The Great and Powerful

The Gods Must Be Crazy

Some games actively encourage mischief. In Lionhead Studios' Black & White, players can use the Hand of God to fling hapless mortals miles into the air and hear them scream in terror until they hit the ground. If that requires more time and attention than you're willing to spend, you can simply call upon your divine powers and burn their villages to the ground. To progress in Black & White, you must convince the mortals of your power by performing miracles of greater and greater scale, and these miracles need not be benevolent. Becoming a Good God requires that you care for the little beings; if you want to become an Evil God, however, then terrorizing your worshippers is not just permissible but will actually advance you through the game.

Not all god games can become a platform for game humor, however. Introversion Software's Darwinia is a simple but sophisticated shareware game with a lot of depth. Like in Theme Hospital and other titles, Darwinia tasks you with protecting and guiding a number of little independent charges whom you cannot control directly. It's a fun and addicting game, but it never fulfills the psychological need met by keeping a Sim from going to the bathroom. What Darwinia lacks is not good gameplay, but detail.

Evoking real schadenfreude from virtual victims requires that players be able to see the suffering they cause. The objects of your violent intent in Darwinia are limited to the Virus creatures and the Darwinians you're meant to protect. You can kill the Darwinians in your trust, but the game's simple retro-feel graphics reduces this to you making little green icons disappear with a funny sound. Moreover, Darwinia provides no middle ground between live Darwinians and dead ones. By contrast, a properly neglected Sim will cry, soil the floor, hold their stomach, and search the house for fridges and toilets. It is that variety and detail that make the player think he's messing with an actual being rather than just a computer. Call it the Turing Torture Test.

There is no one element or panacea that guarantees that a god game will be funny. It requires a combination of player freedom, game scale, AI responsiveness and the tone set by the designers. Even so, many excellent god games give the player all of those elements and fail at making players laugh - it is a delicate balance. For example, designers have to watch where a player may become bored. While it is too much to expect any game to engage a player forever, idle boredom with options is what will lead a player to start tormenting their civilians for laughs, where disengaged boredom is what will lead them to restart and throw in a different disc. Ultimately, like the outcomes of many god games themselves, there is no perfect certainty.

"To be a god, at least to be a creative one, one must relinquish control and embrace uncertainty," writes author Kevin Kelly in the book Out of Control. "Absolute control is absolutely boring. To birth the new, the unexpected, the truly novel - that is, to be genuinely surprised - one must surrender the seat of power to the mob below." That is good advice for developers on how god games should play, and what endows them with humor. When players have the leeway to torture, customize and goof off, comedic situations are inevitable. And if the virtual people below respond in entertaining ways of their own volition, all the better.

Michel Fiallo-Perez is a freelance contributor to The Escapist.