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Peter Molyneux: Working For Microsoft Is Like Taking Antidepressants
SmartAboutThings (1951032) writes "Peter Molyneux is one of the most famous personalities in the history of gaming, especially recognized for having created God games Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Black & White, but also the Fable series. After creating the Fable series, Molyneux announced in March 2012 that he will be leaving Lionhead and Microsoft to start another company – 22Cans. During a recent interview, the former Microsoft employee has shared some interesting details regarding the time when he was working over at Redmond. Here's the excerpt from his interview: 'I left Microsoft because I think when you have the ability to be a creative person, you have to take that seriously, and you have to push yourself. And pushing yourself is a lot easier to do if you're in a life raft that has a big hole in the side, and that's what I think indie development is. You're paddling desperately to get where you want to go to, but you're also bailing out. Whereas if you're in a big supertanker of safety, which Microsoft was, then that safety is like an anesthetic. It's like taking antidepressants. The world just feels too comfortable.'"
the antidepressant myth, jerk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's like taking antidepressants.
Peter Molyneux has probably never taken antidepressants in his life or he would not say this. Antidepressants don't make the "world just feels too comfortable". They make the world feel survivable.
Trust me on this one, folks...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"Steve sometimes walks down the hallways bouncing a basketball. Or if he’s having a really good day he’s swinging a baseball bat. Do you think that sends a signal? Sometimes he brings it with him into the conference room. Is it symbolic? Maybe. I don’t know." Yeah, he probably thought he was this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... or maybe this one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Who says anyone hates him? only said he is being a jerk for perpetuation a myth. A myth that hurts people and prevents people form getting help.
I don't hate people I don't know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...although I'd say the devs were on something stronger than antidepressants.
All kidding aside, Win8 does seem to be a product of "Who cares what our customers want, we'll do it our way and they can just suck it", which pretty much defines comfortable complacency.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
"Nurture and grow a civilisation of reactive, living followers who worship you as a god." - product promo for his current game. Talk about an ego trip...
It's an always-on MMORPG, so managing your piece of the world may be a full time job. The graphics suck, apparently by intent. It makes Animal Crossing look realistic.
Now that I've made soooo much money that I don't have to worry about paying my bills, mortgage, kids college, etc. I'm going to venture out and do something FUN! Yayyy! I'll also run through the grass barefoot every weekend in my paid for in cash Malibu mansion.
All they did was make me not want to kill myself while I was in the hospital.
They're not feel-good pills.
While we're talking about Microsoft and gaming: I wonder why Microsoft doesn't sit down with Turbine and cut a deal to do Asheron's Call 3. World of Wacraft is like over a decade old now, and Asheron's Call 1 is superior in some respects so if you adopted some of the WOW ideas into AC and made a new MMORPG, it could make a fight to take over WOW population base. MMORPGS are big money, but you need deep pockets to make a good one.
God spoke to me
I'm impressed and pleased that when I went to comment on the asinine analogy, several people already had. There are still lots of folks who avoid help they could really use, due to that myth.
I don't know about working at Microsoft being like being on antidepressants (never worked for them, don't think I'd want to), but I know that whenever I hear him talk about his next greatest game - I want to TAKE antidepressants as I know none of the shit he talks about will actually make it into the game at 1/100th the grandeur he describes. Can we say 'Master of the over-sell and the under-deliver'?
..we wouldn't be depressed in the first place.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Indies don't usually have yes men, or more correctly: We're close enough to the programmers that they can laugh in our faces and tell us what zany ideas AREN'T POSSIBLE given the game's canvas -- the technology itself. A good designer can make amazing stuff happen in limited mediums -- They can make the most of what actually is in the engine, rather than banking on that which requires a complete rewrite.
Now the crazy thing is that when some insane idea drifts my way either from my own mind or while I'm being part of the idea reactor for the team, I may actually think on it over night and figure out how to pull it off. However, being an implementor means it's my job to say "NO!" not "Yes, but...". "Yes, but... It'll mean taking 8 times more time or money than we have." "Maybe but... we'll have to try out 20 different implementations to figure out if the feature is workable and meanwhile the other devs and content makers will be waiting to see if its possible, or they may wind up scrapping assets if not." -- Give 'em the TL;DR: "No!"
