Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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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