Spoilers for Westworld follow.
The futuristic theme park at the center of HBO’s Westworld is a video game taken to the logical conclusion of open world and VR gaming. That much is obvious. But some of the questions at the heart of the show can be reflected back on us, the viewer, and the entertainment we watch and the games we play right here in the year 2016.
The series’ co-creator Jonathan Nolan relayed a story at New York Comic-Con’s Westworld panel last month (moderated by IGN’s own Man in Black, Eric Goldman!) that he had heard from BioShock Infinite designer Ken Levine. Levine was talking about the non-player characters like Elizabeth. “In a scene [in the game], I think I had just run through and shot everyone and kept going,” Nolan recalled. “And [Levine] was talking about how much craft had gone into all the conversations that the non-player characters had. And all their dreams and aspirations. And I just thought, ‘Oh, isn't that tragic? Isn't that sad?’ And the player just ignores it all. Those bastards.”
The thing is, you don’t have to be a bastard. You can stop and talk to those characters, whether in BioShock Infinite or in Westworld, and learn their stories and interact and perhaps find some reward to the game you’re playing right there. You can discover romance in Westworld with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), or head straight to the brothel instead. You can make peace with characters… or blast through everyone in a mission of blood and carnage.
Westworld’s second episode, "Chestnut," introduces us to the character of William (Jimmi Simpson). As he enters the park for the first time, he’s given the choice (quite literally) of being a white hat or a black hat. He goes with the white while his fellow vacationer Logan (Ben Barnes) chooses black, with latter player ready to indulge in all the blood and sex and temptations Westworld affords. William is our identifying character as viewers of the show, but as the series has progressed we’ve seen William’s status as a white hat, a good guy, teeter on the edge as he’s been forced to shoot opponents in the back and even abandon Logan to a gang of thugs. All to advance his in-game mission.
This idea of going good or bad is set up in the premiere when a guest can be overheard talking about his first visit to Westworld when he attended with his family and went “white hat.” They fished and did the gold hunt in the mountains -- yawn. But the second time, when he came alone, he went full evil. “It was the best two weeks of my life,” the guy says. I bet.
I remember playing Red Dead Redemption when it came out. The game obviously is something Westworld owes a lot to in concept, but I have to confess: I always wound up going black hat. I may have tried to do the good guy thing from time to time, but for some reason in the end I’d just shoot a place up or do some other horrible thing that led to the law being after me in a big way. Sometimes I’d feel kind of guilty about that, but not enough to really change my ways. Being bad was just too good.
But Red Dead, while very cool and very sophisticated, is still clearly just a game that you play with a controller in your hand and a couch to sit on. It’s fake. You never get blood on your hands, not really. What one has to ponder with Westworld is what happens when the technology of entertainment reaches a point where it’s not fake anymore, or doesn’t feel fake anyway? VR certainly is a step in that direction, and of course an environment like Westworld is nowhere in our near future, but there’s no doubt that something along those lines could happen eventually. And if it did, would I still be slaughtering the non-player characters indiscriminately? When their blood is splattering all over me, how would I feel then? And if I was still playing that way, then why would I be doing that? I mean, what the hell?
Certainly the show is commenting on how the games we play and the movies and TV we enjoy in the here and now offer a sort of guilt-free indulgence in violence (there’s also the sexual aspect, which is perhaps a different discussion). But in Westworld, we see the cycle of violence that the hosts are trapped in, all because of the guests’ base impulses and vices. Seeing the pain Dolores is in after Teddy (James Marsden) is gunned down is only made worse because we realize that the two are going to go through some variation of this over and over and over again.
Anthony Hopkins’ Robert Ford, who designed the park decades ago, notes that the guests don’t come to Westworld because they want an experience that tells them what they are. They already know that. What they want is “a glimpse of who they could be.” Is the show telling us that the answer may be that there are no heroes or villains? Logan spells this out explicitly to William at one point, saying it’s “just a giant circle jerk.” But William continues to try to fight against this idea at times, refusing to play a part of this “sick game” as he calls it. And yet… he still boarded that train with Dolores and El Lazo (Clifton Collins Jr.) after ditching Logan, and he more than any other human character seems to be getting sucked into the illusion of Westworld.
There’s also the fan theory, which seems increasingly likely, that William is actually a younger version of Ed Harris’ Man in Black. The Man in Black’s motivations are tough to read, even though he initially presented as a bad guy, but if he is an older version of William, then not only did he continue to play this sick game, but he’s been doing so for 30 years. To what end, and what his true intentions are -- black hat or white hat -- will surely give us a better idea of where Westworld the show stands regarding all of this. But until we find out, you have to ask yourself: Would you be a black hat or a white hat?
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.
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