Why We Shouldn’t Take Molydeux Seriously

I can’t believe that Molydeux is two years old. Molydeux, for those who don’t know, is a Twitter account which purports to be game designer Peter Molyneux’s postings about overblown, pretentious game design ideas and musings on the state of the games industry. The most recent tweet as of the time of this writing is “Imagine if when you kill someone their death animation loops and ‘burns’ into your screen so you have to watch it for the rest of the game?” It’s funny because Molyneux is known for having an interest in wanting games to be more emotional experiences, and for wanting one to think about the consequences of one’s actions in-game, and because other developers have done similar things–there’s a sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3 in which you’re haunted by the ghost of every single enemy you’ve killed over the course of the game. This tweet is merely taking this idea to its logical, horrible conclusion–a game which actually did this would be terrible. That’s the joke.

Leave it to Kotaku to ruin a good thing.

I’m speaking of Katie Williams’s fawning and oh-so-mysterious profile in Kotaku Australia. I’ve read it three times just to make sure that it’s intended to be read at face value, and I’m pretty sure it is. Chief among the article’s flaws is the fact that it’s written as a profile of the creator–a man who explicitly states that he wishes to remain anonymous. (“…so as not to distract readers from the character he has created,” Williams insists.) It makes everything fairly wishy-washy. The article can’t decide if it’s a profile about someone who does not want a profile written about him, a profile of a fictional character, or–and here is the weakest element of it all–a serious analysis of a joke.

The main theme of Williams’s article is, essentially, that while Molydeux may be a joke, there’s a kernel of truth to it–the sense that maybe Molydeux has some good ideas. She talks about Molydeux’s thousands of fans who want to have competitions where people make games based on the ideas on the Twitter account. At least one game–Goodbye, My Love–has been made about it. Williams is interested in his game design ideas because they somehow resonate, or because they bring to mind some genuine innovations. After all, some people have taken Molydeux’s ideas seriously, not realizing that it’s satire. (Williams, in her blog entry where she posted an extended version of her interview, admits that when she first saw the Twitter account, she “did initially believe him to be the real thing, despite it saying otherwise right there in the bio.”) (Italics in original.)

Goodbye, My Love’s concept is taken from the following tweet: “Game where an asteroid is about to hit earth, the aim is not to stop it but to say goodbye to every family member. You have 120 of them.” The game is exactly that–each round, there’s a bunch of crudely-drawn people, some are pointed out as family members, and you have to touch them to say “goodbye”. If you manage to do it quickly, you move to the next round, otherwise the asteroid hits earth, game over. Williams and Molydeux’s mysterious creator think that the game asks “what is innovation in gaming, anyway?” As the creator puts it, the idea–which seems to warrant an experimental, unusual game–inspired a repetitive, dated game.

But there’s a really obvious thing that is missed here–because, for all that Williams gushes about the account, there isn’t really a sense that she understands that it’s intended to be funny. That, not only did she not originally get that the account is a joke, she might not even get the joke to begin with. Why is the tweet that inspired Goodbye, My Love funny? For one, this is such a cliche videogame plot–”save the earth from a threat from Outer Space” (literally, the plot of Asteroids), but it’s subverted by the fact that the focus of the game isn’t on the world-changing event but on the adventures of some schmuck tearfully saying goodbye to his parents. But more importantly, and something everyone seems to be missing, is the final punchline: “There are 120 of them”. This is a comically large number–we picture the amount of divorces and step-parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, second cousins twice removed to make 120 family members possible. We think of the kind of person who would remember every single one of his 120 family members and cherish every single one enough to make a point of saying goodbye. And we realize that, while the intent of this theoretical game would be to put an emotional, personal spin on a global event, by the very nature of having so many characters that goal is impossible–every one would have to be extremely shallowly drawn, interchangeable. But this is a videogame! And videogames are about collecting stuff! The more the better! The huge amount of family members turns them from people into general collectums, into general goals. That 120 is the number of stars in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy isn’t coincidental, I don’t think.

Williams does not address this at all in her article. She’s too focused on the faux brilliance of the ideas behind the tweets to recognize how bad these ideas are. How unplayable Molydeux’s games would be. Remember, the real Molyneux populates his games with hundreds and hundreds of characters, but such a large number means that any emotional resonance is diluted so strongly as to be meaningless. In Fable III, you can romance any of the numerous townsfolk you see–people who don’t say anything before a few repeated stock phrases and grunts. People whose personality is reduced to a couple of adjectives. They’re interchangeable. There is no emotion to be had here. The tweet that inspired Goodbye, My Love does not bring up interesting theories about possible games to be created as it makes fun of a game that’s already been made. It points out that, no matter what Molyneux’s ambitions are, his bombast and his excesses actually ruin immersion and a personal connection to the games he makes.

