Nicholas Moll
The Westworld park presents its players with a vast open landscape. Players in this landscape, alternatively termed guests or “Newcomers” throughout the series, experience the park as a cinematic recreation of the nineteenth‐century United States. While the park and the kinds of behavior guests are permitted to exhibit is described by the series as limited, these bounds are immense and vague. Within the landscape, guests are free to follow any storyline they wish or none at all. Yet guest actions are tightly monitored and mediated by the omniscient Ford. In this sense, Westworld offers its players a series of linear narratives with the illusion of choice. Presented as an open world experience, Westworld functions similarly to a sandbox role‐play game wherein players can exercise a freedom of action within the setting, mediated by a Game Master. Arbitration by the Game Master is balanced with player intent, utilizing the rules system as both a control mechanism and to award players mediated choice. This chapter argues that Westworld functions as a role‐play experience that continually entices its guests with suggested but unrealized layers of meaning and significance in its immersive western landscape. Where traditional role‐play experiences deliver meaning through player and Game Master group interaction, Westworld provides its guests with violent escapism, sexual fantasy, and nostalgic indulgence.
Westworld invites its audiences to contemplate the notion of self‐development as guests undertake transformative experiences, constructing for themselves a new story of their identity. Central to the idea of Westworld, then, is the notion that the individual is a character in a pre‐existing narrative. Alasdair McIntyre frames the construction of the human life as a narrative brings a sense of “unity” to the individual. 1 Putting life and its events forward as a narrative forges a style of self‐history that is divided into readily understood “stages” presupposed by “standards of achievement and failure.” 2 Herein, the “life of individuals” is framed within a wider structure that is as much social and cultural as it is descriptive. 3 However, the individual is not free to author any narrative of self‐history they wish, as they are only “in part the author.” 4 Herein Bernard Williams’ critique of McIntyre notes the countless confines that influence the individual’s authorship. While Williams defines some as the confines of “biological existence” (health, culture, economic status, etc.), the most profound constrictions are “the constraints of coherence.” 5 For the narrative to be rendered sensibly, some sort of structure is necessary to be put forward in the individual’s self‐authoring of their narrative. Coherence thus presents “some grasp of the material” of a life – the memory and signifying artefacts of events – to which the conception of narrative is “to be applied” and structured linearly. 6 With a sense of coherence present within the individual’s narration of their self, the “developmental sequences” of life become intelligible as a clear arrangement. 7 The individual constructs a narrative of their own history, authored in the context of constraints and coherence.
Those same sequences that render the individual’s narrative intelligible also see it become fixed and in that sense, restrictive. As a sense‐making process, the narrative history of an individual excludes loose ends or unrealized aspects. These unrealized facets become instead restricted to the liminal, unrealized moments of a life or omitted outright. Seemingly, what the narrativization of the individual’s history offers them is a “single narrative” in which they inhabit as protagonist and author. 8 Yet the appeal of the park in Westworld is the chance to author a competing, parallel narrative through acts of role‐play. One seemingly, with only those chosen constrictions, allows aspects denied and excluded to come to the fore and take prominence. The presentation of the guest’s experience in Westworld thus carries with it a theme of self‐development. Herein, the human’s ability and access to alternate and competing narratives of their self and their history help overcome the existing constraints and move the individual towards a greater “self‐knowledge.” 9 The creation of alternate and competing narratives thus overcoming constrictions, allows for the discovery of another, restricted, or liminal self.
Fundamental to both the programmed identity of hosts and the actions of guests within the Westworld park is the act of role‐playing. In the context of the series, the act of role‐playing is demonstrated through guests taking on the identity or function of a persona within the park’s cinematically interpreted nineteenth‐century United States. Westworld’s portrayal of guest persona and role mirrors the act of tabletop role‐playing, defined as “verbal discourse” utilized by players to “portray imaginary events of a fictitious world through symbolic interaction.” 10 Under this definition, tabletop role‐playing becomes a process of portraying character, narrative, and setting within the space of gameplay through social interaction. Gameplay consists of both the players and the Game Master communicating their understandings and responding to those of other players with the rules providing mediation, to paraphrase Montola. 11 Key to this mediation is a balanced “power structure that governs the process of defining,” providing an achievable challenge to the players in accomplishing their goals. 12 While in Westworld “there are no chance encounters,” as Arnold tells Dolores, the park is designed to pose a challenge to its guests at varying levels of difficulty. The maze is perhaps the most overt example of this difficulty, continually eluding the Man in Black for three decades. In this fashion, while guests within the park cannot die, they are continually confronted with obstacles and puzzles. Westworld presents its park setting in a manner akin to a role‐playing activity, presented on a grandiose scale.
