morality Play.(Product Development)

IN THE GAME BLACK & WHITE, GRAPHICS REFLECT A PLAYER'S CHOICES ABOUT GOOD AND EVIL

I've asked a lot of people who are crazy about computers just why it is they are so crazy about computers. They will hem and they will haw, but eventually it gets down to this: A computer makes you God."

Steven Levy, now Senior Editor at Newsweek and author of Crypto (Viking), wrote that in 1984 as editor for the games domain in Point Foundation's Whole Earth Software Catalog. A scant three years later, a game developer turned computer users into virtual deities by giving them dominion over a fantasy world.

That developer was Peter Molyneaux, who created the game Populous for his company, Bullfrog. Populous, released in 1987, was arguably the first in what was to become a new genre called god-sims. Maxis' SimCity followed two years later. God-sims tend to tickle the intellect rather than twitch the thumbs, and many of these games have become best sellers. Populous, for example, reportedly has sold 4 million copies and SimCity, 2 million.

This month, if all goes as planned, Electronic Arts will release Lionhead Studios' Black and White, a new god-sim three years in the making that could, if it works as promised, lead the genre into new territory. As before, this game is the brainchild of Peter Molyncaux, who, after selling Bullfrog to Electronic Arts, founded Lionhead and funded the game's development.

In a god-sim game, a player manipulates elements in a world, thereby changing the game as it's played. A player might create and populate a city (as in SimCity), direct followers from afar to destroy an enemy (as in the early Populous games), or work through a shaman who interacts with people to give the player-god power and help him or her fight an enemy (as in the later versions of Populous.) Like other god-sims, a player in the new Black and White game enlists the help of people--villagers in this case--to defeat his or her enemies by using magical spells and miracles. But here's the twist: The gameplay in this complex god-sim strategy is based on emotion, not logic.

Black and White takes place in a world dotted with islands; the islands are dotted with villages. Even though the game was designed to run on 200MHz PCs with 4MB graphics cards, the 3D world has moving water, a detailed landscape, and 3D animated characters.