Sketchy notes

.. from Peter Molyneux's talk on his stuff, and Jonathan Smith's talk on Lego Star Wars. Both guys were talking freely, no presentations or notes, so forgive them any repetition and forgive me lots of gaps - take this verbatim and I take your head off.

Gives you a nice flavour of the thinking though. Both forms are very creative play, and both games (The Movies and Lego Star Wars) are exemplary titles that are paving the way for something so much more interactive than just shooting things. (I know The Movies isn't out yet, but I've seen enough of it now to know it's at the top of its pile.)

Peter Molyneux:
What are games? You may presume they’re played by 12-15 year olds. Well that was 1989. We were 2-4 people in a bedroom making games then, there were games like Toilet Invaders, Zombie Massacre.. those were the days of crude graphics and concepts that wouldn’t appeal to many outside that very hardcore audience of gamers.

We thought, "this’ll be like skateboarding, it’ll be there for a few years then it’ll disappear". But this industry is a $35bn worldwide industry now. Teams are now 100-200 people large. We’re trying to make these games mass market, and in part by making games of films and TV series...anything we can turn our attention to in society, and this is expanding the market.

Now we’ve got the next-gen coming, and Sony and Microsoft selling us this new technology. They’re trying to sell us realism - but they‘ve been doing that for years actually. However, games are beginning to realise that we can entertain people in very DIFFERENT ways to any other medium.

Next-gen concepts include:

• clear concepts,
• more accessibility,
• simpler to understand,
• deeper interaction,
• play and experiment,
• player’s agenda

– we can tailor the experience to what the user wants. You’re watching a film? You have no input. You listen to other people’s stories, or news. You read books. But we give you worlds, a world you can mess around with, and it’ll be in some sense a reflection of what you’re like, as you.

Pretty much every single console and PC will be permanently connected online in the next gen. You’ll play, see people, invite people in.. and here’s another side. When you play a game, some will give you the ability to create. Something you’re proud of and want to show off to your friends. People having the ability to change the experience that they had - and create a new experience.

Imagine what doing the game of a film in the future will be – the film becomes the scene setting for the game? You will have a Spider-Man game say – this is an example that might not happen, of course, just an example – you go into the world in the setting and you have freedom to do whatever you want. TV series too. Can we do the game of Desperate Housewives? Load of housewives having affairs – not enough nakedness in my opinion – well, we can easily give you the set and the characters to play around with...

Jonathan Smith:
Some games are like appendages, flapping off the movie. We came from the Lego place. We started this game when a group from the videogame industry went to the Lego company, which is an amazing global business based in Denmark that has been making playthings for 75 years. The knowledge they’ve accumulated in play makes them experts…

The particular idea they’ve built on is the Lego system of play, the plastic bricks (45 years old), and the minifigs (which are 27 years old). The bricks could become anything, with your imagination. That has become so much a part of Lego’s function and culture that it was a privilege to join and muck around with those people, we had a very playful relationship!

We needed to translate that “Legoness” into videogames… as players, we knew that there was a connection between good games and some of those things in that Lego experience. We’ve been drawn to it as children. Videogame developers all have Lego sets on their desks - the playing, the taking part, the building, the imaginative engineering .. and the process of building games and playing games, the play experience. There are connections there.

It’s easy to talk in vague terms.. and that was one of the dangers that befell us, we fell into that trap. Lego is a cultural institution, and it had a way of talking about what it is.. it could become jargonised. A certain rhetoric comes into force. Sometimes this acts as a barrier. We fell into that trap as well, talking in terms that pleased the company but didn’t actually mean much sometimes.

One of the qualities I value most is playfulness. Kids… kids like fun.. "let’s make a fun game", we said, well that didn’t get us anywhere either. What are the things in most games that kids like or don’t like - how fun is it to die all the time? And to do things again and again? When we looked at how kids were playing, we looked at what were the things in games that made them bored? What would engage them? We started to formulate some hypotheses about what kind of  features we should put in that would be more appealing.

So that’s the abstract, research component. Increasingly we translated our experiences into something ongoing… it was our view that the existing Lego games were increasingly unsatisfactory in terms of delivering the true Lego experience.
We learned a lot from those games .. we were lucky, we got to start  a game from scratch, which is not the experience for most people in the industry. So we were there from the very very start, we got to distill some of the work that we’d already done, and we tried to say "what kind of video games could you have with Lego?"

Variety was going to be important, because Lego can be anywhere. It had to be colourful, and crucially a rich world full of things you can interact with. You can have a world presented to you in a game that looks very lifelike, and that is full of detail, but when you move around in it you often find there’s only limited things you can do in that place. Limited permitted interactions. That’s usually a technical necessity by the way.

So we set out deliberately to create a world that was less limiting. Lego was always there for you to play with. Whenever people talk about Lego, they always use their hands, it’s a tactile thing. So there were a number of different ideas we had, and we reached a point where everyone playing it enjoyed it and was happy, but we came to the realisation that there was no reason for anyone to buy it. What’s the purpose? We didn’t have any connection with the audience. We needed to engage people and then bring them in. Someone said.. well.. Star Wars?

At that instant so many of the ideas we’d been laboriously poring over really crystallised. We were able to create an experience driven by play: you’re engaged by the story, there’s a narrative, but within that world you can have action and battles, and in the pure Lego world concepts become abstract, building is an end to itself. But children need a reason over time to build. Their imagination can be fired by the drama of the good vs evil confrontation between Obi-wan and Anakin. The simple kinetic excitement of the spaceships above Coruscant.

When we went to Lucas at the start, their initial response was, well we’re already doing star wars games. We had to emphasis the Lego experience, just how special this is going to be. This isn’t the game of the movie. This is the game where you play with the movie.

If one is in reality one has to play by the rules of reality. There’s another category of game that doesn’t take place in reality.. something like Mario, a world of pure game.. there is no relationship with the real world. By pushing more toward that way we felt we had permission to do something that wouldn’t have occurred to us if we’d been trammelled in the more conventional sense.

<snip>

I had to stop there because I really was clattering away and being distracting, but also, at this point Jonathan started to play with the game as he talked, and it was all too shiny.

Then I went home and played Lego Star Wars, because I am that easily swayed.

 

Comments

[SharD]

The Movies has looked like an excellent idea from Day 1. It's just a shame that it's a Molyneux project, and therefore either going to thrill our souls or leave our hearts broken and bleeding as it comes so close but ultimately fails to deliver!

And I agree, Lego ro><

[Rossignol]

Jonathon Smith is the nicest man in the games industry, it's true.