Deep Media

"The Emotion Engine": A Conversation with Peter Molyneux at SXSW Interactive

Peter Molyneux, the creative force behind the Fable series and the seminal god game Populous, recently said he'd gotten hate mail from people who couldn't bear the excruciating choice that confronts them near the end of Fable II: Who will they sacrifice—thousands of people, or their dog? But then, Molyneux's ability to strike a nerve is near-legendary. It's not just his commitment to narrative and emotional involvement. It's the delight he seems to take in putting people in situations that show who they really are—sometimes uncomfortably so. 

Molyneux and I will be talking about this sort of thing in a session at SXSW Interactive called "The Emotion Engine: Can a Video Game Speak to the Heart?" Scheduled for Sunday, March 14 at 5:00 PM, the conversation will focus on the expressive potential of games in general and in particular on what to expect from Fable III and Milo and Kate, currently under development at Lionhead Studios, his headquarters outside London.

When I first spoke with Molyneux—in August 2008, a couple of months before Fable II came out—he explained why he gives players these kinds of choices. "It's a personality test. It reflects on what you're really like. If I can make you care about something, then the story will be much more meaningful. So I wrap the AI around a dog—he's going to love you, he's cute and fun as a companion, and in tests, people can't help but care about a dog. This is what we can do that books, TV, film cannot." 

He's clearly ambivalent about Hollywood. With a movie like The Dark Knight, he said, "it's so evident the skill it takes—who are we even to dare to say we have that skill?" But he also said, "The trouble with a lot of Hollywood stuff is—I'm so bored with it. James Bond, Tom Cruise—the character of the hero is locked in concrete. He must have a love interest, they must end up in bed, he never talks under torture. The only surprise is whether they're on top of a cliff or under water. 

"But that's great—you've got that hero template, and now I can start messing with it. Maybe, just maybe, you'll play Fable II, and the next time you go to the cinema you'll see one of these heroes and say, You know what? I'd never be able to do that." 

People playing Fable III, as Molyneux explained last summer at GDC Europe in Cologne, will face an entirely new set of choices. Midway through the game, the hero becomes ruler of the kingdom, with all the power and responsibility that entails. To write this part, Molyneux and his team spent a lot of time poring over European history, which has no shortage of potentates making bad moral choices. 

In Milo and Kate—demoed above in a video shown at E3 in June 2009—he wraps the AI around a little boy named Milo. Like Fable III, Milo and Kate relies not on a conventional controller but on the interface he's spent years developing as part of Project Natal: an Xbox 360 peripheral that reads your facial expression and tone of voice as you play. How much does Milo actually "know"? What kind of trouble can a hero-turned-ruler get into? From Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA to Shakespeare's MacBeth, we'll have plenty to talk about at SXSW. 

Avatar: It's All About the Eyes

One of the most intriguing comments I heard while reporting the making of Avatar for Wired came not from James Cameron himself (though there were plenty of those) but from Richie Baneham, the film's animation supervisor. Richie, revered among animators for leading the breakthrough realization of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, was describing his technique for avoiding the "uncanny valley," the weirdly lifeless look that creeped out viewers of earlier performance-capture productions like Beowulf and The Polar Express. “We as human beings will process an image to see if there’s something we need to look at,” he said in his soft Irish brogue, “with an emphasis on finding eyes.” This observation fascinated me: What does it say about us that we're hardwired to seek out these small, photosensitive, very expressive, mostly gelatinous orbs? And what does it mean for the movie? 

There's an obvious evolutionary benefit, of course. That's on display early in the movie, which I saw in 3-D at Friday's New York press screening. Jake's avatar, lost and alone at night in the hostile Pandoran jungle after he's wandered away from his comrades, finally succeeds in lighting a pitch-dipped stick—and realizes to his horror that staring back at him are dozens if not hundreds of eyes. Where there are eyes there are teeth, and these eyes belong to a pack of viperwolves, a particularly vicious Cameron-invented species that's sort of a cross between a hyena, a greyhound, and a meat shredder. Unfortunately, this realization comes too late for Jake to do much about it—barring a miracle, he's not going to survive the night. (Don't worry, there's a miracle: Her name is Neytiri, and she kicks viperwolf butt.) 

But this isn't the first time in the movie that Cameron focuses our attention on eyes. The opening shot is an extreme close-up of Jake (Sam Worthington, seen above in a detail from the French movie poster). What we see is one of his eyes, viewed from above in a clinical fashion, the camera seemingly just inches away. This is followed by an even more discomforting shot of the same eye viewed from the side, so close you can make out the cornea resting atop his iris. It's safe to assume that a lot of what Cameron wants to say in this picture has to do with eyes, or seeing, or both.  

Avatar: The Game: Building a World, or Marketing a Movie?

