Extra Lives (24 page)

MOLYNEUX:
That’s fantastic!

TCB:
I have to say,
Fable II
probably made me laugh more than any other game.

MOLYNEUX:
Oh, thank you.

TCB:
At the beginning of the game, for instance, I was breaking all the crates and wondering why I wasn’t finding anything in them. Then that one load screen comes up and says, “Breaking crates is good fun, but you don’t think someone would actually
hide
anything in one, do you?” When I read that, and laughed, I wondered, Is
comedy
the great untapped game genre?

MOLYNEUX:
I remember that crate moment; it’s a funny thing you should mention it. There’s a lot of debate and talking and doubt when you create a game, and that crate moment is very interesting. I can remember us saying, “Well, we want to put loads of stuff in the crates.” And I was saying, “Why do we want to put stuff in crates? We all know there’s no stuff in crates. Are you really going to ask people to go ‘round breaking every single crate? That’s not a game. That’s tedium. Let’s just make people laugh with that one sentence.” I think it’s fantastic that that worked. And now I’ve forgotten your question.

TCB:
Is comedy the untapped game genre.

MOLYNEUX:
I think it’s so rare to make people laugh in any form of entertainment. When you’re in a pub, and you play that game, “What’s your favorite film?”—it’s easy to say what your favorite horror film is, what your favorite action film is, but your favorite comedy? That’s tough.

TCB:
Are you a Monty Python fan, by any chance?

MOLYNEUX:
Monty Python is fantastic. You can see the influence of Python on
Fable
.

TCB:
Yes.

MOLYNEUX:
The best humor is the humor you come and discover, like the crate joke. I hope, if there are any ideals we stick to in the
Fable
universe, I hope that humor is one of them. But comedy is very, very hard to do. We’ve got someone called Mark Hill who is absolutely, blindingly good. He’s responsible for an awful lot of the dialogue. Someone else named Richard Bryant, who’s actually an American writer, is responsible for a lot of it as well. This isn’t something directed by me. I don’t say, “Okay, we’re at Funny Level Fifteen, let’s take it to Seventeen.” It’s something that comes very naturally to those guys.

TCB:
I know a lot of people talk about
Fable
and other games as having “moral choices,” but what I liked about
Fable II
was that it seemed more interested in questions surrounding matters of moral choice rather than the specific moral choices themselves. The game encourages you to be bad, doesn’t it?

MOLYNEUX:
It
tempts
you to be bad.

TCB:
Okay. So you would say—

MOLYNEUX:
That
’s the theme. The
temptation
to be bad. Originally, when I first came up with the idea of doing a game that lets you be good or evil, I expected everyone to be evil. But the reverse is true. It’s quite fascinating how it is
very
country-specific—the percentage of people who are good and bad. Americans, fascinatingly, have the highest percentage of good guys.

TCB:
Really?

MOLYNEUX:
I would have thought the opposite. A slightly constrained society, the American Dream, and all that. I would have thought there’d be some rebels.

TCB:
We actually believe our own delusions.

MOLYNEUX:
Yeah, I know! When we delved into it deeper, we asked a lot of psychologists why these trends were, and the theory was: Although you guys do have this American Dream, Americans feel more constrained by the thought of, “Well, there’s no way I can even
tempt
myself by being evil. That would be really, really bad.” Whereas people like the English are much more willing to play the multiple mass murderer and lesbian bigamist.

TCB:
I used to very reliably play the “good” path in games and then go back and play the “bad” path. But now my play style is erratic, because I’m more interested in how games
respond
to these choices.

MOLYNEUX:
I think that was, a little bit, one of the failures of
Fable II
. You kind of felt like you had to go back and play it again—and it’s never going to work on the second play-through. You’re never going to enjoy it as much. It’s actually going to muddy those memories you’ve got of the game and the story if you play through it again.

TCB:
I have to say, the one part where I couldn’t do the “bad” thing was during the profoundly troubling Tattered Spire sequence, where you have the choice to torture people and put your friend out of his misery. I just could not do either thing. And I was so happy you put that stuff in there.

MOLYNEUX:
That was going to be a lot, lot stronger, but it had to be weakened down for all the obvious political reasons. There’s always this thought that, “Hey, the good guy never caves under torture, never caves under pressure,” and I really wanted to push you and test you on that, and I really wanted you to feel like you were sacrificing something there.

TCB:
How real were the consequences for not killing your friend? I mean, I know I lost permanent experience points by not killing him, but—

MOLYNEUX:
You lost experience points, but we should have taken more experience, actually. We chickened out there. It was quite harrowing at one point. You had someone who was strapped to this machine and you were going to be asked to torture him, using these different devices. I wanted to get you to say, “No, I can’t bring myself to do that.”

TCB:
Was cutting that out an internal decision or an external decision?

MOLYNEUX:
This was the time when the world was in that topsy place where torture was even more politically sensitive, so we cut that out. The one that I found the most interesting, probably, if we’d done it a little better, was the bit where you had to beg for mercy when the Commandant was saying, “Beg! Beg again!” I think we could have done more with that, because it was just words. It wasn’t beating or not beating people. It had the potential to be a lot more powerful. You watch film after film where good guys never beg for mercy. But how far do I have to push you before you beg for mercy?

TCB:
For the record, I begged right away.

MOLYNEUX:
And so you realized that what you had lost there was a little bit of your own self-respect.

TCB:
Can we talk a bit more about the Tattered Spire sequence? I don’t tend to read very much about games before I play them, because I want them to be fresh, so the Tattered Spire sequence I came to late at night, with no idea that it was coming. I see on the screen this amazing
MANY YEARS LATER
part title and suddenly I’m training to be an evil soldier in the Tattered Spire, with all my spells and weapons and clothing and items taken from me, and, my god, my
head
shaved—I mean, this is just not something you see in games. Ever. It was a total confounding of expectation.
Many years later?
What I loved about it was that it seemed—and this is going to sound a little pretentious—but it seemed a really brave aesthetic decision to have made.