There’s a Japanese comedic concept called chindogu which is basically the art of useless inventions. Essentially the goal is to create a product designed to fit a need or solve a problem, but the joke is based on the fact that the invention itself is so unwieldy or awkward or embarrassing that it’s actually worse than the original problem, while making you look silly in the process. To combat the problem faced while shopping in the rain–how do you hold multiple shopping bags AND an umbrella while not getting your purchases wet–there’s an umbrella which has hooks on the inside from which you can hang your shopping. To help women who are unsteady when wearing high heels, there’s a set of training wheels which are on either side of the heel and help balance. A t-shirt with a Battleship-esque grid designed to help when someone’s scratching your back. In all of these cases, while the invention theoretically is a legitimate solution to the problem, it solves it so poorly as to necessitate a trip back to the drawing board. I should add that I’ve never seen a piece of chindogu which solves an actual problem–they’re all designed to address minor inconveniences of everyday life, things most of us don’t really find all that problematic.

The joke is obvious. We tend to shy away from any inconvenience and we believe that if we can find the right product, that it’ll solve all of our problems. If chindogu has a point beyond simple absurd silliness, it’s that we don’t need this solution–it’s that technology doesn’t automatically make our lives easier. Molydeux’s pronouncements are the chindogu of the videogame world. While his tweets address issues such as emotional resonance and a desire to make games that are deeper than simple space shooters–concerns that not only the real Molyenux but many other designers share–they address them in such a poor and flawed manner. “There are 206 bones in the human body? Imagine, just imagine a 206 multiplayer game where each person controls a bone?” is an innovative way of doing multiplayer games, it’s one that forces co-operation and social connections, and gives a definite nontraditional gaming setting–and also is useless because such a huge crowd of people will make detailed communication and coordination nearly impossible, will make it difficult to foster social connections, and last time I checked, most of the bones in our body weren’t particularly active agents. The idea undermines itself.

There’s one tweet that I think is the key to Molydeux’s message, and this is a tweet that’s surprisingly out of character given the rest of the bombastic pronouncements: “In the Shigeru Miyamoto classic, SMBros, why are there tortoises that throw hammers? No Reason. Sometimes, ‘No reason’ is just ‘fun’.” Molydeux doesn’t ask us to consider what innovation really is, or that some of his ideas might have a grain of interest to them. The account is, essentially, an attack on designing games by Theory. I’ve said that playing Fable III made me feel like there was an excellent game underneath MOLYNEUX’S INNOVATIONS–that if the game had toned itself down, made less of a point about its menus, less of a point about how you can have shallow interactions with everyone, it would have been a much stronger, much more interesting story. One of Molydeux’s favorite targets is CliffyB and Gears of War–he makes fun of the series any chance he gets. And yet, while I’m not a particular fan of that series, I’d say they’re better games than Fable, because they’re not trying to be as grandiose. Fable attempts to do more, but it fails at it. Gears of War succeeds at being a much simpler game. Essentially, Molydeux is a warning to developers what they sound like when they try to put too much Theory in the forefront, when they forget to keep in mind what makes a good game.

I had a job where someone had forwarded an email to the effect of, “10 Real Wacky Japanese Inventions”. It was a top ten of pictures of some chindogu. “I can’t believe that they actually invented that,” someone said, showing me a feather duster with an attached cocktail shaker, designed to mix up martinis as you dusted.

Always the spoilsport, I said, “You know that’s not real, right, like it’s done as a joke?”

She looked at me, then back at the screen, and shrugged. “Here’s a fan you attach to your chopsticks to cool down your noodles.” She wasn’t interested in knowing that this was all done as a joke–she was too stuck at “Those wacky Japanese.”

And that’s where I find Katie Williams’s article to be. It’s unaware of why Molydeux is funny and it’s only vaguely aware that it even is funny. In a way, the article itself exposes its own flaws. When you can’t reveal who you’re profiling, when you’re not sure what the focus of your article is, when you don’t understand what you’re writing about–you’re not going to have a particularly good read.

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