Since its first season launch in 2016, I’ve at all times felt just like the Westworld TV sequence supplied an particularly compelling commentary on the online game passion. Like loads of sci-fi, the present leverages futuristic know-how 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 enjoying a sport and the way that sport is de facto nearly life and the selections we make that form that life. Westworld might not borrow from a longstanding online game license. Nonetheless, with its incisive and infrequently stunning views, it has emerged as the very best present about video video games, their potential, and their menace that I’ve ever seen.
SPOILERS comply with for the whole lot of the Westworld TV sequence, as much as and together with present episodes of Season 4.
Anybody who has performed an MMO might grasp the setup introduced because the present’s first season acquired began. Actual-life participant characters are dressed up in period-appropriate costume and flung headlong right into a teeming world of quest givers, aspect aims, 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 an excellent time.
Past the repeated themes of free will that dominate these early episodes, I recall being constantly impressed by the present’s narrative, notably its understanding of sport design and writing – and the way in which good design calls for such an acute understanding of human psychology. Whether or not you as soon as DMed a D&D sport on your buddies, otherwise you’re a part of a workforce crafting the subsequent triple-A console RPG, it’s a truism that understanding participant wishes is essential 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 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 Leisure, a fictional sport firm within the Westworld universe that originally appears to have the identical cache as right now’s most outstanding sport studios, however maybe much more exaggerated. The “Olympiad” title appears most definitely to be a play on phrases to recall to mind 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.
Right 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 via the equal of a number of sport over screens and respawns, and even Bernard’s seeming functionality to “cheat” by realizing the doable results of each interactive alternative – they’re all intelligent twists on online game conventions. In every scenario, Westworld’s episodes faucet into established points 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 extra they’re attempting to say with the fixed online game references.
The repeated online game insinuations emphasize most of the identical emotions we encounter after we play video games. It’s that sense that our experiences won’t be fully actual, and that we should 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 incessantly 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 be taught the foundations.
Most significantly, it’s additionally a manner to make use of the present’s mind-twist setups to recommend that life, at its core, is commonly little greater than a sport, albeit a fancy one. Like the usually tortured characters of the present, the present’s writers appear to recommend that all of us are likely to get wrapped up within the conventions of the sport of life we play from everyday. We set targets and aims. We chase enjoyable, flash, and simple rewards. We comply with 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 value 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 incessantly 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 ultimately 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.