You get maybe ONE of those "That might be doable" per game, maybe TWO if you're helping make the implementation happen, and have an idea of how to pull it off. Maybe a few more if time or money or a playable release isn't important to you. It's important to try new things, especially for innovation; However, you can innovate yourself right out the other side of, "Yes, but...", into, "Oh it might be possible, but the release schedule better include relocating the asset repo before the sun explodes", and only takes one really bad, "Yes", to make that happen. The bigger the behemoth under you the more wonderful are things that seem they might just be crazy enough to work. This is always folly due to the planning fallacy. No game is ever finished (we just have to stop adding features and polishing at some point), so if you didn't hear or say enough "NO" then you'll be bound to have game designers making wonderful statements which seemed wholly plausible at the outset or individually, but are not actually executable as a whole. You wind up with a game suffering from amputations instead of leveraging what was possible to its fullest. You start to sound just like Peter Molyneux.
Sometimes it's not the designer's fault that their plans were just too crazy enough NOT to work out. And, sometimes they just push the hype-drive beyond warp 13. The public really can't tell the difference, but you can help prevent the former by learning when to say, "NO!" Saying, "NO", can leave the door open for a better "Yes!". Smaller guys say more "No", and less "Yes". Indies can't afford to entertain as many pie-in-the-sky prosaic Prozac delusions. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, it's really the execution that matters...
Is like sniffing glue, in the alley behind a billionaire's high-rise apartment block.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Never heard of him or any of these games.
Welcome to Earth. Will you be here long?
So who forced Molyneaux to take Microsoft's money? I assume he cashed his paychecks.
People who claim to be "too comfortable" to be creative really get on my nerves.
And if risky, uncomfortable circumstances are what it takes to make Molyneaux creative, maybe he should try developing games while swimming covered in beef gravy in a pool of sharks. Maybe then he'll actually finish some games again. What a fathead.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And just nonsensical. If anything, they should be equating working at MS to being depressed, not treating depression.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
"It's like taking antidepressants. The world just feels too comfortable."
Spoken like a true ignoramus who's never experienced Depression.
Stick Men
This is the new meme of the week. My turn:
"Working for Microsoft is like being raped by a drunken billy-goat while falling down a three hundred foot high pile of chocolate chips."
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I see that repeating an inaccurate simile that's in common usage is all it takes to ruin a lifetime of hard work.
I think his notoriety for over-hyping and under-delivering did more for damaging his credibility and ensuring that some here are none too fond of the guy. He does some cool stuff, I'll admit, and I've enjoyed his games, certainly, but to hear him hype up $latest_game, you'd think the heavens would open up with angelic choirs whenever it gets released.
What about Syndicate or Magic Carpet?
I'm not sure that repeating a colloquial joke qualifies as being a jerk. I do agree that colloquialisms can and do perpetuate myths and stereotypes. Unless they're coined on the Internet, in which case we call them "memes" and think they are not only funny, but define a new paradigm of reality that is better than the lives being lived by an imaginary group of non-Internet using folks. I digress. Anyway, my point is that the headline is at fault, and we should criticize the poster for using the comment out of context to get a non-controversial story promoted from the firehose, rather than act like Peter Molyneux is guilty of being insensitive when he simply accuses Microsoft as being oblivious.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Ah. Yes. Well, I'm not going to argue with that. It's not like he's a friend of mine or something. Self-promotion does get old...especially if you're a fan of the work.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
It's like taking antidepressants. The world just feels too comfortable.'"
Spoken like a person who has never used antidepressants or understands or how they work, or just buys into the nonsensical Scientologist bullshit.
Antidepressants aren't magic happy pills and they aren't some sort of metaphorical rose coloured glasses.
They take the edge off. That's it. They give you the chance to back away from the emotional precipice that you would otherwise jump from. Some are better than others (Paxil sucks for many many people, for example) but properly used, they help people restore their lives from what was a bottomless pit.
Depression is the third leading cause of death. Probably the main cause of preventable death since if you don't kill yourself yourself outright, you tend to not give a shit about "healthy living" and shave 20 years off your lifespan with heart disease and other crap.
This article and summary is crap.
--
BMO
I thought stack-ranking was supposed to make everyone feel uncomfortable to motivate them; but they did away with it recently due to complaints.
Perhaps being threatened by real doom (startup failure risk) has a different feel than doom created by the superficial ill-informed bullshit criteria of a PHB (Dilbertian) ranker. The nature of real doom is relatively clear and knowable, whereas dealing a PHB is like trying to tame a chimp on LSD: too random to strategize around such that you grow tired of trying to guess.
