Sunday, May 11, 2008
The long-awaited game Black & White is everything fans hoped it would be: A state-of-the-art excursion into our own souls.
Apr 10, 2001 | It may be hard to believe that the future of 21st century art is represented by a giant bipedal tiger who farts, break dances and flings livestock around when he's bored. But it requires only a few hours of play in the lands of Black & White, the new PC game from Lionhead Studios and lead designer Peter Molyneux, to know that this is exactly the case.
For many gamers, that realization may come as a relief. The game arrives after more than three years of development and missed publication dates. At the Game Developers Conference in March, where Molyneux was scheduled to give a talk but unexpectedly canceled just the day before, the prospect of Black & White's imminent arrival was on everyone's mind.
Would Black & White really be the summation of all the acclaimed games Molyneux had designed before, an impossibly ambitious melding of the real-time strategy "god game" genre (which he invented), insanely complex artificial intelligence (AI) and a wreath of unproven technical innovations? If Peter Molyneux is the Stanley Kubrick of computer game design, then, after all the delays, it started to seem like Black & White might not, after all, be the "2001" we were hoping for, but rather would finally stagger to the shelves looking more like a vaporware version of "Eyes Wide Shut."
Our concerns were groundless. Black & White is everything promised, and perhaps much more. It is a great game, and if it becomes the mass market hit it deserves to be, it should shatter the last arbitrary boundary between culture and technology. And if that happens, and its success carries over to its online versions, it might even change the world.
Taken as a literary work, Black & White fits into a distinctly British sub-genre best exemplified by the works of authors such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien (and to a lesser extent, J.K. Rowling) who create fully-realized fantasy worlds that embody the human spirit. Black & White is their peer. With the creation of the first truly lifelike AI the gaming world has ever known, implemented into open-ended gameplay that accommodates a limitless range of emotionally and morally resonant paths, Black & White succeeds as a work of art as vital as our best films or interactive media installations -- and perhaps even surpasses them. You watch a movie, take in an art showing, and whether you come away affected or not, the work remains the same. By constrast, this is a game that learns to understand you as you play it, and alters itself accordingly, to become a reflection of who you really are.
If Aristotle is right, and goodness is the careful cultivation of virtue, then Black & White is a kind of ethics simulator, showing you the sum of your character and the consequences of your actions, physically imprinted on the shape of your world. Other god games give you power; Black and White gives you yourself.
The gamers who have been waiting anxiously for its arrival for years and who have no doubt already immersed themselves in its intricacies understand this, without prompting from any critic. The question is whether the rest of the culture is ready to join in, too.
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