Ubisoft, developers of Avatar: The Game, are fond of saying that the world of Pandora can be experienced through both their game and James Cameron’s movie. This ability to explore a fictional universe in multiple media and through multiple storylines has been the goal of many failed efforts, most notably Enter The Matrix. So it was up to the team at Ubisoft Montreal, makers of Assassin’s Creed II and Prince of Persia, to assuage the doubts of skeptics and live up to the promises made in their developer diaries. Unfortunately, Avatar: The Game offers all too little insight into Avatar the universe.

It’s no secret that movie tie-in games are generally atrocious. Just this year we’ve had the displeasure of experiencing another round of The Lord Of The Rings games, Terminator Salvation, The Godfather II, Up, and a slew of others. It’s not just that these games were poorly designed and hastily put together; they are also unabashedly derivative. None of them provide more in terms of story than their cinematic counterparts; instead of offering a fresh experience, they expect players to play through a plot they’ve already seen at the theatre. Even the few titles whose developers were given the time and license to provide compelling gameplay—King Kong and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance—fell victim to the issues of poorly constructed games: Their storyline and characters felt all too familiar.

A rare few have succeeded in being more than being a decent clone. The first Riddick game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, not only pushed the boundaries of first-person combat and stealth but created a new story arc separate from, but consistent with, the films. As Riddick, the player could experience first-hand what being a feared, ultra-violent assassin was like without knowing every plot twist. But Starbreeze wasn’t finished there: The developers released another game in the series (the only film-game sequel I can think of besides Star Wars), Assault on Dark Athena, that built on their previous success and added yet more mythology to the Riddick canon.

In 2003, Enter the Matrix had promised to bring the integration of games and film even closer. Conceptually, the idea was brilliant. The writers of The Matrix Reloaded—the second movie in the series—created a subplot that would be seen only in a very peripheral way through the movie. The game put the player in control of the characters introduced in this subplot, letting the player watch the movie’s story unfold from a completely different perspective in an interactive environment. But even great ideas can falter with poor execution. 

How Trans Is Your Media? (Part 2)

If last Wednesday’s program at Future of Television East offered a taste of the deep media future, this past weekend’s Futures of Entertainment 4 at MIT was a full-on banquet. Convened as in the past by Henry Jenkins, who recently left MIT for a deservedly big-deal professorship at USC’s Annenberg School, the two-day conference was an immersive discussion of the prospect that entertainment will no longer be restricted to a single medium—that stories will increasingly be told in multiple formats and engage the audience in a more or less active fashion. In other words, precisely what my book is about. The proceedings inspired a flood of thoughts, some of which I've actually managed to jot down.

The Fallacy of Newness

In his opening keynote, Henry sought to put the subject in historical context. “The focus on newness may mislead us," he said. This bears repeating. People on all sides of the debate about where media is headed seem to assume that what’s now is the way it always was, and what’s new is some kind of radical departure. This is a crippling form of myopia. 

Henry cited multiple examples of transmedia storytelling that long predate the Internet—from Felix the Cat, the early cartoon figure who still adorns a 1920s car dealership near the USC campus, to The Wizard of Oz, which was told not just in a book and the Judy Garland movie but in many other books, a stage musical that included a product placement for Budweiser beer, and a lecture series in which L. Frank Baum, the author, gave a slide-show tour of Oz. Oh, and don't forget the Bible, which for centuries was taught through sermons and stained-glass windows. 

How Trans Is Your Media? (Part 1)

The “deep media” approach to storytelling is clearly gaining momentum. At last year’s Future of Television East conference in New York, the focus was largely on streaming TV services such as Hulu—a good idea and a terrific implementation, but not what you’d call revolutionary. This year the focus was on more profound aspects of TV/Internet convergence: breadth, depth, and interactivity. On Wednesday afternoon I led a discussion called “How to Create Successful Transmedia Franchises” in which executives from rival cable networks outlined plans to present narratives simultaneously on TV and in other media—comics, Web video, online games. This was followed by a “Reinventing Advertising” panel in which executives from ESPN, Cablevision, and Google traded thoughts on such issues as addressability. But it was only when Robert Tercek, president of digital media at the Oprah Winfrey Network, gave his talk on “Televolution” that the central dilemma facing the television industry was starkly and fully expressed: How to make the leap from one-way broadcasting to two-way communication. 

Things got off to a slightly rocky start when I compared the current state of affairs to my first exposure to convergent storytelling: a 1996 Fortune assignment to visit the set of Homicide, where operatives from NBC Interactive were interviewing cast members in character about the job of crime-fighting in Baltimore. "We're peeing in our pants every day,” one of the Interactive folks told me, a tad melodramatically perhaps. "It's just like the ’40s, when television was starting out live." To which one panelist, Syfy president Dave Howe, retorted that he has yet to wet himself once. Okay, point taken: Television has made tremendous strides since the mid-’90s. But it still has a ways to go, as the rest of the afternoon made clear.