Trigger Happy
videogame concepts, Black and White nevertheless still comes up against the inherent problem of reversible systems identified in Chapter 10. Although your moral decisions have global effects in the gameworld—let your worshippers drown, or destroy them with fireballs, and the remaining population worships you ever more fervently out of fear, while the environment changes to reflect your evildoing—they are, in the end, reversible. Start being nice, and everything will eventually be all right again. Some gamers found, indeed, that the designers had failed to make being an evil god sufficiently interesting—most eventually chose the path of good after toying with wickedness. That also testifies, however, to the excellent iconic and dynamic design of the little people who worship you: as in Lemmings, they are so cute that it hurts to see them suffer.
Black and White’s amiable, soft-spoken creator, Peter Molyneux, claimed bullishly to me that his creature AI was “the best in the world, anywhere”— including the university research labs that he is regularly invited to visit. While it is still light-years from the simulation of a communicative consciousness inside a machine, it represents a major step on the path
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