by Tom Bissell
Because I could not say this better, and because I admire Metal Gear Solid 4 more than I enjoy playing it, I found I had no way into discussing its gameplay other than by cribbing Alexander’s extremely persuasive analysis of what it means.
I had a related problem with Fable II, another game I deeply and genuinely admire. When the time came for me to write about it, however, I froze. I could never find a solid place from which to explore a game for which I mostly felt admiration. This was especially disappointing because Fable II’s legendary designer, Sir Peter Molyneux, was kind enough to grant me an interview at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Fable II is an open-world fantasy RPG that allows you to quest, pose for sculptures, get married, have children, get gay married, cheat on your spouse, use condoms, get sexually transmitted diseases, get fat, slim down, own a dog, find treasure, buy houses, teach your dog tricks, gamble, work as a bartender, fight, learn spells, pay bards to sing epic songs of your exploits, chop wood, decorate your house, save the world, and kill a friend. Fable II’s refusal to traffic in video-game clichés (its final boss fight is one of the most swiftly and unexpectedly resolved in game history), its mischievousness (rarely has any game with a “bad–good” behavior mechanic made being bad so guiltlessly fun), and its sense of humor (“Why,” one aristocratic woman said when my female character sexually propositioned her, “I haven’t done that sort of thing since my dormitory days!”) make it, without question, a game of rarefied formal sophistication—a strange claim to make for a game that uses a cartoony “expression wheel” as its character-to-character interface. In short, when you want to “talk” to someone in Fable II, you hold down a button, bring up the expression wheel, select which “emotion” you would like to communicate (happiness, aggression, playfulness, amorousness), and then select a distinct expression of that emotion (laughing, muscle-flexing, farting, bedroom eyes). Communication in Fable II is thus largely gestural, the audacity of which is especially daring when one considers the difficulty video games have had with using gesture as a meaningful element of the game experience.
What held me back from finally loving Fable II in the heedless way I love other, less admirable games, I am not certain. I went into my interview with Molyneux—one of the nicest and most intelligent people I met while researching this book—hoping, in part, to get an answer. I am not sure I got one. But I did discover why Molyneux’s reputation as one of the few undisputed geniuses of game design undersells him if it does anything at all.
What follows is a lightly abridged transcript of our conversation.
TCB: Down at the expo hall this morning I was playing Resident Evil 5 and thinking a lot about the benefits and deficits of photorealistic representation—that is, the problems and solutions photorealism creates for games—and I realized that one of the many things that bugs me about Resident Evil 5 is that the quality of the representation graphically is inconsistent with the cartoonish results you get when you’re shooting people, which is what the whole game is based around. Enemies just go flying like Looney Tunes characters. Then I thought of Fable II, which is, representationally, a realistic game—storybook realism, I would say—but which also has this wonderfully unrealistic expression wheel. Somehow, though, the gamer never senses this same kind of dissonance. Could you speak to how you walked that line?
MOLYNEUX: When we first started with the Fable franchise we looked around for a visual style that wouldn’t be too exact. It’s not just the pixels on the screen; as you say, it’s the animation, it’s the speech, it’s the timing, it’s the fighting—all of those things have to come together. We’re very close to realism, but the closer we are, the further we are away, weirdly enough. So the visual style we picked for the first Fable was Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, which had that same kind of mixture. It’s almost abstract; the colors are a little bit brighter. I think that, subconsciously, that keeps you from thinking, Hey, that person’s eyebrows are not moving in the right way. When we came to Fable II, we looked around for a bit of a change in that visual style, but not to go too far over that line. We chose a film called Brotherhood of the Wolf. Again, you look at it and you know that maybe this never was a place you could go to or visit, but it was close enough to reality that you weren’t estranged by it.
TCB: So would you agree with the idea that when realism is the goal, it also becomes the problem?
