Black & White Omens
A friend recently recommended Black & White 2, sequel to the brilliant, ambitious, but ultimately flawed Black & White, which grafted a learning AI onto a standard RTS. In both games, you take the role of god of a primitive tribe, seeking to increase your divine power by increasing the worship you receive. You can do this with constructive miracles, which cause your worshippers to prosper and multiply, or destructive ones, which encourage them to worship out of fear. Either kind of miracle can convert neighboring tribes, if you’re sufficiently impressive, and the land’s appearance soon begins to reflect your divine or infernal nature, becoming a pastoral paradise or a hellish wasteland. This good-or-evil dilemma gives the game its name.
The real selling point of Black & White, however, was your animal avatar, or “pet.” A gigantic animal—ape, wolf, lion, ram, or many others—acted as a semi-independent extension of your will. It would learn from the slaps and tickles you bestowed which you behaviors you forbade and condoned, respectively. More interesting, it would also learn behavior directly from you. If you frequently cast rain miracles to benefit crops, for example, your pet would soon go bringing rain on its own initiative. Navigating the maze of training your pet, and watching its own unpredictable innovation could be fascinating. For example, I read one story of a player who taught his avatar to play catch with large boulders. Later, when a hostile god hurled a fireball at the player’s village, the avatar caught the fireball, then, putting two and two together, hurled it back at the enemy’s village, to good effect. Bravo!
But avatar behavior could also be incredibly frustrating, so frustrating that many players (including me) simply gave up. Many complained of being unable to break their pet of eating its own poo. I never got my pet past the hurdle of moving villagers to where he belonged. Encouraged to pick up villagers, my pet would pause, look up at me, look at the villager, look up at me, look at the villager, then eat the villager. No! Bad monkey! No biscuit! Correcting bad behavior beyond a certain complexity, once learned, was difficult. How could I punish my creature without causing him to learn not to pick up people at all? How could I reward it for picking up people without rewarding his man-eating tendencies? How could I train a pet to eat only farmers and not priests? When the creature learned new tricks on his own, training him to repeat or cease them was nigh impossible, because the player probably didn’t know why he was doing it in the first place.
Lionhead Studios trumpeted unpredictable pet behavior, even to the point of surprising the developers, as a triumph of AI. I soon began to suspect it was simply semi-random behavior, from which Lionhead culled the most intelligent-sounding cases.
But they learned from public comment. From what I’m told, this second incarnation of Black & White makes the training process transparent: as your creature acts, a window tells you what it is thinking: “I’m picking up a person,” or “I’m eating a person,” or “I’m eating a priest,” or “I’m hurling rocks at an enemy building.” Thus, you can know which behavior, precisely, you reward or punish. And when you tickle or slap your pet, a window again tells you what he pet thinks: “I am more inclined to throw people into the ocean,” or “I would rather die than eat my own poo.”
I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it gets the player past some very frustrating problems. The game is better as a game, with clearer relationship between cause and effect, thus better rewards for good strategy. On the other hand, it pretty well destroys the illusion of artificial intelligence, and the wonder of interacting with your pet. The game is poorer as a toy, with poorer rewards for exploration of the engine for its own sake. If Black & White were at heart a strategy game, this would be a good thing. But the market is saturated with well-made strategy games. Black & White earned all its attention as a toy, a chance to play with an independent, if somewhat clumsy, thinker. I would like to see the sequel, but I can’t help the feeling that what magic the original had will be gone.