PixelVixen707

Okay, so I’m not jealous about E3.  Do I mind that all my game journo pals are partying in L.A., hanging around with a couple of Beatles and Steven Spielberg and livetweeting about what Felicia Day’s wearing?  Do I care that they’re getting all these product announcements live and in the flesh, while the rest of us have to wait 10 seconds to read about them online?  Oh, and the exclusive interviews and schmoozing and noshing - that’s all so done.  What do I care.  Why would I give Ringo a chance to grab my butt, anyway.  (Psst, Mr. Starr, “Octopus’s Garden” is full of win and ooohhhh, will you take me now?  Could it be a “hard day’s night” for me, too?)

Gah - okay, calm.  Folks are so starstruck, and I’m getting the full torrent.  It seems like I follow every game journo on Twitter who’s worth reading and about 50 other yes(wo)men who just go, “Squeee” every ten seconds during these press conferences.  But I don’t have to sit on my hands.  What is it we on the backlines are supposed to do?  That’s right: we eschew the scoops so we can give you analysis.

So let’s talk about Milo.

Milo’s the imaginary little boy who will live in your Xbox and play with you.  I’m loathe to link you to Kotaku, but Steven Totilo is new there, and he has a great write-up of his hands-on demo.  The Milo project was spearheaded by Peter Molyneux, who’s been playing Gepetto for years now: first he gave us an imaginary creature, then he gave us a virtual dog, and now, this Milo kid.  You’ll play with Milo online, and Molyneux is promising that he’ll be part of a game, but he’ll also be a kid-shaped Tamagotchi.  In other words, he’ll be your imaginary friend.

So let’s skip to the two big burning questions:

• Is this going to be like that stupid dog that shows up when you install Microsoft Word, and it offers to help you format a shopping list, and so you switch it off almost immediately?
• What kind of sick, crazy fool needs an imaginary friend who lives in their computer?

 
Back in the ripe old days of sci-fi, we used to see little boys on strange planets who had nothing but a robot to keep them company.  There was always something cute about a child and a robot playing together, and also something a little sociopathic.  Shouldn’t that kid have some real friends?

The difference today is that instead of expecting robots to fill our lives, it’s clear that virtual friends will come first.  After all, building a walking, talking, lovable robot is hard work.  But a virtual assistant that takes support calls?  A Mii avatar that waves at you on its own?  And now Milo, and Milo 2.0, and so on?  Aren’t they about as real as anything else you bump into online?  (I’m still convinced that my favorite Oz-bloggers, like Daniel Purvis and Ben Abraham, are just figments of our collective imagination.  I mean, Australia?  Is that even a real place?  I’ll believe it when I see it.)

Yet there’s still a prejudice that hanging out with unreal people is a crutch, a way to fill the loneliness because you never made “real” friends.  Think of the film Lars and the Real Girl, where the protagonist buys a life-like dummy for a girlfriend as a kind of self-therapy, to coach him toward human relationships.  The movie acknowledges that everybody has a crutch of one kind or another - some of the “normal” characters care plenty about the stuffed animals on their desks - but these are still poor substitutes.  It’s not healthy, we learn, to have any kind of an emotional attachment to something that isn’t real.

And yet, robots and AI’s and avatars like Milo don’t work without an emotional attachment.  The emotional attachment is what separates them from can-openers and credit report forms.  Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s A. I. got this right, by making love the prime directive that motivates a robot to go beyond the mechanical.  At some point, the code and scripts and if-then’s in a robot’s head have to turn into motivation, and drive, and desire.  And the humans have to play along.  (Until they all drown or whatever, and the robots can just take over.)

But the humans won’t play along if they think it’s unhealthy. So here’s the compromise we need to reach, and the goal that Milo should set for himself: Milo, and all the AI avatars that come after him, has to act as  a casual friend.  He can’t be a substitute for going outside to the playground.  He can’t be the only person that a child, or an adult, talks to every day - or at least, not for long.  But he can be one of our friends.  He can be an assistant, like Cortana.  (In fact, where’s our Cortana?)  He can be a piece of our digital ecosystem.  And he’ll help to teach us that we can have relationships with a range of real and unreal people, and it only makes our lives richer.

Although knowing Molyneux, he’s probably aiming right for our hearts and tying our arms and legs to sticks to turn us all into his army of heartstruck, weeping puppets.  Lucky for us that his games rarely live up to the hype, or else we’d really be screwed!

UPDATE: Courtesy Offworld, here’s an official demo of Milo from Lionhead. Parts of this are very impressive - particularly the idea of waving your hands at the screen and seeing the water ripple - but I think they’re overstating Milo’s interactivity. I have a hunch that Milo’s not really listening to half of what the human is saying to him; his little routine of going down to the dock and opening his journal would probably proceed either way. But the way he parses and repeats some of her exact words is as eerie as promised.