MOLYNEUX: Absolutely, it is. To really achieve realism, what you’re dealing with, when it comes down to it, is something called neurolinguistic programming. There are hundreds of thousands of tiny little messages that our brains are picking out from faces, the environment, the lighting, the time of day, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, which gives us, at best, a sense of reality. And whilst we’re making strides to achieve that in games—and I have no doubt we will achieve that—we are still a ways off. Some people call it the Uncanny Valley. I don’t think the Uncanny Valley exists if you choose the right stage. If you chose the wrong stage…it’s like trying to cast a Shakespearean play with cats. It doesn’t work. One of the things you’ve got to remember is that games are made by people who are, first, computer-game developers. It has taken the film industry and the television industry and the theater decades and decades and decades to get some principles right. The problem we had with Fable II, and it is a problem a lot of games have, is that when you come to the “story,” you have to wait, because there’s all this technology that’s being created. You have to create your scripting engine, you have to create your environments, you have to create your gameplay, you have to create your controls…you’re going away all along, and all of that stuff is not finished until, probably, two months before the end. Well, guess what? That’s when you’ve got to start editing your story, and that’s just not enough time.
TCB: It’s a weird process.
MOLYNEUX: It’s a very weird process. It’s kind of like trying to shoot a film and spending 90 percent of your time making the set and 10 percent of the time shooting the actors. In film they shoot a huge amount of footage and edit that down. In Fable VV, what we did was, first, realize that we were really rubbish at telling stories. Then we found this director who was willing to actually talk to us about staging. And that was: You have a script. You have some actors. You figure out how to position them and what their gestures are going to be and how they will behave and where certain things are going to happen. We hired a soundstage, a place called Shepperton, and went into a huge white room, put all the actors in there, gave them all the script, sat back, and watched this director direct all this stuff. And, my god, it was just an amazing moment when we realized that the nuances we were trying to communicate, the emotion we were trying to get into our characters, was driven solely and purely by dialogue. And a lot of what we had written would have worked much better on the radio than it would have on the screen. This director would say, “Right, let’s have this person walk here, and let’s ask this actor, ‘What would you do if you just heard this piece of news?’” Watching the actors improvise and get into the characters was an incredible experience. We did that for the entirety of the story, so that we could feel what the story was like before it was implemented in the game. What we discovered—which was quite amazing and is so true about a lot of video games—is that the story we had written was so wordy, and so slow-paced and turgid, that a lot of the dialogue we could rip out. We already had a lot of the emotion. We didn’t have to ram it down the audience’s throat. As human beings, we’re used to getting a feel of what people are thinking by their gestures, but now we’re using that technique in games and in a position to achieve something very special.
TCB: The use of the expression wheel is a way around needing huge amounts of dialogue, then?
MOLYNEUX: The expression wheel is a way for the player to emote, but I’m not terribly happy with it. There’s an enormous amount more that could be done with it. The way it works is that it cuts down on the necessity of dialogue, yes, but the way it did
n’t work was when it did not provide the right emotional connection and came across as a little bit trivial. The great thing about it is the stories people were able to make up in their own minds about what they were doing. I’ll give you an example. There was this journalist that came in about two hours ago who was talking about something that happened to him and his wife while they were playing Fable II, and it was all to do with the child they had had in the game. They went off adventuring and came back to see their son for the first time. And so they thought, “What expression should we do for this child?” This child was saying, “Mommy, Mommy—you’re home! Where have you been?” So they decided to make the little kid laugh and tried to do the “sock puppet” expression. But they messed it up in doing it, picked the wrong expression, and ended up punching the air. Their kid got really scared and said, “Mommy, don’t hurt me!” That moment became unbelievably emotional for them. And that, I think, is where the expression wheel worked, because it allowed people to make their own stories up without it being totally encapsulated by what I wanted to do. And that is an amazing place for us to get to.
TCB: I can tell you that when I played Fable II I became a slutty lesbian bigamist who had tons of children, all of whom I abandoned.
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 figh
ts 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.