The God Who Peter Molyneux Forgot
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
It's such a strange thing to witness; this developer passion and designer dream just slowly withering away. Play Godus for 2 minutes and you will feel why people ache for that experience. It's beautiful. Like The Witness. Calm. And WFTO, watch the trailer. The speaker is the same guy who did dungeon keeper in 1998. These games are pulling your heartstrings, no wonder they get their money. In some way, I would still throw money at another one of these games, if only because a slim chance of a new Bullfrog title is better than none.
At least Blizzard is still going strong; if anyone want a truly unique and delightful experience I can recommend Hearthstone.
Maybe the indie game world need an incubator, like YC.
It has it's flaws but I feel like I've got my money's worth (I spent some money on IAPs cause there was no other way to pay for the mobile version).
There are a few groups and companies that are attempting this with various success. Afaik, the most successful version of this is Indie Fund (http://indie-fund.com/), but it's not an incubator in the same way YC is, it's more like an indie game angel investor or VC.
Joystick Labs attempted to follow the startup incubator model for indie games and failed. http://www.gamefounders.com/ Appears to be an active game incubator that follows something close to the YC model.
A couple of game developers including Yetizen and Firehose Games have started incubators.
He is really good at PR, he always promises a lot and he almost never delivers (game functionality, not about the article). He has a bad reputation IMHO at least since Black & White 1 in 2001, his earlier games were great! Though he is a charming guy and get away with it. The article is rubbish, just like Molyneux latest 22Cans's "Godus" god game.
(To give Molyneux his well-earned credit, I also loved Populous and Dungeon Keeper!)
It's also worth noting that startups do exactly similar tactics with waitlists. (what, you really think 100,000 people would be willing to join a wait list for a random startup with no publicity?)
Anything specific you're referring to?
I saw this article this morning and it made me raise my eyebrows: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-league-app-has-a-75000-pe...
A waitlist isn't inherently impossible for startups; I'd expect a few hundred at most, but 75,000?
EDIT: All email clients have the same name. :p
...until you're not satisfied.
He also did some great games in the 90s (and the 80s - Populous is my favourite, released in '89), so I was also unaware of the repeating pattern until Black & White.
Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked? An email appeared with a the message "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
Sharing your passion with the world.
Personal accomplishment and pride.
It's a bugger the game isn't released yet - but he explained in the article the external unforeseen issues that caused the delay. Software often gets delayed. Why is this illegal for PM?
PM's only fault was getting excited about features he wanted for Fable which they weren't able to implement. That's a communication style issue which I think he has learned from. Other than that he has an enviable backlog of titles which prove his ability to deliver. I don't believe he deserves the BS he gets from gamers who seem to think PM owes them something.
edit: Surprised by the negative reaction to this post. At least 5 downvotes altogether. I'm not endorsing Monyneux's actions in any way. I'm just saying that it's obvious what happened. They promised royalties on a product they failed to deliver for business and technical reasons. Now they are pivoting to a new game to try to stay in business.
They should have owned up to it, and given the kid an apology, a check for 1000 GBP, and modelled a character in "The Trail" as damage control.
Of course, a lot of us have gotten to the point where the hype around Molyneux is itself enough entertainment. I was there in the Black&White days, which I considered to be a really interesting concept, but as is so often the case these days, the Creator of that Universe got bored, and moved on. Maybe thats the real lesson here ..
With Godus, with Curiosity, it increasingly seems as though he failed to deliver even a finished game and in addition it seems as though he failed to even try.
For many gamers, it's the end of the final shred of Molyneux's respectability. People may snark about it, "Oh, what a surprise", but this was his last chance.
The royalty (or at least some prize) formed part of a concept that was at the heart of Curiosity - some grand, real, reward that justified all the cow-clicking nonsense. As such, it was an essential part of the game that people played. Meanwhile, Godus continues to languish without the promised features.
Comparing him with Shyamalan, this would be his Last Airbender. Not earth-shattering news that he messed it up completely, but final confirmation that his talent - if he ever had it - seems to have deserted him.
