Darkness, light, heaven, earth and sea. Sun, moon, grass, fish and fowl. And then, just six days in, comes man. Player one takes the stage and the creation process is complete. Black & White is a game that from the off does little to discourage Christian parallels, whether it’s the swirling darkness and light of the opening sequence or the conventional cloud-perching, snow-bearded deity who represents your good conscience. It may be a convenient shorthand, but Black & White took the god-game label more seriously than ever before. But there is a crucial difference in the theology. In Peter Molyneux’s universe, god doesn’t create man; men create the gods they need. The player’s character, a fledgling god, is called into being by the prayers of anguished parents, watching in panic from the beach as their young child is circled by sharks. So where does that leave you, as the hero of the quintessential god game? Suddenly you’re not so much the great I Am, as the great How Can I Help?, a hired hand paid off in wads of worship – 34 belief for conjuring some wood, 16 for helping bring the crops in.

There is, of course, the option to rebel. To kick over the traces and go bad, wreaking havoc on the people whose desperation for mercy created you. Even then, though, you can’t escape the caretaker role. Even if your regard for your flock extends only to wanting to ensure there’s a steady stream of child victims for your sacrificial altar, you still need to invest time breeding and feeding to keep their numbers up. It’s soon apparent that, even if this is a god game, no one else around treats you as omnipotent. Within seconds of starting your first proper quest, the Creature Trainer is talking to you with all the big-vowelled condescension of a nanny trying to sweet-talk a toddler. And, once you’ve done your chores and been rewarded with your creature, you accelerate straight from childhood to parenthood – burping your bug-eyed tiger when he eats the wrong thing and tutting over his toilet training. Wasn’t there supposed to be a bit in between? A bit when you felt, if not like a god, then at least like a grown-up?



It’s this contradiction which is at the heart of all god games. Although promising ultimate power, the design challenge is always focused on how to limit that power: it wouldn’t have made Black & White a better game if you’d been able to toss off a mouse gesture that casts ‘I Win’. And so your potency is metered, dependent on the prayers of your followers. Your influence is circumscribed, penned in by a smoky ring of red. In an odd ecological twist, you’re even dependent on natural resources: strip the land of trees and the seas of fish and your godhood can soon be brought up short. And, while you may be able to frazzle the odd helpless fisherman or scoop up lost and lonely sheep, you look like a second-class citizen next to your creature’s freedoms. He’s got no one to please but himself – no villager raising pesky flags or whiney pleas, and at worst a bit of a slap for eating something he shouldn’t. He’s got unlimited magic, whether he’s raining grain into the storehouse or ushering clouds of bats through a terrified village. And, at night, he can snore in front of the village fire while adoring children dance and cheer around him. You’re a floating flashlight with money worries.

All of which sounds an unappetising prospect, and does little to explain the enraptured enthusiasm of those who love the game. And that’s because the creature works to balance the inevitable constrictions on your capabilities, by emphasising your place at the top of the evolutionary ladder. By making the creature so much grander and powerful than Eden’s inhabitants, and then making him dependent and subordinate to you, the game gives you back much of the sense of omnipotence that its structure has to rob from you. The stronger he is, the stronger you must be, and so training him becomes your greatest focus and most rewarding task within the game.

Black & White’s creatures were entirely beguiling. They may not quite have lived up to the game’s early hype, but they still eclipsed everything that had gone before and, for many years, everything that went after. Expressive, contrary and quick-witted, their extraordinary responsiveness owed much to the fact that their innovatively designed AI was as focused on figuring out just what the player was playing at as it was at investigating its environment. Every player has their tales to tell of benevolent turtles roaming the land looking for farmers to stroke, or of hate-twisted mandrills, raised on a diet of faeces and children, raining spontaneous fire on defenceless villagers. Every creature was, as promised, yours and yours alone – and every one was, as promised, a mirror of your own behaviour in the world.