Looking Back: Why Milo was Doomed.

"Are you enjoying Milo, Isn't he pretty?"

@Borodin said:

@Hailinel said:

@Doctorchimp said:

@Hailinel: I'm arguing that the tech was never there...

At what point did I say it was? Developing a project as a game and failing to construct the tech to power said game are two different things. The failure of the latter, however, inhibits the success of the former.

This is where you lost me, it's like telling a small child that the main reason they cant have a picnic on the surface of the sun is that they didn't pack any sandwiches, because you can't have a picnic without sandwiches. It's a valid point to question how worthwhile an experience Milo would have been but if you also admit the tech for it has never existed, it seems disingenuous to say that the reason it was doomed was that it would have had to have worked hard not to be boring IMO

Well, look at Red Steel, for example. Ubisoft began development of that game under the impression that the Wii Remote was capable of greater motion sensing than it actually is. They had reason for this belief because Nintendo had at one point planned for it to have tech approximate to what became the Wii Remote Plus. Then Nintendo decided to cut costs, and the Wii Remote wasn't as impressive as it would have been, leaving Red Steel in a bit of a lurch, but they still went ahead with the game anyway.

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Hailinel said:

@Apathylad said:

When I first saw Milo, it reminded me a lot of Facade. That wasn't a game, either. ><

...That character art looks straight out of MS Paint.

It's an indie experimental game with no budget. And the artwork is vectors. Was that you trying to discount the game due to its visual characteristics? Sure seemed that way...

I was making a comment on the art style because that was the first thing that struck me. I didn't mention anything regarding the game's background, nor was I judging it as a whole based on its art.

@NoelVeiga said:

@Hailinel: I... actually hold the exact opposite belief.

I think the concept of a mundane game had amazing potential, while the technical wild goose chase Molyneux has been on since Black and White to create a believable autonomous AI entity was doomed from the start.

Gaming history is in many ways a history of a descent into the commonplace. Gaming starts huge and epic because it can't do anything else. Stories about saving the universe aboard a spaceship are easy to convey in 8 bits, because ultimately they are abstractions: put this thing away from those things, emit/shoot these things, when those things hit these things, they disappear, you score. What we have been unable to gamify is character drama.

We've made strides, for sure. From LucasArt's point and click adventures to stuff like Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption or Heavy Rain. We've brought it down to the level of a space opera, an action adventure, a western or a mystery thriller. It's when we cross the line from making Unforgiven to making The Descendants that we know that gaming can do everything, and indie designers are working on it as we speak, and some are even successful at times.

Now, Milo... well, that was a pipe dream. We know what Kinect can and cannot do now. It can't do proper face and voice recognition without a lot of tweaking and fiddling. It certainly can't do natural speech recognition yet. And good luck trying to get it to subtly read things in your movement like your emphasis or your emotions, which is arguably what they were trying to pull off here. Nah, it would have been a chatbot with some camera-aided tricks. "What a nice blue sweater you're wearing today" "That's a jacket, you idiot" "Hey, why do you have to be so mean?" and so on. It's the tech, not the subject matter that would have failed it.

Of course, we're both talking from tech demos and trailers, so... but, hey, speculation is free.

No matter what, Milo's AI would have had its severe limitations. Interaction would have been based on a dictionary of words and phrases that he could recognize; there would have been plenty of items that he would never have been able to understand. In that sense, Milo wouldn't have been anything more than a more complex Pikachu or Seaman. The difference being that the concept of Milo never had anything compelling from a narrative or thematic perspective in its scope. "You can interact with a child!" That's great, but I have a nephew. A real one. How does Milo differ from him (other than being a computer simulation and all), and is there a reason or purpose for the interaction with him that is at all unique?

@upwarDBound said:

@Hailinel:

The thing is you didn't focus on the concept of the idea, you focused on what the subject matter of the game would be. I think of the concept as interacting with a virtual person. Human, android, whatever. You brought up Wonder Project as a favorable alternative due to its more ambitious character growth and interaction as well as having a non-human subject. You then criticize Milo for being mundane and "uncanny valley," and how that's why it was destined to never release.

