Peter Molyneux: My Next Game a 'Significant Scientific Achievement' | Hacker News Reader

Peter Molyneux: My Next Game a 'Significant Scientific Achievement'

blog.wired.com

19 pointsbreily16 comments

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!"

""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?

"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.

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.

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... - 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...

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.

"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.

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

but how would that be done.

no matter how you do it there has to be some starting point, initiation. and whatever values you place there wont be neutral right? or can they? it seems that even if you make it very basic they will still include some interpretation of the world from the designers and thus be more likely to evolve ina certain direction.

to be a perfect simulation would need the game designer to be some sort of a god no?

Not saying it is easy, but as an example I could point out "Conway's Game Of Life". At least it doesn't claim to be anything else than what it is...

What about a simulation of pool? I guess one could argue that the physics can never be 100% correct, but in that case I wouldn't feel so bad about it, somehow.

I guess I feel that it would be more interesting to have emergent behaviour from simple rules than to hardwire the rules on a high level, but of course I can not give a clear cut definition...

sure i see your point, i guess in the future there will be middleware.

like molyneux himself points out it is too expensive. and i mena people kind of keep reinventing the wheel(like in a lot of other areas in programming) so one could imagine people creating worlds both for science and computer games that have evolving populations of something and then game designers can take these when they are at a certain stage of development and build a gameworld on top of them.

uh, kinda :)

Definitely, the way there are tools like Poser today for creating animated 3d people, there might be behaviour design tools in the future.

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.

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

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.

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.

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