Goodbye, Milo

Yesterday, a fantastic story of the life and death of Milo, the Xbox Kinect sort-of-a-game-but-not-really tech demo seen at 2009's Microsoft E3 press conference, was published on Polygon. As an artifact of the brief moments when new technology pushed down the walls to show further possibilities, Milo made the world think that Microsoft, through Kinect, was going to give the world something that they never knew they always wanted: a synthetic friend.

But the article, written be 1UP alum and Polygon features ninja Matt Leone, cracked the mirrors and busted the smoke machine to reveal that underneath it all, there was a game to be had with Milo (and his canine buddy Kate), and not simply an imaginary friend whom takes shape on your television. Not that it's entirely Lionhead's fault, after all, since it's a Microsoft-owned games studio that, you know, makes games. It turns out that using the camera and microphone saddled withing Kinect, Milo would turn the mirror back on you as the player represented his imaginary friend that would be taken on a trip (at least, in one iteration of the unreleased curio) through his everyday life and kinship with Kate. A Twilight Zone mystery was afoot, and the on-rails adventure would end as you, Milo, and Kate uncover who or what was killing sheep in the rural home that Milo had just moved to, kick starting his loneliness which ultimately, to him, spawns you. It actually sounds cool. But it's still a game.

I actually read this story with a small sliver or sadness. Milo, from what anybody could infer (because there was so little about it that was factually known) , was a program that one could speak to, and it would remember the conversation. When you walk into a room, Milo would know who you are and say hello to you. Draw him a picture, and he'll know what it is. You could ask him how his day was, and he would give you an answer (however empty that might actually be). Milo was our Commander Data, or as close to it as artificial intelligence could take us.

There was a lot of reflection after I had finished reading it. Do I actually want to have something like this in my life? Do any of us? I really don't now. While those might be larger philosophical fear-of-technology worries that don't actually keep me awake at night, I can say that the potential for something like a Milo to exist was very exciting when I first saw him streaming through the air on an internet that is too magical to to properly grasp if you thought too hard about it four years ago. Did I care about Kinect? Not really; I cared about the fact that technology was poised for a watershed moment in human interaction, and whether that interaction may actually dehumanize us as a whole. I didn't know what to make of it then. Now, I'm let down that it, as an game, was going to take me from the beginning, middle, and ending of a small virtual boy's story about him and his dog.

Maybe I'm just sad that it was going to be safe. Maybe that doesn't make me so afraid of technology, anyway.