own, to so great an extent that the folks at Lionhead felt the need to include them in the game itself…

“It was a massive phenomenon; very scary, principally because it started being designed by the populous. These fan-sites sprung up, and one fan-site said,

‘I really love the idea of Black & White, just imagine if you had this big creature, and you could teach the creature, and you could teach this creature anything you liked… or imagine if you had a big, giant blueberry… and this blueberry would bounce around.’

And then another fan-site would say,

‘Hey, we’ve heard that there are blueberries in Black & White.’

And then another site would say,

‘We’ve seen the blueberries!’

And then we’re sitting back in Lionhead thinking, oh god! We’ve gotta add blueberries!”

If nothing else, it’s one very pronounced manner in which the games and film industries differ; it’s hard to picture film development being influenced nearly as heavily by the rumours surrounding a film’s production. It seems that, in some cases, game development can very much be a two-way street. As Molyneux points out, in some of those ideas, there were some ‘real gems.’

The Games Industry:

When it came to the general subject of the games industry as a whole, Molyneux was less optimistic. Indeed, there were some fairly telling statistics for those tracking the popularity of games as a whole.

The Sinclair ZX-81, often seen as a crucial part of gaming history

When Molyneux released Populous in 1989, the game saw unprecedented success, topping four million sales. Despite the massive success since then of consoles, the growth of the games industry and the apparently widespread integration of gaming into more mainstream culture, it seems that things haven’t much improved when it comes to the actual numbers of videogames sold.

Indeed, while Populous, arguably the biggest game of 1989, saw sales around the four million mark… things haven’t improved as much as might be expected. By contrast Molyneux’s most recent AAA title, Fable II was among the biggest games of 2008 (some would argue the biggest, but with so many big game releases in a year it becomes a little harder to judge than in 1989). Nearly twenty years later, things have changed significantly.

“Let’s look at this one thing, this one shame of the computer game industry because, if I look at the first game I ever did, which was Populous. 1989, it was massively, hugely successful – I still don’t… really understand why – it sold four million copies, one of the bestselling games of the early nineties. And here we are, y’know, in 2008, Fable II was released – the number one selling RPG on the Xbox 360 – the most popular core gaming console, it sold four million copies.

What happened to this dream that Sir Clyde Sinclair laid down?”

It’s curious to see that, despite the fact that development had by then moved from a two-man office to a full studio with mountains of staff working for years to develop a single title of Fable II’s quality, the number of sales hasn’t moved.

It’s also interesting to see that Molyneux cites the Sinclair ZX-81, the same device to which William Gibson seems to attribute the growth of game development, and indeed, in (unless we’re very much mistaken) Pattern Recognition, Gibson seems to attribute the apparent slowdown in interest in programming in general in the UK to the fact that the Sinclair generation was gradually retiring…

It’s likely not a coincidence that, at the same time as talking about the apparent lack of growth in interest in the videogame industry, Molyneux points out that those who remember or have actually used the Sinclair ZX-81 have “… little hair on their heads”

Indeed, Molyneux went on to paraphrase Sir Clyde Sinclair, when he said,

“Computer games will culturally overtake both cinema and television, they are going to be a principle form of entertainment for everyone in the world…

And we have failed to deliver on that dream. That’s the truth, in reality.”

So, with games to date having failed to capitalise on the promise of the gaming industry, at least as Molyneux sees it, it seems as though it could well be the case that this falls to upcoming developers, like those currently studying as part of DIT’s game development masters program.

Who knows, with any luck we could well be listening to an Irish game development superstar telling us about the failure of the games industry to capitalise on the promise made by Peter Molyneux in ten years time…

If you’d like to read more about the game development masters in DIT then you should check out our focus on game development in Ireland.