I

(have this fear that something bad will one day happen to Peter Molyneux. Because if he ever suffered harm under mysterious circumstances, I worry that a police investigation will uncover things I said in 2001. I may have expressed ill-will toward him, and perhaps even made comments to the effect that it would not be in his best interest to encounter me in a dark alley. I might rashly have expressed the opinion that Black & White was a gaming experience that I would one day avenge.

Calling Black & White a bad game oversimplifies the problem, because Black & White’s true malginance came from its flashes of brilliance. Those glimmers in the dark would buy another two or three hours of hope-crushing gameplay. Just as you were about to consign the game to Uninstall hell, it would do something mildly clever and you would once again think that maybe you were getting the hang of this thing. Maybe the problem wasn’t really the game, but your own clumsiness and stupidity. It was such a smart, creative game, and your plodding imagination and incompetent hands were ruining it.

Black & White was one of those, “The future is now!” games: high-concept, reactive, dynamic, and completely user-driven. Millenial expectations, coupled with the fact that the late 90s had seen an explosion of creativity on the PC, created an environment where gamers were ready to believe that a game really could do all the things that Black & White set out to accomplish.

The sales pitch went like this: you were a deity who presided over the lives of his believers, free to be whatever kind of god you wished. You could be a punishing death-god, whose unrelenting violence was rewarded by fear and misery. You could be a loving god who helped his people arrive at Utopia. Or you could strike any number of middle-paths, balancing benificence and wrath as you saw fit.

You had a representative on earth: Stay-Puft to your Gozer. He was a giant animal guarding your territory from other gods and their creatures, and would perform tasks using his own divine energies. Where the player would have a limited supply of belief with which to create forests and rainstorms, the creature could perform those tasks unceasingly. The creature could also police the faithful, calling in lightning or simply devouring the divinely disfavored.

There were two twists: first, mouse-based spellcasting. Rather than simply binding “lightning strike” to a keystroke, you had to make a glyph on the screen with your mouse. There was to be no visible interface standing between players and their world. Your mouse hand was the hand of god. Second, your creature could learn. You trained it to behave as you desired, and its personality changed with how it was treated. Treat it like a beloved pet and train it to help the villagers live their lives, and it would be like the Jolly Green Giant. Torment it without reason and reward it for destruction, however, and the creature would become something out of Clash of the Titans.

So went the theory, at any rate. In reality, the mousecasting worked terribly. Too often, the mouse simply would not cooperate in making the smooth character needed to generate the spell. If you had a trackball mouse, the game was nigh unplayable. Beyond the simplest spells, Black & White’s casting system was impossible to use efficiently. Belief would be consumed by miscasts, and spells were never at hand when they were most needed.

Worse, the creature was a Tomogatchi from hell. Needy, helpless, and hopeless, it had to be babysat constantly in order to learn anything constructive.

Which is why the torture began.

After spending an hour showing it how to conjure wood for the villagers, which it would do only sporadically before going back to its favorite activity, standing around doing nothing, I finally snapped. The gestural controls that were so inept at doing anything useful or constructive proved surprisingly satisfying when they were used to mercilessly beat my pet.

All my frustration at the broken, boring, and semi-playable game started coming out in endless series of slaps across my creature’s face. Once it started cringing and cowering, I moved onto the villagers.

They didn’t do anything useful and kindness wasn’t making them particularly faithful, so I started flinging them with my mouse. A farmer on his way to the field would be snatched from the ground and hurled into the ocean, and they started to believe. I burned down their houses and they started to believe.

I tossed one of them into the sacrificial fire at my temple, and got a surge of power. This got me thinking, and I went in search of an infant. Grabbing a baby from its parents, I tossed it into the flames and got a tremendous amount of power. I still couldn’t cast anything interesting with it, since the controls were terrible, but laying waste to this insipid little civilization was its own reward.

My pet grew lean, miserable, and angry. I fed it on a steady diet of villagers, destruction, and senseless beatings until it became a Dorian Gray portrait of me playing the game. Black & White had become a journey into spiritual sickness, portraying the unjust fury of an impotent godling.

That’s when I lent it to someone I didn’t like, and never asked for it back.

Black & White was important because it served to remind us that the future was not, in fact, now. The 1990s were not giving way to some creative explosion brought on by yesterday’s wonder-technologies. AI still didn’t “learn”. There was no damned “neural net” that would create an endlessly dynamic, responsive, and adaptive gameworld. There was just the dazzling promise of technologies that were still just out of reach, and designers like Peter Molyneux, who sold these mirages.