You seem to think that interacting with a virtual child is too weird. How is interacting with a virtual android any different? Neither of them are real. Would it make you feel better if Milo was explicitly stated to be an android? The uncanny valley effect can be unsettling but I believe it can be averted if the characters act real enough. Heavy Rain was packed to the gills with this sensation but the characters acted real enough to make it not so unsettling.

You never mention why Wonder Project J never got off the ground. Was it because of tech reasons or was it because of its subject matter? Do you think if the template of Milo had more of the ambitions of Wonder Project, it would have actually released? The answer is of course it wouldn't have because the tech is not there. You're attempting to pin the cancellation of Milo at least partially on the failings of the creator rather than the limitations of the tech. You're criticizing the idea based on your personal feelings and attributing those feelings to the project's demise.

The concept of a virtual child is not weird in and of itself. The problem I have with Milo is that the supposed concept of the game was too mundane for its own good. There's nothing in it that breaks it out of the activities that an average parent could engage in with their own child. I'm not saying that it necessarily would have been released, but if the game pursued different ambitions and end goals, actions that elevated it out of the mundane and into something more unique or extraordinary, then it could have, at the very least, received a greater response. Instead, it's "Hang out with this average boy," which is not in itself a compelling game idea, and its apparent goal, to help Milo earn the money for a bike, does not help it escape that sense that it's trying too hard to emulate what is already entirely normal life.

Also, Wonder Project J did get off the ground, way back on the Super Famicom. It even had a sequel on the Nintendo 64. Neither game was actually released outside of Japan in an official capacity, however.

@Hailinel said:

No matter what, Milo's AI would have had its severe limitations. Interaction would have been based on a dictionary of words and phrases that he could recognize; there would have been plenty of items that he would never have been able to understand. In that sense, Milo wouldn't have been anything more than a more complex Pikachu or Seaman. The difference being that the concept of Milo never had anything compelling from a narrative or thematic perspective in its scope. "You can interact with a child!" That's great, but I have a nephew. A real one. How does Milo differ from him (other than being a computer simulation and all), and is there a reason or purpose for the interaction with him that is at all unique?

I always find that train of thought either disingenuous or misinformed. It'd be weird to hear somebody say "I never liked the show Friends because I already have a group of friends I have coffee with" or "I didn't enjoy the movie The Descendants because I already had an ailing relative in real life, so what does the movie bring to the table that my dead Auntie Esther didn't?"

The reduction of gaming to escapism and wish-fulfilment is just that, reductionist. Even if everything else fails, there is a sense of technological wonder to seeing situations depicted in gaming. When GT5 was in development, the devs explained their car choices by explaining that, according to their data, the two cars people use the most are the one they currently own and the one they want to own some day. Even if they could drive to the track with their own car and have an actually superior experience than they get in the game, full of g-force and smells and other elements that don't carry over, they still want to do that same thing in the game. There's an attraction to reproducing reality virtually. It's why mankind started to draw in the first place, I'd expect.

@NoelVeiga said:

@Hailinel said:

No matter what, Milo's AI would have had its severe limitations. Interaction would have been based on a dictionary of words and phrases that he could recognize; there would have been plenty of items that he would never have been able to understand. In that sense, Milo wouldn't have been anything more than a more complex Pikachu or Seaman. The difference being that the concept of Milo never had anything compelling from a narrative or thematic perspective in its scope. "You can interact with a child!" That's great, but I have a nephew. A real one. How does Milo differ from him (other than being a computer simulation and all), and is there a reason or purpose for the interaction with him that is at all unique?

I always find that train of thought either disingenuous or misinformed. It'd be weird to hear somebody say "I never liked the show Friends because I already have a group of friends I have coffee with" or "I didn't enjoy the movie The Descendants because I already had an ailing relative in real life, so what does the movie bring to the table that my dead Auntie Esther didn't?"

The reduction of gaming to escapism and wish-fulfilment is just that, reductionist. Even if everything else fails, there is a sense of technological wonder to seeing situations depicted in gaming. When GT5 was in development, the devs explained their car choices by explaining that, according to their data, the two cars people use the most are the one they currently own and the one they want to own some day. Even if they could drive to the track with their own car and have an actually superior experience than they get in the game, full of g-force and smells and other elements that don't carry over, they still want to do that same thing in the game. There's an attraction to reproducing reality virtually. It's why mankind started to draw in the first place, I'd expect.