Within the series, the Westworld park presents itself as a combination of two aspects of tabletop role‐playing game. The first is the sandbox format. The second is Live Action Role‐play (LARP). Within the traditional format of tabletop role‐playing, the players are provided with a quest by the Game Master, and are expected to follow that quest to its conclusion. During this time, the Game Master mediates challenges encountered by the players. However, the sandbox format is distinct in that it sees the Game Master presenting the players with a setting but no direct prompt. Instead, the Game Master allows the players to interact fluidly with the setting, responding to their actions accordingly. It is worthwhile to note that the sandbox format of role‐playing game is more popularly associated with video role‐playing games than tabletop. However, the principles of the sandbox remain highly similar in both formats. Within the game, players are presented with the suggestion that the fictional setting and space is “a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories.” 13 Yet, the game’s setting itself is not a blank space but instead contains various elements with varying degrees of narrative and character already attributed to them. In this sense, players are free to negotiate between distinct story options that are not pre‐structured, but instead take “shape through game play” and interaction. 14
The sandbox presents players with a world that is “ripe with narrative possibilities.” 15 This aspect of tabletop role‐playing is shown throughout Westworld as players are presented with a wide variety of settings, potential quests, a vast cast of characters, and other options, but ultimately no goal or proscribed series of actions other than those they choose themselves. In the tabletop format, the Game Master, a player occupying the specialist role of mediating player interaction with the setting, mediates the possibilities encountered and engaged by players. In this sense, the Game Master and players craft the narrative through a series “of description/response cycles” in which the former provides information of the setting and characters to the players, who respond and the Game Master retorts accordingly. 16 Thus, the sandbox format of play affords the Game Master “a live control over the game world and its inhabitants” and is thus “responsible for providing an environment where emergent collaborative storytelling can take place,” tailoring events, characters, and outcomes to the specific actions of players. 17 In Westworld, the role of the Game Master is occupied by Ford and the other directorial staff, who respond to the actions of their guests. The relationship between Ford and guests within Westworld can be framed through the reciprocal relationship between Game Master and player within the sandbox style of play.
The second aspect of Westworld’s park as presented to its players is LARP. The guests within the series enter Westworld from what appears to be a contemporary‐styled United States, yet the experience is not one of a theme park. Rather, guests costume themselves in attire of a cinematic interpretation of the nineteenth‐century United States and interact in a world that encourages and responds to them accordingly. Thus the Westworld park functions as a LARP experience for its guests, providing them with the key criteria of materially embodying their characters with a game that “takes place in a physical frame.” 18 Unlike a game that is played around a table with description offered by players, in a LARP “embodiment means that the physical actions of the player are regarded as those of the character.” 19 Within the LARP format, rules provide mediation to the “means of interaction between the players” and the setting. 20 Likewise, despite its sandbox and seemingly open nature, there are clear rules in Westworld. Hosts, for example, are not permitted to harm guests. Nor are guests allowed to seriously harm each other. The park itself is arranged into a series of frontiers, and the further one strays from the initial township, the more dangerous and disturbing the experiences become – affecting a style of censorship or mediation to guest‐host, guest‐setting interaction. Thus, while the rules are unwritten for Westworld they are present nonetheless. Westworld presents its audiences with a sense of world‐player interaction that can be framed as a LARP.
Central to Westworld ’s vision of transformation is motivation. Also an important factor in gameplay, motivation essentially drives interactions and behavior within the boundaries of role‐play. 21 Indeed, for games an impetus or prompt towards action or interaction is central as “motivation is used to start an activity.” 22 Within the role‐play experience, the cultivation of motivation on the part of the Game Master entices players to undertake or follow particular narrative threads. It is evident that “motivation can wax and wane depending on individual characteristics” with different types or styles of game narrative appealing to different players. 23 Naturally, Westworld offers its guests varying kinds of motivation with a wide variety of narratives – from incidental bank robberies to warfare – available. The park is capable of appealing to linear law versus outlaw adventure narratives, along with more morally complex experiences. Narrative begins with motivation in Westworld.
