Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
As the game begins, the player is literally summoned into existence by a tribe's need for a god. You begin your life as a deity on a verdant island, populated by aboriginal peoples. (There are seven races, each with its own distinctive traits, including Aztec, Celtic and Tibetan.) A faint red line demarcates the geographic boundaries where the population believes in you -- while neighboring gods with their own circles of influence develop their own faithful. As your population grows, so does your power -- in Molyneux's game logic, a god's omnipotence is directly pinned to the number of adherents you have, and the intensity of worship they pay you.
To increase their faith, you go about tending to their basic needs: food, shelter, offspring and so on, expressed by totemic flags the villagers raise from their civic center, and spoken out loud in prayer, when you pass over them. As in most real-time strategy games -- a genre conceived by Molyneux with his games Populous (1987) and Powermonger (1990), though younger gamers are probably more familiar with Starcraft, Command & Conquer and the innumerable variations they inspired -- the fundamental elements of human society are represented by a few emblematic buildings. Raising a village store, for example, gives it an economic base; erecting a graveyard allows villagers to bury their dead and get on with their lives -- that is, get back to obeying you.
Your sole on-screen interface is a giant hand hovering above the planet. Controlled by the mouse, the hand can move over the surface by gripping the ground; it can rip trees from the earth and lob boulders across the island. You have similar control over the population. You can pick people and move (or if you prefer a harsher theology, toss) them at will. The action enables you to assign them social classifications, too: Pick up a villager and drop him into a fertile field, he'll begin to farm the land. Drop him next to another villager of the opposite sex, and they'll start a family.
But while the hand interface is impressive and mostly successful, especially with magic spells that can be cast by drawing symbols on the ground, it's not as seamless as originally billed. The game field is so intricate, you'll probably end up using it in conjunction with the keyboard.
And though the title suggests otherwise, the game doesn't simply plunge you into a clear-cut sense of moral choices. Because this is morality on a godlike scale. Early on in the game, for example, you're presented with the pleas of some incompetent shipbuilders, who beg you to help them complete their ship.
From a human perspective, their constant requests soon get annoying. But from the god's-eye view, your alternatives are ambiguous. Assuming a Christian/humanist perspective, perhaps, you should refrain from helping too much, begging off on the principle that the Lord helps those who etc. But from a more Greco-Roman point of view, you kind of want to get pissy, and hurl a few boulders at their ship.
The ambivalence is offset, unfortunately, by a pair of consciences, an angel with a plummy British accent and a devil who sounds like a New Jersey henchman from "The Sopranos," who pop up on occasion to spell out the moral issues involved. It's a sometimes humorous conceit, but also a bit too pat and cutesy.
The decisions get substantially more complex when you're given the most impressive feature in the game: your own Creature, a giant-size emissary that takes the form of various animals. (You're first presented with a cow, a tiger or an ape to choose from.) You get the creature in its infancy, a gurgling, playful tabula rasa; making him grow into a worthwhile pet and servant requires training and a scrupulous regimen of punishment and reward. (Rub your god's hand over his fur, and he purrs -- jerk your hand across his body, and he's hit with a barrage of slapping.)
This is achieved through an AI (by Lionhead programmer Richard Evans) that is so supple and contoured, it entirely reworks your expectations of what good gaming artificial intelligence is. Your creature stops to watch your hand when you're performing tasks, and learns by your example -- though not always perfectly. Throw trees to your villagers, to help them with their wood-gathering needs; after watching awhile, he'll try and imitate this, though he may end up throwing villagers instead. A painstakingly raised Creature becomes the perfect ward for your people. (There are reports of creatures who become so altruistic, they spend all their time feeding villagers, and actually end up starving themselves to death.) Every now and then, he even glances back to make eye contact with you, as if to seeking your approval; the doglike effect is utterly eerie.
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