Friends and The Descendants are both passive entertainment, rather than interactive. One is an episodic sitcom that defies reality in a number of ways, the other is a drama that, while it is centered on a tragedy that some may find too close to home (and that can happen with any medium), tells a story with a dramatic arc that goes beyond "There is a child that wants a bike."

And I'm not being reductionist in my assessment of Milo. That's really the extent of what was known about the game. You interact with Milo to help him achieve goals, and he will eventually have the money for a bike. Films with such simple premises are able to succeed because if the narrative is well-written it keeps the viewer engaged, but there is always the disconnect that the child on screen is not directly connected with the viewer in any sense. There's no direct interaction between viewer and character. In a game where the player has some form of agency over the events, the game must be able to provide a reason for the player to become engaged, whether that be purely from the perspective of gameplay, narrative, or a combination of both. But the nature of interaction with Milo would by its very nature be a watered down simulation of interactions with a human child, and the objective of the game would be an entirely normal task. There's nothing about the concept that makes for interactions with Milo a compelling experience because they're experiences that can easily occur in reality. Milo, however, is several layers removed from reality while still attempting to emulate it. And the closer such a game gets to approaching reality, the deeper into the uncanny valley it falls. If Lionhead had somehow pulled off a miracle and created a spectacular AI that could follow the player's every word and motion, how compelling would it actually be to interact with Milo? I've said before that I have a nephew; if a game such as Milo were to provide an impeccable simulation of a boy in a mundane world with an end goal no different than what a child might pursue in reality, then it's no question that I would rather spend time with my nephew because Milo would not provide me with a unique experience of the sort that I can engage in real life.

@Willin said:

I bet this is the first time anyone has thought of Milo since 2010.

No way. Until this post I thought it was still coming haha

@Hailinel said:

@NoelVeiga said:

Friends and The Descendants are both passive entertainment, rather than interactive. One is an episodic sitcom that defies reality in a number of ways, the other is a drama that, while it is centered on a tragedy that some may find too close to home (and that can happen with any medium), tells a story with a dramatic arc that goes beyond "There is a child that wants a bike."

And I'm not being reductionist in my assessment of Milo. That's really the extent of what was known about the game. You interact with Milo to help him achieve goals, and he will eventually have the money for a bike. Films with such simple premises are able to succeed because if the narrative is well-written it keeps the viewer engaged, but there is always the disconnect that the child on screen is not directly connected with the viewer in any sense. There's no direct interaction between viewer and character. In a game where the player has some form of agency over the events, the game must be able to provide a reason for the player to become engaged, whether that be purely from the perspective of gameplay, narrative, or a combination of both. But the nature of interaction with Milo would by its very nature be a watered down simulation of interactions with a human child, and the objective of the game would be an entirely normal task. There's nothing about the concept that makes for interactions with Milo a compelling experience because they're experiences that can easily occur in reality. Milo, however, is several layers removed from reality while still attempting to emulate it. And the closer such a game gets to approaching reality, the deeper into the uncanny valley it falls. If Lionhead had somehow pulled off a miracle and created a spectacular AI that could follow the player's every word and motion, how compelling would it actually be to interact with Milo? I've said before that I have a nephew; if a game such as Milo were to provide an impeccable simulation of a boy in a mundane world with an end goal no different than what a child might pursue in reality, then it's no question that I would rather spend time with my nephew because Milo would not provide me with a unique experience of the sort that I can engage in real life.

You are being reductionist in that you're taking a part (its flimsy narrative premise) for the whole game. By that token, all there is to Mario is you jump for a while and then he rescues the princess, or in Tetris blocks fall and nothing else ever happens.

What's interesting is that you keep going to the same argumentative well: because Milo simulates a real action, it is essentially redundant to life. That's just... not true. Gaming is no more an analogue of life than movies. It's just like those musicians that criticised Guitar Hero back in the day: "Why not learn to play a real instrument instead?" Well, because learning to play an instrument is not a videogame. Even if the controller is shaped like a guitar, it is not a guitar, and playing Guitar Hero is an abstraction in gameplay form meant to convey some feelings, which in this case happen to be those of being very good at playing an instrument in front of a crowd.

