Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather discuss the potential fruits of the AT&T acquisition of Time Warner, and get into the multiple meanings of the Western genre, talking about Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, Westworld, and the remake of The Magnificent Seven.
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I’m fascinated by Westworld so far. It’s been reported to be heavily influenced by games like Bioshock Infinite where the creator scripted NPC storylines and events which the player may never see unless they turn around certain alleyways. Also with the difference in games like GTA which the creators played.
I can see a lot of BioWare and Telltale games in it, too.
In a way, this is showing the NPCs in video games as people with a slowly-growing awareness and consciousness. At some point they may become Cylons, may become people who need rights. One of the big issues I’m seeing at the moment is whether that can/will happen, how are they going to react to people who have been wantonly murdering and abusing them?
You could view it as the way people viewed The Other as someone without feelings, without any need for rights because they weren’t us. With the self-awareness of hindsight on our part and the blindness of the protagonists in the show, I’m very interested to see how they go in the show.
It’s something which makes me want to write about the way we treat NPCs, the permission about taking a life or harming people in a virtual world and what that means. My brother and I used to creep each other out by talking about how the enemies in GoldenEye had one day until retirement or were paying for their child’s medication in order to put each other off. It didn’t stop us, as it was the only way to progress the story, but Westworld puts a voice to those nameless NPCs we gunned down in GoldenEye and robbed in GTA.