MOLYNEUX:
There were a lot of fights over that sequence.

TCB:
I bet.

MOLYNEUX:
But it felt like that.

TCB:
Brave?

MOLYNEUX:
A little. I wanted it to be even more emotional than it ended up being, because the whole point of it was upsetting the rhythm of the story. You had had all this success of finding Hammer and you had gone through the Arena, and you felt like a big, tough hero. And I wanted to strip everything away from you and
say, “Hang on a second. You’re not that big, you’re not invincible, and every fight you face you aren’t necessarily going to win.” It worked to a certain extent, so it’s fantastic to hear that you responded to it.

TCB:
I loved it. My personal belief is that what makes works of art great is often what is weird and kind of flawed about them. And what I admire and appreciate about someone like Hideo Kojima is his eccentric insistence on forty-eight-minute-long cut scenes. I don’t care if they don’t “work.” It seems like a personal vision. And that’s what the Tattered Spire sequence felt like to me: a vision realized, convention and consequence be damned.

MOLYNEUX:
I would love to talk to you about this other thing we’re working on—but I can’t—because you’ll hear about this talk of “twenty-two minutes.” And you’re going to hear this soon. Why is it twenty-two minutes? It’s something that happens in twenty-two minutes. It’s not logical; it’s something in my mind. When you see the announcement, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

TCB:
I won’t press you—though I really, really want to. One of the people I’ve talked to while working on this is Jonathan Blow.

MOLYNEUX:
Yes.

TCB:
Do you agree with him that the forward progression of story and the “friction force” of challenge create structurally unsound narrative? That games can’t tell stories in a certain sense because they’re built on a flawed edifice?

MOLYNEUX:
I don’t know if I agree with that.

TCB:
I don’t know if I agree, either, but it’s a very interesting argument.

MOLYNEUX:
It is. You know, the thing about
Braid:
I loved it, I loved the atmosphere, I loved the visions, the softness of it. It kind of felt like a piece of silk you could run your hands through. It was a lovely, lovely game. But here’s the thing that didn’t work for me: It got so tough that my need and want to experience more of its world was absolutely challenged by my feeling that I wasn’t clever enough. I hit this cerebral brick wall where I kept going back to find out more about the world, feeling more and more stupid. After a while, I thought,
This game is dumb
. Now I think I was wrong, by the way. But this was another fight we had in
Fable
, which is about the death mechanic.

TCB:
Fable II
has an unusually forgiving death mechanic. A lot of people accused the game of being too easy.

MOLYNEUX:
If you’re writing a game, why is it in so many games—even in games I’ve done—when the player dies, you ask the player to go back and reexperience what they’ve experienced before? Why do we do that? It just makes us feel stupid, and dumb, and we forget what the story is. We don’t care about the characters anymore. Some guy is telling me what I need to do again, and I want to
kill
him if he tells me one more time! I think that’s…well, thinking about story and narrative and gameplay, they should have a beat and rhythm that work together. You shouldn’t have gameplay being this one big thing shouting, “I’m more important than you!” They should work together, in concert. And if they do, then what I really want you to feel is fantastic about the narrative and the rhythm of the story
and
feel fantastic
as a player. It’s what
you’re
feeling, not what I’m feeling as a designer. That’s what’s important: what you’re feeling.

TCB:
Do you follow the indie game scene? A lot of the game writers I’ve met here seem to think that the indie game scene is the future.

MOLYNEUX:
The funny thing is, we’ve been here as an industry before. Three years ago, these guys didn’t exist. They weren’t here. The entry level into the industry was so enormously high. If you asked me how to get into the game industry three years ago, I would have said, “Go to university, get a top degree, then go to work as a junior coder or designer and maybe in seven years’ time you’ll be a lead designer on a game.” Now I can say to you, “Get a friend, smoke lots of dope, go in a room, come out when you’ve got a really good idea, and release it on Xbox Live Arcade.” And you know what? That’s where I was twenty years ago. I was one of those guys twenty years ago. I was doing a game called
Populous
. I was in a room. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know, really, anything about game design, or much of anything about programming, and I sort of came up with this concept. So yes, some of those people are going to be the future, but I don’t think you can look even at
Braid
and think,
This is the future of games
. It’s just one aspect of it.

TCB:
I went to the Hideo Kojima lecture this morning, and he showed slides from the first
Metal Gear
game and then the most recent, and seeing those images in such close proximity made me realize, “My god—we’ve gone from petroglyphic rock art to the Sistine Chapel in twenty years!”

MOLYNEUX:
I’m going to sell this hard, because I love what I do and I love this industry. Here’s what’s even more amazing: If I were to draw on the wall what a computer-game character was just twenty years ago it would be made up of sixteen-by-sixteen dots, and that’s it. We’ve gone from that to daring to suggest we can represent the human face. And pretty much everything we’ve done, we’ve
invented
. There wasn’t this technology pool that we pulled it out of. Ten, fifteen years ago, you couldn’t walk into a bookshop and learn how to do it. There weren’t any books on this stuff. They did not exist. Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? No. We had to invent architecture first. We had to quarry the stones. We had to invent the paint. That really is
amazing
. Think of word processors and spreadsheets and operating systems—they’re all kind of the same as they were fifteen years ago. There is not another form of technology on this planet that has kept up with games. The game industry marches on in the way it does because it has this dream that, one day, it’s going to be real. We’re going to have real life. We’re going to have real characters. We’re going to have real drama. We’re going to change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before.