Same with, say, NBA 2K. Why play it and not actual basketball (which, again, is a question that pops up online every now and then)? Some people's answer is that it's one thing to play basketball and another to play basketball as Kobe Bryant in front of thousands of people. They're wrong. The difference is that NBA 2K is NOT basketball. It's a game that consists of pushing certain buttons on a gamepad in order to make a game entity take control of another game entity and then succeed in a dice roll that determines whether the player scores based on position, timing of the button presses and stats associated to the entity the player is controlling. It only does a very, very good job of looking like basketball to the casual observer.

I know it's a deep, obscure point I'm making, but it's an important one. Games are not reality, or simulations of reality, they are more or less abstract or referential to the real world, but they are virtual constructs that use rulesets to generate reactions in the player. What they choose to depict has some bearing in how engaging they are, but not nearly as much as you'd think, or Tetris would be the most boring game ever (its subject matter being "shapes made out of four identical squares").

The truth is I never played Milo. I don't know how engaging its gameplay was, or how fascinating its rules. Not much, I bet, since it got canned. I do suspect that a big reason for that, though, was probably that it exposed flaws in the hardware that Microsoft didn't really want exposed at the very beginning of its life cycle, much less with a game that probably wouldn't have made that much money to begin with. But, again, I'm wildly speculating here.

You're over complicating it. If you had ever been exposed to British fear-mongering media, you'd know exactly why it was cancelled.

@NoelVeiga said:

You are being reductionist in that you're taking a part (its flimsy narrative premise) for the whole game. By that token, all there is to Mario is you jump for a while and then he rescues the princess, or in Tetris blocks fall and nothing else ever happens.

What's interesting is that you keep going to the same argumentative well: because Milo simulates a real action, it is essentially redundant to life. That's just... not true. Gaming is no more an analogue of life than movies. It's just like those musicians that criticised Guitar Hero back in the day: "Why not learn to play a real instrument instead?" Well, because learning to play an instrument is not a videogame. Even if the controller is shaped like a guitar, it is not a guitar, and playing Guitar Hero is an abstraction in gameplay form meant to convey some feelings, which in this case happen to be those of being very good at playing an instrument in front of a crowd.

Same with, say, NBA 2K. Why play it and not actual basketball (which, again, is a question that pops up online every now and then)? Some people's answer is that it's one thing to play basketball and another to play basketball as Kobe Bryant in front of thousands of people. They're wrong. The difference is that NBA 2K is NOT basketball. It's a game that consists of pushing certain buttons on a gamepad in order to make a game entity take control of another game entity and then succeed in a dice roll that determines whether the player scores based on position, timing of the button presses and stats associated to the entity the player is controlling. It only does a very, very good job of looking like basketball to the casual observer.

I know it's a deep, obscure point I'm making, but it's an important one. Games are not reality, or simulations of reality, they are more or less abstract or referential to the real world, but they are virtual constructs that use rulesets to generate reactions in the player. What they choose to depict has some bearing in how engaging they are, but not nearly as much as you'd think, or Tetris would be the most boring game ever (its subject matter being "shapes made out of four identical squares").

The truth is I never played Milo. I don't know how engaging its gameplay was, or how fascinating its rules. Not much, I bet, since it got canned. I do suspect that a big reason for that, though, was probably that it exposed flaws in the hardware that Microsoft didn't really want exposed at the very beginning of its life cycle, much less with a game that probably wouldn't have made that much money to begin with. But, again, I'm wildly speculating here.

The premise of Mario may be simple, but it's also a fantasy that's easy to understand. And Tetris is an abstract puzzle game in which there is no narrative at all, so it doesn't even factor into this discussion.

