Playing God

While the game really doesn't make a moral distinction on your method for building faith (you can assign a villager to be the town craftsman, or lob him over the town as an example to terrify the rest; the aggregate effect on belief is tallied numerically) the consequences either way are palpable.

In Black & White, the landscape changes according to the tenor of your moral choices. With enough acts of cruelty, it begins to take on a dark, ominous hue; with consistent kindness, colors grow more vivid, and lush. This moral coloring even affects your interface. Get nasty enough, and your god's hand morphs into a gnarled red claw. This ethical algorithm applies most vividly to your Creature. A fully moral lion Creature takes on a crystalline glow, a kind of leonine angel. But with enough consistent sadism on your part, he'll get blackened and fangy, testament to the ruthlessness you performed to make him that way.

None of this is to say the game is a somber, allegorical tinker toy. For all the highfalutin ideas woven into its design, it is nimbly free of pretense. It has a sense of fragile delight that no other game has quite matched, from the giggles that tinkle out of village children when you pick them up to the hushed, breathtakingly beautiful way the land looks at night. (The art direction by Paul McLaughlin makes the world a dreamy, iconic paradise; the 3-D engine from programming lead Jean-Claude Cottier is astoundingly agile, enabling you to zoom from 10 feet to 10 miles above the surface, in a second.)

There's also an underlying wackiness reminiscent of Monty Python, especially Terry Gilliam's surreal animated interludes: Much of the initial Creature training involves curbing his farting and toilet activity, which he often ends up unleashing on village huts or the hapless villagers themselves (not to mention what happens when your creature learns to dance in rhythm to the village tribal music, and lays down a line of fresh moves like a furry, 30-foot James Brown).

In all this, Black & White realizes a design ideal established by the late lamented Looking Glass Studios: the triumph of emergent narrative over embedded narrative.

Embedded narrative is the preconceived story created by the developers: scripted dialogue, stand-alone cut scenes and so on. (And in Black & White, this involves the player's ongoing struggle to defeat a dark master god known as Nemesis -- a compelling story, but not necessarily its strongest feature.) Emergent narrative, by contrast, are the stories that evolve organically through the gameplay itself. They're the stories that the players create for themselves. And if the game design is robust enough, they are unique to each one. Will Wright's the Sims succeeds on these terms as well, with players endlessly fascinated by the kinds of suburban perversity they can stick their Sims into, bizarre love triangles and household disasters. Black & White has this, too, but elevated by its archetypal scope; emergent myth, as it were.

My first such mythical moment came after enormous frustration teaching my tiger Creature to treat my villagers kindly. For a while there, the rambunctious dimwit was more prone to pick them up, deliberate a moment then cheerfully toss them in his mouth. But after an irksome cycle of punishment and reward, neither of which seemed to be sinking in, I happened to catch him at just the right moment. Lumbering through the village, with a crimson sunset behind him, he stopped to pick up a villager, patted her on the head and gently set her back down. It was a perfect, surprisingly moving tableau; but more key, it was mine alone.

That a game could create such moments deserves special attention. For too long, mainstream coverage of games has been cordoned off into the technology section, blurbed alongside spreadsheet software, or worse, the subject of clue-impaired exposés about their putative negative influence on children. When will we stop treating computer and video games like mere geek trifles, and acknowledge them as the emerging art form they really are? Like the Thief games from Doug Church and Looking Glass Studios, or Deus Ex from Warren Spector and Ion Storm Austin, or even the Sims from Maxis and Will Wright, Black & White is an affront to this ignorant dismissal, and a challenge. With Molyneux's game, the mainstream press is now obligated to explain why it hasn't given these designers their due as artists, so late into the development of digital culture.

That need should become crucial when the full online versions of Black & White -- Black & White Worlds and Black & White: The Gathering -- launch. Internet communities are fast becoming influential social forums, and the growing numbers of Internet users will only amplify their importance. Online multiplayer games are playground and theater in this new social realm -- but up until now, they've mostly been about pseudonyms and false fronts, generic heroes with little individuation, as in Everquest or the anonymous bloodbathing of Quake deathmatches.

Peter Molyneux's Black & White suggests a new route, and a new way of thinking about online interaction. What happens when your avatar is a unique and telling reflection of who you really are, and the choices you've made? As the designer once promised a conference of game developers, speaking of players' Creatures, "You'll have to justify his appearance to others." What will happen when we interact in an online world, where everyone enters it in a similar state, wearing our souls, so to speak, on our sleeves?

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