Despicable acts by game companies are nothing new, yet gamers continue to buy the games in droves. Ubisoft is a great example.
All that matters is if a game is good or not. If the game is terrible then good karma or a massive marketing budget can win you sales but overall having a fun game is the most important factor imho.
If it's already made, sure. But if he needs funds to finish it and tries crowdfunding, this may bite him pretty hard.
Peter Molyneux's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: he's incredibly creative and ambitious. He aims very high, often a little beyond his reach. Frankly, that's what we should all be doing. I don't quite remember the quote, or the person who said it, but it went something like, "If you're not failing the majority of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
I'd rather play a game that was trying to be incredible but fell just short, rather than a game that aimed to be passable and hit the mark. Maybe that's what bugs me about Curiosity and Godus; these aren't the big, ambitious games I've grown accustomed to from Molyneux.
Black & White was ground breaking but it was such a disappointment to me that I wouldn't include it in any list of great games...
I think that's an erroneous belief when it comes to games. Many games are complete failures because of the fact that they attempted to cram too much into the design.
Many of the best games take a core concept that's fun and refine it, polish it until it's gleaming. Only then do they add some small things off that core gameplay to flavor the experience. The shotgun approach of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks is a great way to either release a buggy, unfun mess (if you're lucky) or burn through your capital, goodwill, and development team before cancelling the project (if you're unlucky).
The problem is that you used the word 'often' instead of 'consistently', which has been the case for the past 15 years. Black & White was the beginning of the end and the pattern for 21st Century Molyneux: promise the world, get bored, fail to deliver. At a shallow level, B&W looked great, but it was terrible as a game and an experience; both tedious and failing to deliver on promised complexity. That trend continues all the way to Godus.
It's not like he's hit-and-miss, and a few failures are okay as long as you have some hits mixed in. It's that the first half of his career was consistently hit, and the second half consistently miss.
I'd imagine the same thing goes for films as well. Start with an incredibly ambitious concept only to find that you need to hype the hell out of it in order to get the necessary investment. But then with outside investment comes the requirement that the finished product be released within a certain timeframe and meet certain expectations in terms of profits generated. It's no wonder that for all of the talented and dedicated artists out there (in games or film), the majority of what gets released is either disappointing, unoriginal, or at best, pretty damn good...but rarely mindblowing or something that elevates the entire state of the art.
I fondly recall the exciting demos and wild claims that Peter Molyneux gave of Black and White at CGDC during the late 90's, which reminds me of Joe Spark's exciting demos and wild claims about Total Distortion that he was showing at practically every computer conference for several years during the early 90's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Distortion
I think they were both interesting games, over-demoed before their time then under-shipped after their time. They had a lot of unique original ideas, but both would have been much better received were it not for all the hype that set such unrealistic expectations.
The idea behind Total Distortion was that you went out into a virtual world, explored, fought guitar battles, took pictures, and shot video. Behind the scenes, the pictures and videos were annotated with metadata about the subjects.
Then you went back to your multimedia production studio and used a miniature kid-friendly version of Adobe Premier to produce music videos using the raw content you gathered from the game. Implementing a music video editor in Director was an amazing technical achievement in and of itself.
But then (and here's the hard part) you had to sell you music videos to simulated hollywood agents, who evaluated your videos based on their (very diverse and whacky) personal preferences. The metadata in the pictures and video you used would entertain or disgust the various agents in different ways, and they'd give you feedback along the lines of "I'm a people person, and I want to see more people in it!" or "I'll be honest fellas, it was sounding great, but I could have used a little more cowbell."
But Joe Sparks demoed it at so many conferences that it was a running joke that it would never be released, because he keep adding new cool features to make each demo more awesome than the last. When it finally was released, it was a big disappointment, after seeing all those fantastic demos.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090516110053/http://www.gamespo...
