Peter Molyneux has too much faith in the goodness of the human race to think that people will cultivate “inappropriate” relationships with Milo, the virtual boy made possible by Microsoft’s new motion-face-and-voice sensing Natal technology.
On Monday, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios introduced the world to a charming young lad named Milo. Milo lives in a virtual world inside your Xbox 360, and users can (at least according to Molyneux) interact with him in unprecedented ways thanks to Microsoft’s new motion, voice and face sensing Natal technology. You can have a conversation with Milo, and he’ll register your tone of voice. You can hand him drawings, you can physically interact with the objects in his world.
Or you could tell him to go screw himself and play soccer on his own. Yeah, that’s right. Soccer. I don’t care if Milo calls it football. I call it soccer. Stop bothering me, kid. Don’t you have parents to do that to? Go eat some biscuits and leave me alone.
Ahem. That’s just me, but the potential for people to do inappropriate things with and to Milo would seem to be implicit in the game’s potential for everything else. At least it would seem so if you aren’t Peter Molyneux. “It’s almost impossible to form an inappropriate relationship… it’s just not something that’s possible to do within the game,” Molyneux said. “I don’t think people will do that. I think people will find it amazing and charming.”
What Molyneux doesn’t want to see happening is things like how “in The Sims you can trap someone in a room and they can die. That sort of stuff is just not really where we want to go.” The developer added that what he found with his Fable games is that, despite the temptation to do evil things, most people end up siding with the good, and that should imply that the same thing would happen with Milo.
Well, I just happened to be the kind of guy who played Fable II by seducing people and then killing them underneath the bridge in Bowerstone. For my own sake, I think I’ll probably steer clear of Milo when Molyneux launches it – he hopes – next year.
[Via CVG]
