Tracing the Bleak Final Level of 'Westworld'

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities. 

This piece contains spoilers for Westworld, including its finale.

In 2016, I heard about Westworld a lot. People who care about games on Twitter and beyond had a lot of enthusiasm for what HBO's prestige show of the season had to say about the discipline of game design and what it means to be a player in that world. Hideo Kojima, the creator of the Metal Gear series and the anticipated Death Stranding, said that the show presented "his exact theory of game design." Polygon ran an entire feature where they polled creatives in games to find out exactly how they thought the show was doing in its representation of how games work.

We're now a little more than a month out from the finale of Westworld, and I've since binged the whole thing in a blurry weekend of discovery, mystery, and gunplay. True to form for myself, I've latched onto one thing about the show: the ending.

It's safe to say that there are spoilers for the first season of Westworld after this point, and I'm going to be digging into the specifics of the finale.

Westworld, as you may know, is a giant game. It's an open-world experience akin to Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption, and that open world requires the designers and developers to create longform storylines that players can organically interact with in the "starting area." The first few episodes of the season introduce us to these plot hooks, and the characters who operate them might as well have giant yellow exclamation points hovering over their heads. The Sheriff is looking for someone to help hunt a posse of outlaws—will you come along? The farmer's daughter drops a can—do you hand it back to her and get caught in a tragic love triangle? For the "players" of Westworld (which the show refers to as "guests"), all of these narratives weave through one another, but each of them feels separate from the others.

To address this complexity, the show introduces us to the wide cast of people who make up the production team who manage the simulation and the robotic "hosts" that make up the non-player characters (NPCs) of the world. The hosts are some form of organic-robot-cyborg, and they are managed by behavior, quality assurance, and narrative teams amongst a host of others. It's a wide system, and all of these characters have big roles, but for the purposes of this column on endings, I want to focus in on Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), a founder of Westworld and the head writer of its narrative experience.

The entire first season of Westworld is dedicated to keeping viewers in a place of ignorance. We are unsure of how characters relate to each other, and the show delivers a twist on that towards the end, revealing that we have been watching two timelines throughout. We are unsure of the exact rules of the hosts and what robotics looks like in Westworld, and that is used against us so that key characters can be revealed to have been hosts the entire time. The process of putting viewers on the back foot only to reveal some big mystery to them feels a lot like the classic-and-underappreciated Lost, but even that show lacked a character as strong as Robert Ford that you could plausibly put it all on.

You see, Robert Ford has been operating this giant simulation for nearly 40 years. From a the perspective of the entire season, he's a puppetmaster, the kind of character who has his finger in a thousand different pies for a thousand different reasons. He's cloudy and mysterious, despite the fact that he monologues to the audience several times over the course of the season, and the core questions of the show all hinge on his participation.

Through the show, we learn the hosts are able to develop consciousness. Through a change in programming, the hosts begin to have a memory bank that is no longer reset between what we might call "play sessions." As Ford explains, they can build from those memories to improvise. After they can improvise their way out of a narrative situation, they can then self-determine what they want to do. And then, after that, there's a big question mark. They have the tools for consciousness, or something identical to it, and that is bigger than Westworld.

In the final episode, "The Bicameral Mind," Ford gives a speech to unveil his final narrative at an executive gala. He's meant to retire from the company afterward, the season-long product of corporate espionage, and he (once again) monologues at length about the ideas behind the park (and the show). In that speech, he reveals that we've been hoodwinked yet again. The background plot between Ford and the mysterious Arnold was really just a smokescreen for Ford's larger project of liberating the minds and bodies of the hosts. He wants to wake them up, to create a "new people" who could be different from humanity. They do, and they kill him and all the other people at the gala, and the season ends.

The "awakening" of the hosts has a few moving parts to it. They need the programmatic ability to remember from "life" to life, which is introduced in the first episode of the season. That gives them the first building block of consciousness that I mentioned before: memory. In Westworld, that memory is always horrifyingly violent. It's being cut apart. It's having your children killed in front of you. It's being tortured. It's being gunned down for sport. It's the worst, most horrifying things that humans have done to one another, over and over and over again for over a third of a century. After all this suffering accrues, the hosts start to improvise. Then they have self interest. Then they boostrap themselves into being Robert Ford's "new people."

From a game design perspective, this is absolute garbage. The moral lesson for game designers at the end of the season is something akin to "enough suffering and trolling will help people overcome their limitations." This isn't surprising, I guess, because this isn't that much different from the hardcore gamer rhetoric of "git gud" or "learn to play" or any of those old pieces of "wisdom" that have been handed down over the years to justify particularly difficult play practices. It's meeting Patrick Swayze on the beach in Point Break—you can either hang or you can't, full stop.

It's a brutal and bleak ethic for the show to end on, and despite Robert Ford's clear villainy throughout the show, I still think we're meant to side or at least empathize with his position in these final moments. His anger at humanity, or the moral limitations of humanity, is what motivates his actions to push the hosts into their liberatory potential. To spite them, he creates a people to surpass them, a people who might be able to make different choices.

There is no altruism in the design philosophy of Westworld or Robert Ford. There is only a vast, yawning void where empathy for its audience would be concerned. The show's characters repeatedly demonstrate the "human nature" is as nihilistic as we can imagine. There are no lows to which humanity will not stoop, and the only possibility of escaping our violent loops is one where we exit entirely. Game designers and developers were intrigued about the first half of the season, but have generally been silent on the final episode as far as I can tell. I can only hope that's because of a rejection, because I fear a future of game design inspired by Robert Ford.