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Games Industry and Peter Molyneaux
chastity1337
Member Posts: 1,608 Arc User
in Ten Forward
I hope Ten Forward is the right place for this.
I was, out of the blue, curious about what happened to Peter Molyneaux, so I went digging. And I found an article from 2015 that I found truly profound, not for what it says about Peter, but for what it says about the state of the games industry. Yes, it was written 5 years ago, but I think it's even more true today. Everywhere I go, in all the MMO forums, I see a vast discontent among gamers, and this piece has something to say about the causes of that, though the author thinking that "premium mobile games" are the future of gaming made me want to vomit. Then again, eh, it was 2015, before Blizzard fell on their own sword with their Diablo mobile announcement at Blizzcon 2018...
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyneux/
I was, out of the blue, curious about what happened to Peter Molyneaux, so I went digging. And I found an article from 2015 that I found truly profound, not for what it says about Peter, but for what it says about the state of the games industry. Yes, it was written 5 years ago, but I think it's even more true today. Everywhere I go, in all the MMO forums, I see a vast discontent among gamers, and this piece has something to say about the causes of that, though the author thinking that "premium mobile games" are the future of gaming made me want to vomit. Then again, eh, it was 2015, before Blizzard fell on their own sword with their Diablo mobile announcement at Blizzcon 2018...
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyneux/
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Rosedale envisioned Second Life as a virtual environment where all kinds of things could be done without the usual pigeonholes that suppress creativity, to be judged on what you know instead of who you know, and allow your inner (and theoretically more creative) self to interact with others instead of the external self others impose by tradition and stereotype.
It worked for a while and hit its peak somewhere around 2007-2008 when it had a lot of educators, small businesses, and even a realworld embassy or two on the grid, and was poised to make the leap to the concept of the hypergrid, where it would not just be a single company hosting it, but rather a community of companies and cooperatives all interconnected like the internet itself.
That vision came apart in the face of the same kind of short term money machine thinking the article talks about, driven both on the corporate side by the bean counters worried that it might impact the bottom line and by a vocal subset of the merchants on the grid pushing for real-world identification and all the hoops and boxes that Rosedale was trying to keep out of the creative process.
The company stopped trying for the big picture and firmly settled into a walled garden approach instead, which made it hard for the other grids since most people stuck with Second Life after putting so much time and effort into their characters and projects there and the grids in general have been only slowly growing since.
The rest of the gaming industry has not been hit quite as hard on the idea level though they are getting more formulaic and risk-averse as the pool of funds tightens and the player demographics shifts as it grows away from the hardcore gamer whales that once made up the majority of gamers.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
And yet the aversion to that is part of the same small-minded thinking that phoenixc is talking about. I despise people who go around trying to "clean up" every last corner of the internet. In doing so they play right into the hands of the NWO/corp-rats who seek to bring every last tiny corner of the globe under their iron rule, extinguishing the last few sparks of independence and creativity left in this fallen world.
Well, Smoke, that's an interesting comment. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "THAT guy".
Guru Larry is a YouTuber that makes humorous list videos about a variety of gaming industry topics, and for some reason he likes to insult Peter Molyneux ("THAT guy") at least once in almost every video. I can't link the video here due to language, but if you search "guru larry peter molyneux" on YouTube you can find a video called "5 times Peter Molyneux was an TRIBBLEhole", I think that's the only video where Larry actually takes time to discuss Molyneux instead of randomly making fun of him.
Yea. Peter's pretty much a bean counter who THINKS he has any brains, but he does not.
I would point out that being wildly innovative and creative, and being a TRIBBLEhole, are by no means mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible for one person to be both.
I don't know what Molyneaux is today, time can change people, but he was once a very innovative designer. Black & White, (the first one), and The Movies were both wildly innovative games for their era, and I spent vast amounts of time playing both of them.
As far as Guru Larry, well. It's easier by far to criticize the creative efforts of other people than it is to be creative yourself. And I have a personal rule that I don't waste my time with list videos.