Black & White

Black & White is a God-simulator game by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios and one of the most expensive Tamagochis I have ever owned. You are a ‘god’, defined by dictionary.com as “one of several deities, esp. a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs.” In this case, it seems likely that you are the god of neurotically pointless weird stuff.

The problem, in a sense, is one of agency. Although you are promised the 'freedom' to be good or evil, in reality you are given a narrow path to walk along, where the left side is 'doing as the designer intended, but evilly' and the right is the same, but with slightly shinier lighting effects. Your character is confined at all times. When you first begin, your exploration is curtailed by two little talking heads who attempt to introduce you to the game’s interface with a series of clunky and difficult activities that you are unable to avoid or circumvent. After spending a little more time free-roaming you discover that your exploration of the world around you is actually limited by your ‘sphere of influence’. This might not be the nail in the coffin.

The nail is truly that its features do not combine to make a ‘god game’ as advertised, nor is it truly a strategy game. “You”, in your capacity as god, are unable to micromanage your villagers meaningfully and there is no particular tech-tree, but all the same you are unable to exert your potentially-useful miracles anywhere where they would be important. Similarly, your creature is a liability in most levels of the single-player game: at first it is small, stupid and useless and given to occasionally eating your villagers or pooping on your village, it is captured in the second level, becomes the main objective in the third and throughout the fifth it is cursed to gradually lose power and swap alignments. In the fourth level of the game, fireballs rain down from the sky.

From the perspective of game-balance, the challenge to the player doesn’t start out low and gradually increase, it starts out unfamiliar and then level-by-level throws out all the information you accrued during previous stages of the game and replaces them with a fresh, novel game state. What is Black & White? In the end, it is not so much as a single game as a mismatched jumble of tiny little games.