Since its first season launch in 2016, I’ve at all times felt just like the Westworld TV series supplied an particularly compelling commentary on the online game passion. Like a variety of sci-fi, the present leverages futuristic expertise and far-fetched concepts to get its level throughout. However at its core, it’s nonetheless a present in regards to the psychology of individuals taking part in a sport and the way that sport is admittedly nearly life and the choices we make that form that life. Westworld might not borrow from a longstanding online game license. Nonetheless, with its incisive and infrequently shocking views, it has emerged as one of the best present about video video games, their potential, and their risk that I’ve ever seen.
SPOILERS observe for everything of the Westworld TV series, as much as and together with present episodes of Season 4.
Anybody who has performed an MMO may grasp the setup offered because the present’s first season bought began. Actual-life participant characters are dressed up in period-appropriate gown and flung headlong right into a teeming world of quest givers, aspect targets, and freeform exploration. After all, Westworld’s all-important twist is the attention and nascent sentience of the NPCs inside that would-be massively multiplayer actual world and the harmful implications of a bunch of individuals prepared to miss others’ struggling to have time.
Past the repeated themes of free will that dominate these early episodes, I recall being persistently impressed by the present’s narrative, significantly its understanding of sport design and writing – and the best way good design calls for such an acute understanding of human psychology. Whether or not you as soon as DMed a D&D sport in your buddies, otherwise you’re a part of a group crafting the following triple-A console RPG, it’s a truism that understanding participant wishes is vital to creating one thing enjoyable.
The early episodes of the present fourth season double down on the online game allusions and aren’t delicate in regards to the nods. Composer Ramin Djawadi helps to open the season with one other of his fascinating orchestral covers of acquainted songs, this time with Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” The music performs to accompany the quiet contemplations of Christina, née Dolores, as she muses on a brand new character within the sport for which she writes.
That sport is a product of Olympiad Entertainment, a fictional sport firm within the Westworld universe that originally appears to have the identical cache as at present’s most distinguished sport studios, however maybe much more exaggerated. The “Olympiad” title appears almost certainly to be a play on phrases to think of Mount Olympus, the house of the capricious gods of Greek mythology who as soon as lorded over a helpless humanity, with current episodes serving as ample proof for the case.
Here within the fourth season, Christina’s dawning horror about her position on the planet (as a author of individuals’s fates), Caleb’s twisted journey by means of the equal of a number of sport over screens and respawns, and even Bernard’s seeming functionality to “cheat” by figuring out the attainable results of each interactive alternative – they’re all intelligent twists on online game conventions. In every state of affairs, Westworld’s episodes faucet into established elements of the fiction to create conflicts for its leads. However devoted sport gamers can get pleasure from an additional layer of interpretation – every character being a participant or creator of an enormous and inscrutable sport.
If that’s the case, then why? Certainly, gaming is an integral a part of the zeitgeist and serves as fertile inspiration for futuristic dystopian musings. However I believe the present’s creators have more they’re making an attempt to say with the fixed online game references.
The repeated online game insinuations emphasize lots of the similar emotions we encounter once we play video games. It’s that sense that our experiences may not be fully actual, and that we must always query the character of our personal actuality. Like gamers in a sport, there’s a futility to Westworld’s character experiences; everyone seems to be striving towards one thing however ceaselessly finds themselves merely having to begin over from the start. Westworld leverages the gaming expertise to current an existential quandary for its characters, leaving them spinning their wheels as they attempt to study the foundations.
Most significantly, it’s additionally a method to make use of the present’s mind-twist setups to recommend that life, at its core, is usually little greater than a sport, albeit a posh one. Like the customarily tortured characters of the present, the present’s writers appear to recommend that all of us are inclined to get wrapped up within the conventions of the sport of life we play from daily. We set targets and targets. We chase enjoyable, flash, and straightforward rewards. We observe guidelines, or break them. We provoke or handle battle. And, if we get too wrapped up within the sport’s challenges and targets, Westworld’s fiction means that we might lose sight of the moments price dwelling for.
My enjoyment of Westworld has ebbed and flowed over the lifetime of its seasons. However all through the scope of its story, I ceaselessly smile as I watch its many twists and turns, imagining how its characters appear to be a part of an enormous and convoluted treatise on sport design and participant psychology. In no matter wrap-up the showrunners finally attain, I’ll nonetheless love how the present speaks to my love of gaming, and I can’t wait to see if its characters lastly eke out a win.
