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Decade Feature – 2001: Black & White

November 17th, 2009 by Rob Zacny · 16 Comments · Uncategorized

What this is about.

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.

Black and White Black Cover

Calling Black & White a bad game oversimplifies the problem. Black & White had flashes of true brilliance, but they were also the source of its cruelty. 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. Millennial 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 beneficence 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.

Black and White Spell

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 Tamagotchi from hell. Needy, helpless, and hopeless, it had to be babysat constantly in order to learn anything useful.

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 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 an 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.

Black and White Mountain Village

I tossed one of them into the sacrificial fire at my temple, and received a small 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, 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 new wonder-technologies. AI still didn’t “learn”. There was no “neural net AI” that would create an endlessly dynamic and responsive gameworld. There were only the dazzling promises of technologies just out of reach, and designers like Peter Molyneux, who sold these mirages.

(All images courtesy of MobyGames.)

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.

Next up, Timegate’s Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns.

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16 Comments so far ↓

  • JonathanStrange

    Great summary of my feelings – esp. the idea that the future had arrived and concepts like Molyneux’s would work.

    I can’t give you B & W back though; you didn’t say you were “lending” it to me at the time anyway.

  • James Allen

    I’m glad that this series will not end up being a series of “this game was super mega awesome” posts.

  • Troy

    Mostly fond memories in the series, but it’s the author’s choice to go somewhere else.

  • Protector one

    Sounds awfully familiar to my own experience with the game. After I gave up on playing normally, I took refuge in flinging everything (starting with fireballs, then rocks, then trees, then villagers) and feeding my pet rocks. (I didn’t have pet rocks I was feeding, I was feeding my pet, rocks.)

  • Morkilus

    Aw, I was hoping for someone to do MOO3.

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  • JonathanStrange

    For too long a time, I thought it was my fault my Creature wouldn’t stop eating or doing something unpleasant to the villagers – I’d keep trying different stuff long after it had ceased to be funny.

  • Nightmare

    I agree with James – it’s great to see some “awesome” failures in this series, of which there were many this decade.

  • Rob Zacny

    I wish I had a happier strategy memory of 2001, a MOO3 for example, but this is what defined that year for me. The worst part is that I wasn’t really that interested in this game until my friend Zach drank the Kool-Aid and started telling me how amazing this game was going to be. We ended up going to Best Buy on launch day together. But, as I wrote above, it was a valuable learning experience.

    Sad part is, I read Protector One’s comment above and I think, “Wait, I could have been feeding rocks to my pet? That sounds AWESOME!” And then I wish I hadn’t “loaned” Jonathan Strange the game so that I could feed stones to a giant monkey. Where B&W is concerned, I will always to some extent be Charlie Brown trying to kick the football.

    Still, Mr. Strange, don’t feel you need to return it to me. You just enjoy.

  • Troy

    Anyone who would consider MOO3 a happier strategy memory doesn’t remember the game at all.

  • Rob Zacny

    Yeah, I realized after posting that MOO3 was the bad MOO. But I never played it because I was too busy having fun with this. Still, I have a hard time imagining it could be worse than B&W.

  • Cameron Goble

    B&W left such a bad taste in my mouth, it forever spoiled Peter Molyneux for me. I had grown to worship him and his team at Bullfrog, especially with Dungeon Keeper — oh Peter, what happened? Now every time he opens his mouth, I feel a dark shadow of cynicism rise up like bile in my throat.

    I want to love B&W. I want to love the giant cow. But the reviewer gets it right: the game is so inept at interpreting my godliness that moral fly right out the window. I wonder if something like that is happening on a macrocosmic scale: injustice exists because the universe has a crappy interface.

  • MattR

    Now I feel bad for giving a copy of B&W2 to someone I actually liked. Oops.

  • FooManchu

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

    Everything from this paragraph on in your article mirrored exactly what I did with this game. It’s uncanny.

    I would also like to add thanks for including this in your decade feature write-up. We don’t need another “top 10 best of…” list.

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