Other Peter Molyneux STIR lecture 19th Nov

So, I went to a lecture by Peter Molyneaux last night as part of Design London which runs monthly lectures about various topics on design in general. He was talking about god games and how he developed the genre.

It was interesting at a lay-level, but unfortunately considering the amount of academics there, shrank back from any kind of deep discussion. One thing I was frustrated about was the fact that throughout his talk he spoke about a common thread making his games so popular: people playing the game wanted to believe in the humans depicted. From Populous onward, players ascribed much more complex motivations behind the actions of these little sprite than their programmed imperative, and this basically made their actions more believable. When it came to question time I asked him whether, given that this is a common thread through his games, and obviously the behavioural models have increased in complexity, does he see a point where the amount of behavioural modelling happening serves not to engage the player, but push them away, mentioning the Uncanny Valley as an analogy. Big mistake. He latched onto that phrase and merely talked about visual representations of humans in games. Very disappointing. It seemed to be the case in every question asked: a question about referencing religion in games gave an answer about censorship in general focusing on sex and violence, but not a single mention of religion.

Overall though, there were some interesting titbits. He talked about the huge wave of hype surrounding Black & White and Fable, and said that due to his role first and foremost being a designer, a lot of the time he would be talking about his aims and suddenly get a flash of inspiration which he would talk about there and then, without ever having done any work about that in the game. Of course, then he mentioned the project Lionhead is working on currently, and said "we hope to build somewhere or someone, we can't tell you yet which, that if you believe is genuinely living, we will have succeeded", so obviously he hasn't yet quite learned to shut his mouth

(also there was free beer and food)

So! anyway. Don't suppose anyone else went to this? Thoughts? Thoughts on PM in general?