After a long wait, we now have our chance to try out Black & White, the new and heavily hyped god-game from Lionhead Studios. Something about processing power in our home-assembled computers ? B&W is a pig about processing. Anyway.
B&W has elements of RTS in the conquest of new worshippers from what you hope will soon become old, feeble gods. It also has elements of puzzle-adventure games in the collection of detritus and manipulation of the environment to complete short-term goals for the reward of a tool better to handle the next puzzle. Neither is very satisfying, taken on the terms of past successes in these genres, but, of course, that isn't fair; B&W is neither RTS nor puzzle adventure. B&W sells itself on two major points: the moral compass and your creature.
The eternal struggle of good and evil, for which the game is named, is reflected in the graphics of your game. Provide for your villagers, water their crops, save them from illness, and they worship you from gratitude. Your countryside will turn rich and verdant, and villagers laze around, enjoying the good life. Exploit your villagers, however, sacrifice them for their life essence, punish them for small infractions or just for your amusement, and they will worship you in hopes of appeasing you. Your countryside develops an unhealthy fire-and-brimstone appearance, and villagers abandon important jobs to flee at your approach. Many scenarios have at least two solutions with different moral directions and different rewards for their completion ? one way or the other. The treatment of moral issues is rather shallow, but no more so than in other computer games. Lionhead has at least tried to confront you with moral dilemmas. If the extra mana from a human sacrifice means the difference between saving your sheltered people from or losing them to an aggressive and brutal god from the next valley over, could you call it right? Your countryside won't think so.
(Lionhead promotes the game as a window into your own soul. Of course, it isn't really. B&W only reflects your treatment of little pixilated people, rather than true altruism. Until computers start passing the Turing test, and these villagers certainly don't, it's hard to feel real ethics are at issue. Besides, the moral tests are no more a window on your soul than those mini-quizzes you find in teen magazines, since the answers are obvious well ahead of time. Smashing a house to see what happens is ?bad;? collecting stray sheep to see what happens is ?good.? One gets the feeling that, were there no pre-programmed quests with fixed rewards for niceness, there would be no reason to be good at all. There must be an awful lot of hellish countryside in multiplayer games.)
The other big selling point deserves the press it's getting. You have a creature, a giant animal with an endearing desire to please. He (or she) wanders about the land doing all sorts of things, depending on what you train it to do. Using the same slap-or-tickle mechanic of Creatures, you can rapidly teach your gigantic pet that eating people is wrong, or that moving trees to the village lumber store is desirable. Add three leashes which impose varying levels of aggressiveness on your creature and can focus his attention on objects of your choosing, and you can direct him in specific behavior, rather than waiting to reinforce what he does on his own. Lionhead has provided a vast number of variables for the creature to consider, and you can, with patience, train him in behavior as specific as collecting only fully-grown trees for timber, while replanting seedlings in a separate pen. Complex lessons are not easy, though. If you want your creature to learn to eat male villagers of enemy gods, preserving famales for rapid repopulation, and he eats a female, do you stroke him to reinforce the eating of ?enemy villager,? or slap him to discourage him from eating ?female?? Teaching by steps, like encouraging your creature to pick up all villagers, then just children, then just female children, can produce schizophrenic behavior as you start to punish the poor thing in later steps for actions you earlier encouraged.
There are material rewards for training your creature. He can do the grunt-work of sustaining your villages. He can smash enemy villages, destroying an enemy god's source of power. Helping villagers and terrorizing them wins worshippers for you by proxy. He can reach the point of winning an entire village over to your side without your lifting a finger. You can even train a creature to methods of the opposite ethical alignment, allowing a ?good-cop, bad-cop? approach to village conversion.
More important than the material rewards, though, is the raw fun of seeing your creature learn. I'm only in the first world, pursuing quests that can be done with training wheels, and already my ape knows to poo in the fields, collect food for villagers, and refresh himself from streams when he's thirsty. Often, he finishes these tasks by grinning broadly out of the screen at me, hoping for approval. ?Look what I did!? (He also, thanks to a badly-timed click, likes to poo on miracle dispensers, but we're working on that.) I haven't yet got him collecting wood or exercising by lifting rocks when he's too fat, but those lessons are underway. Honestly, I dread the advancement into competitive play, when I'll have to stave off enemy attacks when I'd rather watch my creature, or perhaps teach him less-than-admirable behavior to defend my worshippers. The fun of the game is watching the artifical intelligence at work. Well, AI coupled with adorable creature expressions. It's a pity there's no way to play without going through the tutorial once you've learned how the engine works. I expect starting fresh with a new map and all the tools at your disposal would be more engaging than all the fixed scenarios a CD can offer.