The Game Master’s activity within a role‐play game is not necessarily successful. The theme of the failed enticement is explored in Westworld in the second episode, “Chestnut,” when the eye‐patched host approaches William. Logan pushes William away from this path, claiming “he’ll just try to rope you into some bullshit treasure hunt.” Yet, the quantity of enticements the park offers appeals to multiple levels and styles of motivation – represented by a plethora of narratives. The “war game,” for instance, appeals to Logan despite his jaded attitude. From an initial point of motivation, guests are drawn into the structures of the park. Once within the structure of gameplay, the guests experience a flow action and interaction back and forth between themselves, other guests, and the park itself in a manner that demonstrates “absorption and engagement in an activity.” 24 Once absorbed within the world and action of role‐play, the structures of the game itself become invisible to the player even as they limit and direct experience and action. From the perspective of directing gameplay and interaction, one of the key goals of the Game Master is to direct a players activity through the cultivation of motivation and perception of reward. 25 Herein the game’s rules, style and structures “influence a user’s behavior [sp] without forcing the change” – essentially enacting education through restriction. 26 In the case of role‐play games, these restrictions are less over by the narrative nature of the game. Nonetheless, the restriction of rules is still present in a role‐play game in the form of game mechanics as mediated by the Game Master and in Westworld the narrative paths and restrictions on host interaction and general action reflect this aspect. Yet, the series does demonstrate guests undertaking self‐discovery and enlightenment through the guided experience of the park.
The style of role‐play as presented in Westworld is one that is vicarious, visceral, and highly self‐educative. With Ford seeing his guests enter the park to gain a sense of “who they could be,” participation is framed as transformative. While the guests understand that the park is a game, they nonetheless experience the physical sensations of riding on horseback, sexual intercourse, and violence. Undertaking an act of role‐playing, the guests learn about themselves. William, for instance, discovers his latent capacity for ruthlessness, cruelty, and violence that facilitates his transformation into the Man in Black. In reaching the end of the park and participating in Ford’s narrative, William finds “himself.” The park experience for the guests is both educative and playful, presenting an illuminating “gameful experience.” 27 However, Ford’s vision of the nurturing and enlightening aspects of the park go one‐step further, implying that from his perspective, aspects of the game are a teaching mechanism for its guests. Herein, the park achieves the goal of Gamification through the “the integration of game mechanics into a non‐game environment in order to give it a game‐like feel,” 28 creating a sense of separation from the real world, with governing rules of interaction granting value to action. Providing impetus and reward in exchange for collaboration with the director via the game world, the game guides players along certain paths towards defined goals. 29 If Ford’s and Arnold’s designed player goal for the park is to provide a transformative experience for its guests, it is one goal that is not only met but exceeded throughout the series. William’s transformation into the Man in Black is indicative of this as is Ford’s own realization of Arnold’s perspective at the conclusion of the series. Often those goals are not made explicit to the guests or intended for them, as shown through Ford’s reproduction of Arnold’s suicide and May’s rising self‐awareness that the park’s educative experience not only transform the guests. Rather, they also extend to the Director or Game Master and his assistants – the hosts. Within Westworld the park offers a transformative gameful experience.
From the perspective of transformation through role‐play, the moral of Westworld is that cruelty, violence, and murder is the path to empathy and self‐actualization. Operating from this standpoint, the guests of the park appear to learn through the act of inflicting pain and suffering on the hosts. Conversely, the hosts appear to be educated by both enduring or being the target of pain and suffering by the guests but also inflicting it – both onto each other and eventually, the guests and directors. The portrayal of the role‐play experience as a violent one is striking in Westworld. Yet it is not an unusual association given. As detailed by Nathan Shank, tabletop role‐playing games are often framed in terms of measures of decision‐making and extraversion balanced with degrees of sexualized imagery and combat‐centered gameplay. With many games containing detailed combat mechanics, tabletop role‐playing becomes an “unmistakably a playful” experience, but one that nonetheless “abounds with the signifiers of violence.” 30 Indeed, for games such as Dungeons & Dragons , “violence and play are both essential components of the game” with vicious confrontations central to character advancement. 31 Thus, within a tabletop role‐playing game “play and violence both operate structurally with respect to rules” in a manner that simultaneously creates “space and elasticity in the system which allow for a freedom of movement within boundaries.” 32 Viewed through the lens of gameplay, violence works in conjunction with the rules and is mediated by the role of the Game Master. In the case of Westworld, the guests can be hurt but not killed. The hosts can fight back but only so much, and pyrotechnic effects must be requested. At each turn, the violence of the park is mediated by the rules of the game – serving a narrative function, and purpose.
