Peter Molydeux may not be a real person, but he has some very real ideas about the future of game design.
"You know, my dream for gaming is in one game you'll shoot someone, and then in a game of, say 'FIFA,' you'll see their son crying," writes Molydeux. "Until developers think outside the box, we're going downhill."
Molydeux himself is an idea for a new age, a fictitious game developer brought to life through social media. Created by an anonymous industry insider in late 2009, Molydeux began life as a Twitter parody of luminary game designer Peter Molyneux.
The man behind such classic games as "Populous," "Black and White" and "Fable," the real Molyneux is famous within industry circles for proposing brilliantly ambitious titles that often fall short of their promised high-concept ideas. At its outset, the Molydeux Twitter account provided pitch-perfect send-ups of Molyneux's design philosophy in 140 characters or less.
The pitches themselves are outlandish. One, for example, reads, "You play as a small boy with a remote control helicopter that is alive and your friend, then you discover a nuclear missile inside it."
What readers quickly discovered, however, was that many of the questions Molydeux's tweets presented were not only clever, but legitimate.
One such tweet ponders, "Why are bosses mostly big? What if the final boss was merely a cunning ant? As designers, we need to challenge the 'rules' more often." In a way, Molydeux became the video game equivalent of Stephen Colbert, using bombastic satire to poke at the uncomfortable truths of the industry.
As Molydeux has pointed out on multiple occasions, one of the most popular games in the world in 1978 was "Space Invaders," in which players hid behind cover and shot at oncoming aliens.
Thirty-four years later, the pinnacle of videogame innovation is "Gears of War," in which players...hide behind cover and shoot at oncoming aliens. If one were to look to videogames for a representation of the human experience, they would probably come away with the assumption that it consists primarily of shooting dudes in the face.
The irony is that the anonymous designer behind Molydeux actually worked on "Gears of War."
In a certain sense, the story of Molydeux's creator reveals a systemic flaw in the structure of modern game development. He is clearly an incredibly creative individual, and yet the games he has worked on—"Gears of War," "Kinectimals" and "Saints Row" are a few that he has admitted to—read like a laundry list of exactly the kind of generic titles his character deplores.
"I think most game designers can think up ideas on tap," he admitted in a rare out-of-character interview.
The problem is that the realities of creating a big-budget studio game often seem pitted against innovation. As the technology behind games has become more advanced, the resources needed to create them have increased exponentially. As game budgets balloon into the tens of millions of dollars, publishers have become less and less willing to fund an idea that is not a proven success. Worse, when over a thousand people can work on any one game, it is often difficult for any individual developer—even one as creative as Molydeux—to get his or her ideas through to the final product.
"It wouldn't surprise me if some professional designers are really envious," Molydeux's creator admits. "I can just think up any idea without caring if it works or not, and instantly put it up there for thousands of people to read."
As it turns out, they were envious. Motivated by Molydeux's example, Anna Kipnis—lead programmer at Double Fine Productions—proposed an idea for a game jam in which developers from the San Francisco area would come together to build games inspired by the satirist's tweets over the course of a weekend.
Once shared on the Internet, the modest proposal tapped a nerve within the development community.
Within days, more than 30 events were planned in different cities spanning the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to Tel Aviv. In the end, more than 1,000 individual developers took part in the festival—which came to be known as "What Would Molydeux?"—and produced more than 300 complete, playable games.
Obviously, not all of the games are good, and only a few show any kind of polish. They were made in a weekend, after all. Nevertheless, the creativity on display is astonishing across the board.
One developer created a game with a neurotically needy title screen that doesn't want you to leave it to play the game. Another created a romantic parkour game where two players must hold hands by sharing one controller between them. And yes, someone even made a game about a boy and his nuclear helicopter.
In a way, What Would Molydeux? represents a return to form for an industry that has gotten off track over the years. In the days of the original Nintendo, a game could be created by a single individual who produced code, art and sound by him- or herself. With a single artistic vision and the freedom to experiment, small developers created some amazing things. What Would Molydeux? allowed frustrated developers to get back to experimenting with game design and embrace the freedom inherent in being able to see a game design through from start to finish. The results speak for themselves.
Clearly, Peter Molydeux is just the hole in the dike. The video game industry is full of incredibly creative and talented people whose ideas are largely being ignored because of the corporate realities of the business. The mysterious man behind the tweets may have been the first developer to seek a new outlet for his creativity, but, as the game jam shows, he will not be the last.
Hundreds of artists work on any given game. How about we start letting them make art?