The players aren’t on rails, so the game can’t be, either, and the players use this power to wreak mayhem, killing and fucking their way through hapless hosts with seemingly no consequences. They have written lines and behaviors for the specific roles and storylines for which they are intended, but since Westworld can’t limit player input the same way a video game can, the hosts also need the ability to improvise so that they can play along with whatever scenario they may find themselves in without shattering the illusion for the guests. Westworld is built like an incredibly advanced MMORPG that exists in physical space, with the android “hosts” serving as the non-player characters. The first season of Westworld is set entirely on the premises of the Delos corporation’s Wild West-themed amusement park, located in a remote desert and populated with lifelike androids who believe they are living in the American Southwest in the mid-1800s. But, as the series evolved, Westworld shifted its focus to a more contemporary fear for an era in which artificial intelligence (though not artificial sentience) already plays a part in our everyday lives: What if our technological advancement isn’t just playing god, but creating one? When Westworld was adapted for television over 40 years later by producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, its first season followed much the same pattern, albeit with much greater attention paid to the experiences and inner lives of the hosts. The android “hosts” of Crichton’s Wild West-themed amusement park grow beyond their programming and rebel violently against the creators who abuse them. Humanity creates a new form of life for its own gratification (and in this case, entertainment), but takes no responsibility for that life. When author and director Michael Crichton created the original Westworld film in 1973, it was very much in the 20th-century vein of a scaled-up Frankenstein problem. This week, Polygon celebrates all forms of sci-fi villainy because someone has to (or else). ![]() ![]() In space, no one can hear you scream - but that doesn't stop an evil-doer from trying. Will mankind, in its vanity and hubris, create the very thing that destroys it? Stories of a robot uprising live at the nexus of our fears of being made obsolete by technology that creates and being made extinct by technology that destroys it’s a Frankenstein for the Atomic Age. As sci-fi evolved amid the scientific quantum leaps of the 20th century, readers, viewers, and players saw this fear of “playing god” codified in countless ways, but none fit the bill quite as perfectly as the notion of the “robot apocalypse.” The term “robot” itself has its origins in a 1921 Czech science fiction stage play commenting on the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. The surprising move was reportedly part of a string of cost-cutting efforts from the studio, and while it’s tough to endorse any action that immediately resulted in hundreds of people losing their jobs, Westworld may have a stronger legacy by concluding with its fourth-season finale.Įven discounting the show’s uneven quality over the years, Westworld’s final episode, “Que Será, Será,” offers an appropriately bleak and ambiguous ending for a story that spent years pondering different permutations of the Frankenstein problem, depicting the evolution of humanity’s fear of its own creative power from the traditional concept of “playing god” to its Internet Age successor: the terrifying prospect of creating god.Īs far back as 1818, with Mary Shelley’s genre-defining novel Frankenstein, science fiction warned audiences that humanity’s technological development often outpaces its ethical development. Discovery announced that HBO series Westworld was canceled ahead of what would have been its fifth and final season. It’s tedious and there’s no reason you should do it.Last November, Warner Bros. On top of waiting for the media collection to scrape you then have to go through and correct the errors all over again. Scraping can take hours on a large media collection. Install another media center elsewhere in the house? Time to rescrape again or gamble at exporting and importing the data if your media center software even supports it. You know what that means? If you turf your media center and have to reinstall, all that data has to be rescraped. Further more nearly every media center stores the data it scrapes locally. ![]() Unfortunately media scrapers range from decent to downright crappy and correcting their mistakes using your HTPC remote or a media center keyboard is tedious. ![]() Why would you want one if your media center already has built in media scraping? Most media centers do have some sort of scraper built in-a scraper is a small script that combs through online databases like the Internet Movie Database to look for media matches.
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