It was a brilliant idea that was way before its time, and pushed the limits of the technology, incorporating machinima and video editing into a game, but the execution was mediocre compared to all the great hype. It was terribly difficult to implement that kind of stuff in Director in the early 90's. It would be great to see somebody try the same idea again, but with modern technology.
While I tend to use whom, dative forms in most non-German Germanic languages have been on life support for longer than most of us have been alive.
Reader's Digest, your grade-school teacher, and anything written before lingustics was a science do not count as reliable sources for this purpose.
However, it's still taught in school, in college, and in any modern grammar book. It's clearly coming up on the cusp of disappearing, but it certainly hasn't been written out of the books just yet, and I'm not sure why you're pretending that it has been. This sort of mistake would have been corrected in basically every English class I ever took in the last five years. It would have been corrected not just by the professor, but also by a majority of peers if peer grading was utilized.
My rule of thumb is to basically never use "whom" in speech and to conditionally use it in writing, depending on the context and how formal it is. I'll generally use it correctly when writing posts like this on the internet as well, but anything less formal and I won't care. I feel like the threshold of minimum formality to justify using it is always rising, and perhaps in the next decade we'll see that threshold rise up above the level of formality of, say, a paper for a literature class. But that definitely hasn't happened yet.
This reflects my general belief that grammar is a spectrum. It's less about the mindless application of rules and more about pattern recognition. Rules of grammar are best understood as being part of a context, and that context is not just the rest of the sentence or paragraph; it includes the social context as well, the mode of communication (written, verbal, etc.), and basically everything else you could think of. My description above is an example of how one rule -- that rule pertaining to the usage of "whom" -- morphs according to context.
To summarize, grammar is the art of satisfying two constraints simultaneously: (1) making sure nobody else thinks you've made a mistake; (2) making sure your efforts at (1) aren't going to distract people.
(1) could be seen as maximizing acceptance of your grammatical decisions, and (2) could be seen as minimizing social offense. "whom" is a great example, because in certain contexts people might recognize it as correct but they'll think you're only using it because you're trying to show off how smart you are. You've unnecessarily distracted them by using it, which violates (2).
The words are just both correct. Some people like to argue from authority that there's some rule against using "who" there, except -- as is the case for many prescriptive bogeymen -- the supposed authority actually doesn't exist at all.
Ask anyone who scientifically studies the actual English language for a living -- fenomas's comment links to a good source at Cambridge, which is very well reputed in linguistics -- and they will not cast a single bit of doubt on using "who" to introduce a relative clause. Everyone uses it, including very good writers.
It's easy to caricature linguists as always saying "as long as you can be understood, anything goes". And that's unfortunate -- nobody here would put up with misunderstanding and making fun of the work biologists do, for example, but for some reason everyone thinks that being literate makes them qualified to disagree with linguists.
There are linguists who make recommendations about not just how to be understood but how to write well, based on lots of study and observation on how people use language in all registers, and if you're looking for an authority you should be looking to them. If you do look -- I'll point at fenomas's comment again, because he's the only one who actually linked a source -- you'll find they don't support your position.
It's too bad you took a lot of English classes that wasted time on correcting this word. (Editing out a harsh and hasty conclusion I came to about your English professors here.) If I assume the best of them, I'll say it was a pedagogical exercise. Sometimes it's important to distinguish different cases. This isn't a situation where you have to distinguish cases in English, but you can.
So maybe your classes told you to use "whom" there kind of like a class in object-oriented programming might tell you to create a "class Rabbit" that inherits from "class Animal" -- as a way of showing that you understand the concept, not as something that you'd actually have to do in the real world.
Of course, there are cases where people use a false whom because it sounds more sophisticated, but this isn't one of them.
Taken from the BBC Radio 4 Series "Knowing me, Knowing You."
(I'd argue "The God that Peter Molyneux Forgot" would sound more natural, though..)
Who can act as the subject or the object of the relative clause:
The woman *who* I saw yesterday was Sheila.
(who refers to the woman and is the object of saw in the relative clause)