Table-ized A.I.
Antidepressants make many people stop getting really stressed out about stuff. That was is point: startups are really quite stressful, working at MS isn't. He's not feeling the motivation and pace that leads to his best creativity. I get that, being the same way. I'm not chasing my muse, so I prefer less stress to my best performance, but that's quite subjective.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
-- Yahtzee Croshaw
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Magic carpet 2's engine was way ahead of its time with deformable terrain. Its a shame they didn't keep using it. In mage battles, I found the easiest way to win was to make a mountain, then carve a hole in it and hide for mana regen, then burst people down, and hide in mountain cave again.
God spoke to me
I don't hate him, I just think he's being sort of a jerk. Well, that, and I continue to admire his absolutely unparalleled ability to create bugs in games that leave me wondering how anyone could have gotten those results on purpose, let alone by accident. (Favorite: In Amiga Powermonger, you could only save if every floppy drive the machine had contained a write-enabled disk. This is so much more work than simply using the existing writing facilities, and even then it's fairly impressively hard to get it wrong.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Then why do I feel like eating a bullet when I have to use their software?
Liberty.
Yes, well, if you are going to feel like you are safe in the billy goat's stack racking system, something other than employee job skills rating must be going on, ewww.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This is not a commentary on Microsoft so much as it is a commentary on Peter Molyneux's personality and work habits.
Some of us are self-starters and don't need constant crises or deadlines to get work accomplished or be creative. Others require that sense of the world will come to an end to be motivated. Hell for me would be to constantly be in crisis mode. Hell for him is to not be... To each their own...
Ever see the ads for anti depressants on TV? One of the side effects is you'll commit suicide.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
128 comments in and someone finally mentions his current project!
Godus sounds interesting, like massive persistent version of Populus. I read something recently that described how they had overhauled large parts of the game in response to beta testers comments which is how it's supposed to work, isn't it? Wouldn't happen in a big studio with millions already committed.
There's some genuinely innovative aspects to the game, such as a Joe Public (the winner of his last project 'Curiosity') being granted overall God status in the game - to be benevolent or a dick as they see fit and taking a cut of the profits.
Admittedly a lot of what sounds interesting about it is probably from Molyneux's own hype but then you have to aim high to have any chance of producing something great. Ill judged comments about antidepressants aside, would you be more welcoming to him if he said "We're basically just recreating Populus with prettier GFX?"
I would jump at the chance of working with someone with overreaching ambitions and massive industry experience.
I must confess I was hoping to learn something along the lines of "microsoft beats small children and eat their puppies" ... ...
But what he really writes is that startups are more fun than large companies
wich is "mostly" true... except when you just have trouble paying the bills because the funding dried up and the business is not quite there...
And what he writes about M$ would be true in most large companies ... (they probably never trusted him enough to learn about the secret rooms where they really eat puppies while concocting new EULA and IP legislation...)
Well good luck to M. Molyneux anyway :)
Gather round folks, looks like we've got ourselves a clash of the intellectual titans.
it seems that the piece is about organisational culture and how you preserve a high functioning development team in an a large organisation that becomes too focussed on bottom line and not enough on their customers and growth.
This must be a common problem for IT companies. do you need skunkworks? at the same time there is a piece in the news at the moment about how Jobs slavedrove the iphone team into spectacular creativity. maybe it only works when the driving force is as creative as the people being driven?
it is a bit unfortunate that most of the
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
From the comments others have been making, it's apparent that he's always sort of a jerk. I wasn't aware of that. I still don't think his use of the "being on antidepressants" phrase makes him a jerk though. A whole bunch of other things do.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
"Peter Molyneux is one of the most famous personalities in the history of gaming."
If I read his name in any other context I'd have no clue who he was. And I've played the heck out of Dungeon Keeper, and Populous. Odd as well, a last name like his would seem to want to stick with you.
I read someplace in that article When the idea of Microsoft and gaming comes up you think of an Xbox, actually I think of Ages of Empires, Xbox only because I was told that was the answer.
Linked at the bottom of an article blasting the working conditions at Microsoft, is of poor Mr Holtman; "Microsoft Hires Former Steam Boss Holtman to Make Windows Great for Gaming"
Wasn't there a lot of talk recently of Microsoft ditching the money pit called the Xbox?
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