It's not that Milo's premise is merely a simple. It is that it's both simple and mundane. As life simulators go, the premise is not enough to support the gameplay, nor is the gameplay enough to support the premise. It is not the same as arguing about Guitar Hero not succeeding at emulating life. Guitar Hero is a rhythm game and is subject to the same abstraction that governs a game like Dance Dance Revolution or Elite Beat Agents. The goal of the game is to attain a high score by performing actions in sync with the music. In NBA 2K, the player is playing a basketball simulation that depicts the athletes and rules of NBA basketball; not all of us are skilled basketball players, and far fewer of us are of the caliber to excel at the professional level. The video game is also an abstraction in that you don't simply control "yourself," unless you are playing a mode that specifically assigns you to the role of a single player. In most cases, you are in command of the team as a whole from a perspective that one could never achieve in playing real basketball. And people that play actual basketball play NBA 2K for reasons such as it being a diversion, or a less physically demanding way to continue enjoying the sport they play.

But as a basketball simulation, NBA 2K does not actually simulate the act of playing actual basketball. Not in the way that Milo and Kate was theorized to simulate the act of interacting with a child. You don't influence your teammates by speaking with them verbally, nor do your gestures or motions produce any form of reaction. The idea behind Milo was to remove several layers of abstraction so that, no matter how simple the dialogue and motion interaction was, you were directly interacting with Milo as you would a child, but beyond that basic premise, there's little stated purpose beyond that. Who would such a game even appeal to (aside from the obvious joke answers)? What is the draw of interacting with a virtual child that's portrayed as little more than an average boy? Unlike playing in the NBA, becoming a parent is a relatively simple matter. Becoming a good parent with an excellent relationship with one's child is far more difficult and something that most people don't need a game in order to experience. As a concept, Milo was too real to be of particular interest as a life simulation, and not fantastic or abstract enough to offer anything outside of average reality. If it sounds like I'm repeating myself here, that's because as far as I'm able to see, that's really all there is too it.

I bet this is the first time anyone has thought of Milo since 2010.

@Hailinel: I feel that all the points I've made earlier already address all the points you've made now, so I'll leave it there with an agree to disagree offer instead of repeating myself.

Surely basing your entire opinion of the potential game (being mundane) on a tech demo & some theorised early development talk is quite presumptous.

Also, the importance of mundane actions & versimilitude/minutiae/detail isn't being given its fair dap here. If we can't give pretext and contrast to moments of exhiliration, action or escapism then we're left with an empty abstration for a gaming experience. There's a reason you walk & talk as Marcus to Anya in Gears of War (although these moments should be longer & this is a relatively shit example).

Anyways, this game was a lie born from a serial liar. The presumption of the entire game being mundane because of some spurrious initial information given about its concept is a fallacy and this thread seems to miss the biggest reason for its supposed demise -- which has been covered by several people already.

@NoelVeiga: I appreciate your comments.

@dabe: And despite Molyneux's reputation, it's also presumptuous to suggest that the game was never meant to actually exist.

And I'm no saying that mundane moments don't have their place. Some of my favorite games have quiet moments that one could consider mundane. But the presentation and desciption of Milo is little more than mundane. Whether or not a full game was meant to exist, what was presented and spoken of did not present a picture of a game with arcs of particular interest. If there were truly more to the game than what was presented, it would have likely been spoken of in order to drive interest. Even at his most snake-oily, Molyneux can only drive so much interest by expounding on concepts of emotional connection. Without more to drive the concept forward, there's little to the idea of Milo other than that Milo exists.

@Hailinel: While I agree to an extent, the tech-demo nature of the presentation and the proposed potential (voice chat, realistic AI response to interaction) was more prescient than the actual game content (whether that would remain mundane or not).

Also, while it may also be presumptuous to suggest the game was nothing more than smoke/mirrors and Molyneux being Molyneux, the time after E3 2009 bears my deduction out more so than the mundane angle I'd say.

Anyways, as long as you've acknowledged that mundane activites can be good then I'm cool. That was the only thing I really wanted to point out :D

But... I would've liked to have played it though... :(

Wow, this was a really good blog about Milo. I haven't thought about that tech demo for a long time. I did believe it was just a tech demo and not suppose to be an official game. But in any case, I haven't really seen any Kinect games that used that specific tech yet. Hopefully this year there will be more adult-themed Kinect games such as a Heavy Rain type.