Westworld presents the park as an enlightening but structured experience. The structures and rules of the game thus mediate the tensions and randomness of violence. 33 Yet the invisibility of the director or absence of the Game Master from the game world renders the rules and structural nature of role‐playing invisible to the players. Thus, players respond as though the happenings of the gameplay setting are either random or manufactured by circumstance, not constructed artificially. The result is gameplay that is both “inconsequential and meaningful” at the same time. 34 The park experience thus offers both the illusion of choice and actual decisions to both its guests and hosts, but neither event is framed as such. That is to say, it is unclear if a decision made by a guest or host is ever overt or as designed. Audiences might question if Dolores seeks the maze because she is self‐aware or if by seeking the maze she becomes self‐aware, or if Mave’s affection for her daughter is real or programmed. Simultaneously, however, such questions become fundamentally more compelling when applied to William and the Man in Black. William, for instance, attributes his transformation into the Man in Black because he found “himself” in the park. Yet earlier in the series, the Man in Black admits that within the park, “there are no accidents, not in here.” The question underscores later statements of William’s self‐actualization through the experience of the park, with the knowledge that his journey was both manufactured and guided. Thus, gameplay was designed to cultivate certain personality traits and instincts. The cultivation of negative aspects of the human psyche is particularly evident within Westworld on William, Logan and Dolores’s visit to Pariah where the former comments “you get the feeling they don’t think very much of people.” The balance and the questions raised by issues of design and happenstance form the central dilemma of the educative aspects of the Westworld park.
The park takes on a critical view of human nature. Yet despite its criticism, the Westworld park offers a space that is rife with escapist fantasy. As Harald Warmelink, Casper Harteveld, and Igor Mayer outline in Press Enter or Escape to Play Deconstructing Escapism in Multiplayer Gaming , escapism is a fundamental motivating factor in acts of role‐play – fulfilling the human need for stress relief and pleasurable leisure through stimulating the imagination by providing a fundamental break from the mundane world. 35 While their concepts are applied largely to online role‐play games, Warmelink, Harteveld, and Mayer’s concepts are equally applicable to tabletop role‐play games as they focus on the game’s fictional world – a feature shared by tabletop role‐play games – as the creation of a site for imagination. 36 In this sense, the park itself constitutes both an active escape is pursuit and an extreme one under Warmelink, Harteveld, and Mayer’s definition. While active pursuits “require actual input from the escapist” with fishing and camping offered as examples, extreme escapism has “contributed to the negative discourse surrounding escapism” and is linked to socially negative behaviors by the authors. 37 Herein, Warmelink, Harteveld, and Mayer outline a variety of side effects that can result from extreme escapism ranging from anti‐social behavior to violence. 38 It is difficult to ascertain if the guests or even a portion of them experience the negative effects of extreme escapism detailed by Warmelink, Harteveld, and Mayer. The series details little of their lives outside the park, though we do see hints of socially unconventional behavior with Delos executive Charlotte Hale displaying a highly brazen sexuality as a tactic to put Theresa Cullen ill at ease. This perspective is, however, complicated in Westworld when applied to the hosts. It is uncertain, for example, which world is the “primary” one for the hosts as manufactured entities – repeatedly told that the world outside the park is a “dream.” In this sense, it is doubtful that the park’s educative nature and the insight Ford claims to offer into oneself is intended for the guests but instead reserved for the hosts who are engaged with each aspect of its production.
The Westworld park offers both guests and hosts a transformative gameful experience driven by the enticement of its vast, cinematic landscape. Herein, the park itself functions in a manner akin to a role‐playing activity, with guests taking on the garb and acting in role. With guests conducting themselves with a sense of self‐awareness, Westworld presents its audiences with a LARP‐style of world‐player interaction within its grandiose sandbox. Through guest role and crafted landscape, the narratives present a suggested but unrealized layer of meaning and significance. Indeed, the series does demonstrate guests undertaking self‐discovery and enlightenment through the guided experience of the park. Violence is presented as the crux of this education and at each turn, mediated by the rules of the game, thus serving a narrative function and purpose. The balance of guided narrative and violent action, along with the questions raised by issues of design and happenstance form the central dilemma of the educative aspects of the Westworld park. In this sense, it is doubtful that the park’s educative nature and the insight Ford claims to offer into oneself is intended for the guests but instead reserved for the hosts who are engaged with each aspect of its production. Thus, where traditional role‐play experiences deliver meaning through player and Game Master group interaction, Westworld provides its guests with violent escapism, sexual fantasy, and nostalgic indulgence.