It bears mentioning that this essay was written during my second, frustrating attempt to get started with the best-selling game from Lionhead Studios Ltd., Black & White (B&W). Some of my experiences during the first attempt also bear mentioning, as they are related to my experiences this time around. When Black & White was released, I chose to purchase it not because I had any great interest in the game itself, though I did find it intriguing in light of my past experiences with games by Peter Molyneaux (e.g., Dungeon Keeper II), but because I wanted to vote with my dollars.
As I understood it, Mr. Molyneaux developed the game sans publisher to avoid ceding control; i.e., to be able to make the game he had always wanted to make, free of the sorts of constraints imposed by publishers which all too often lead to unfinished dreck being shipped simply to meet some date on a calendar rather than produce something worth buying. As one who has been frustrated by this mindset in the past during my own tenure with various companies in the software industry, I heartily applaud Mr. Molyneaux's approach and wanted to do my own part to make sure the market noticed how his philosophy was rewarded in cold hard cash—the only factor weighed, it seems, by publishers.
Still, I had read a fair amount about the game prior to release and was looking forward to the sort of open-ended exploratory experience that B&W was supposed to provide. What I got instead was a nightmare. The things I wanted to do, I couldn't do—well, until I'd jumped through precisely the hoops the game designers wanted me to jump in exactly the right order. The creature that I so wanted to be good was growing more evil by the moment, which was caused not by my own incompetence as I thought at the time but because of a bug in the game; i.e., I had the gall to feed my cow fish, which made him evil. I admit I don't think much of seafood, but surely that's a bit much don't you think?
After the torturous ordeal that was the first land I thought it might get better, but it didn't. Thus, I shelved the game and decided to come back to it after a patch had been released. Perhaps then I could play it without running into every documented bug along the way. Unfortunately, after applying the official patch, I could no longer play the game at all as it would hang hard at the loading screen with the progress meter at around 5 - 10%. Still, I wasn't too attached to my old game, so I decided to uninstall the game completely, reinstall, patch and go forward without so much as a memory of the past. It is at that point, then, that my narrative may truly begin.
Every time a wish is made, a god is born. What a stupid theology this embodies. Still, one doesn't play a game (or at least most games) for deep, theological truths, and one must grant Molyneaux a certain amount of liberty to employ such devices for the sake of the story. After watching the opening sequence and being amazed at my own beneficence in rescuing a drowning boy, I saw that the villagers wanted to worship me, so I came along for the ride. I was quickly acquainted with my conscience in the form of two avatars, one for evil and one for good, black and white so to speak. As an aside, I'm actually rather surprised that Molyneaux et al. haven't been the target of a lawsuit by the NAACP or some similar organization for having the gall to associate the colors black and white so obviously with evil and good. Perhaps it's a victory for common sense that it hasn't happened? (yet)
Anyway, the villagers wanted to build me a temple, which as a naive and new god on the block seemed appropriate to me. Initially watching them work was rather interesting, but my eye was quickly drawn to the beauty of the sea in my new world. I used my hand to pull myself along the landscape to take a closer look, only to be dragged back to the temple by my conscience. "Shouldn't we help the villagers finish the temple first?" he said, or something like it. Ok, fine, they need my help again. I picked up a rather large amount of wood and deposited it nearby, figuring that should hold them for a while. I then turned and headed for the beach, only to get dragged back to the temple again (sigh). This continued until the little buggers had finished the temple completely. I figured perhaps then I could finally at least look around.
Silly me. My conscience continued to interrupt me at every turn until I suppose he figured I'd finally learned how to move around and look at things to his satisfaction. I realize that some kind of tutorial is needed, but the manner in which B&W crams it down the user's throat is quite annoying. How hard can it really be to understand such basic notions as rotating or tilting the camera view? Does this really require such a laborious and un-skippable set of directions followed by the tedium of practicing it? Sheesh.
Finally I was done with my conscience for a while, or so I thought. The first order of business, then, was to secure a creature so that I could get on with the game and start enjoying that marvelous, ground-breaking AI about which I had read so much. I breezed through the quests necessary to choose a creature and made my selection: the mighty cow would be my avatar in this world. He mooed in glee when I picked him while his loser colleagues cried and whined in their own special ways. It was a momentous occasion in bovine history.
In retrospect, I should have obtained my creature elsewhere, however, if at all possible—perhaps at Crazy Bob's Discount Creature Hut on some other island. I say this because Sable, the local creature trainer, soon proved herself to be every bit as persistent and annoying as a group of animal-rights wackos on the warpath. All I wanted to do was watch my creature explore its environment, teaching him what to eat, where to poop and so forth. But my efforts were constantly interrupted by "Sable, the creature trainer, is trying to get our attention!" Things only grew worse as "There is a silver reward scroll down at the beach!" (or something like that) was added to the din. Let me ask the game designers openly: how much fun do you really think it is, folks, for your player to be nagged every minute or so? I barely had time to feed my creature before I was getting annoyed constantly from both directions.
To summarize this set of disappointments, I would ask a simple question: what kind of god am I? Apparently I'm the kind that can't have a bloody moment's peace without getting dragged around by the ear like a five-year old who doesn't want to take his bath! How lame.
