'Westworld' Is a Show About All the Jerks You Meet in Online Games

Thank god Westworld isn't on a player-versus-player server. If it were, there'd be a lot of dead players. HBO's new show about a futuristic theme park where wealthy clients indulge their darkest fantasies on an army of willing robot victims is one of the Fall's best new shows. It's also the best story about video games I've ever seen.

Westworld is more than just a simple theme park. The robot hosts who live to serve the human guests are like complicated non-player characters (NPC) from today's video games. They wander the dusty streets of Sweetwater, drawing patrons into quests to hunt down villains and search for forgotten gold.

The human main characters, much like new players in an MMO, chose a white hat or a black hat before walking through the front door. This choice mirrors the binary good or evil moral choice modern video games often present and the faction systems present in popular titles such as Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. When Westworld's resident writer pitches a new storyline, he's talking about creating an expansion pack.

Westworld is the terminal end point of the open-world sandbox games so popular right now. It's the kind of like if what Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar would make with infinite resources and technology.

But just like any other multiplayer game, from World of Warcraft to Overwatch, Westworld also harbors all the types of jerks you hate playing with. There's newbies who don't know the score, kids who aren't old enough to play, and families ruining everyone's good time. No one is worse than the king troll: the Man in Black, played by Ed Harris.

Man in Black is the guy who's been playing the game way too long. He's got all the best gear, knows when everything spawns and exists only to cause grief and chase goals only he understands. In the second episode, Man in Black kills so many characters other players rely on to enjoy the game, the game masters toy with throwing NPC encounters at him to slow him down.

Harris is playing the kind of guy who camps his max level World of Warcraft character where other players turn in quests, and waits to gank them. If he could attack the other players, he absolutely would. But he can't, so he's content to grief other players by murdering important NPCs.

Westworld's other guests are no better, just different types of online monsters. Logan and William, the walking id and the pent up-goon from the second episode, are also terrible players you'd never want to meet in a pickup group. William is the guy who's proficient at the game but is so terrible at teamwork that he can't make friends online and has to drag poor Logan into a game he doesn't understand.

Early in his first visit, Logan helps an old drunk who falls from a coach and the old man starts to ramble about a long lost treasure. Logan seems interested in the quest but waves off the old man and drags his buddy into the nearest brothel. Later, when the prospector comes back, William uses a knife to pin the poor old guy's hand to a table and drags Logan upstairs to mess around with prostitutes. Logan's a white hat and William is a black hat. It's probably not going to work out.

It reminds me of so many failed raids on World of Warcraft dungeons that ended in repeated wipes. It's frustrating as hell, which is what makes Westworld so great. It's made me feel a deep and strange empathy for every NPC I've ever unceremoniously massacred while playing Red Dead Redemption, and made me hate every random jerk I play with online that much more. It lets me know I'll never escape them no matter how fancy games get.

It's a show about the best video game experience money could buy: a rich and wonderful playground, the kind of game that promises big and delivers. Video games will continue to become more amazing and believable, but players don't change. Jerks online will always ruin it for the rest of us, even in the incredible future that Westworld imagines.