After a while, I think I managed to shut up both Sable and my conscience by allowing myself to be led around by the ear like a good little god. I figured I could then concentrate on training my creature, or at least starting with the basics of what I wanted him to eat and where I wanted him to poop. Unfortunately, this process was far from painless and has been nothing but frustrating to date.
My creature was getting hungry, so I put him on the leash and led him to the local store, at which point he promptly ate the nearest villager. After I slapped him around a bit, I offered him some grain, which he seemed to like, and rewarded him when he ate it. Shortly thereafter he began farting like a young puppy taking an afternoon nap, so I leashed him and took him out back to the fields. He stood there in the field looking at me curiously while farting profusely, then promptly walked over to the village holy artifact (i.e., a rock I'd dropped around which the villagers were presently dancing) and took a dump on it (sigh). Well, even the smartest pets need repetition to learn, right? God how I wish repetition worked...
For the next hour I focused on little else aside from trying to teach him what to eat and where to poop. I wanted him to eat grain. I wanted him to poop in farmers' fields. He ate rocks. He ate more villagers. He ate cows. He ate his own poop. He ate pretty much everything except what I gave him and rewarded him for eating. Even the dumbest of dogs learns more quickly than this cow, and believe me I know for my real life involves a couple of seriously dim-bulb canines. Regarding his poop, it doesn't seem to matter how many times I drag him back to the fields, he just doesn't get it. I drag him to the fields, and he stands around in puzzlement. He starts to wander off, and I drag him back to the fields, so he eats one of the nearby farmers. After a good beating he begins to wander off, and I drag him back to the fields yet again, at which point he promptly thrusts his butt into the nearest house and poops there rather than in the fields. In a word, aaaaauuuuuggggghhhhhhhh!
To call this "artificial intelligence" is an insult to intelligence itself. This isn't artificial intelligence at all; it's artificial stupidity at best. My cow scores about a 12 on the Richter scale of stupidity. I realize that bovines aren't that bright, but isn't this beastie supposed to respond appropriately to positive and negative reinforcement? Maybe I got a masochistic cow, for he seems to date to do everything I beat him for doing and avoids everything for which I reward him! I swear that if he eats his fifth villager, I'm going to beat the little bastard bloody.
Setting aside the difficulties mentioned thus far, what about the rest of the game? After all, getting started with any game can be a bit of a chore, and perhaps one's creature will grow smarter over time (he couldn't get any dumber, I think). What about the rest of the story? What kind of experience does the rest of the game play involve? Is it the open-ended exploratory experience the hype would suggest one expect?
Sadly, no. After getting frustrated with trying to train my creature, I figured I should focus instead on working on some of the things to do around the island. I grabbed my creature's leash and we began to explore together. Lo and behold, I found some rather largish creature seemingly moping on the other side of the mountains. But no matter what I did, he wouldn't respond to me. When I threw rocks over his head, he ignored them. When I brought my creature to him, he ignored us both. Nothing we did would get his attention. Hmm... How odd.
That was alright, though, as I had noticed something else worth investigating. There was another village out there! And what's more, it seemed to have no god—or at least not the right one (wink). I'd read the manual, which was suggested strongly by the developers, so I figured I would try to convert that village with all the suggestions gleaned from its thorough perusal. I threw rocks, I showed them my creature, I gave them food, wood and sent disciples to spread my good word to them. For all my efforts I got a big fat nothing. Along the way I discovered I couldn't activate any of the miracles mentioned in the manual, no matter how hard I tried to perform the right gestures. I could conclude only that converting a village was a serious undertaking, and one for which I wasn't equipped.
Finally, I ran out of steam and decided to click some scrolls. I had not done so thus far for two reasons. First, I wanted to approach the game as the open-ended masterpiece of exploration and fun that it was supposed to be. Second, as I understood it, I didn't need to activate the scrolls until I wanted to advance the story. Obviously my understanding was flawed. I soon discovered (or rediscovered I should say as I had learned this during my first pass through the game and had forgotten it since) that the game is open-ended only insofar as you can choose when you will do precisely what the game developers want you to do. Sure, you can uproot trees, mess around with your villagers, throw and break rocks and twaddle about pointlessly trying to train your creature, but if you want to interact with anything else on the island, you'd darned well better click those scrolls and do exactly what the developers want you to do to finish the challenges. Yeah, I suppose that's "open-ended" by some standards, but not mine.
In short, I felt like I was jumping through a series of admittedly interesting hoops. I couldn't fuss with the big, sad creature until I clicked the right scroll. I couldn't convert the village until I'd taken the right steps to "activate" it. I couldn't cast any miracles until I'd been given them by the developers. Again I have to ask: what kind of god am I?
I'm still on the first island right now, so I have hope that the game will improve once I get off this clump of dirt and head somewhere else. From all the guides I've read, however, I think I'm going to be here for quite a while trying to train my moron creature. At this point, I feel as if I can just get the idiot to eat and poop I will have accomplished a task roughly as difficult as putting men on the moon. Perhaps the magic of B&W will yet manifest itself as I play further. For now, however, I have to say that it delivers on only a small portion of the hype.
07/31/2001