Westworld - 1x02 "Chestnut" - Episode Discussion

A real Westworld would lose it's interest after exactly two visits.

The first visit you could do whatever you like. Spend six hours in the brothel? Why not? Kill some random shopkeep cause you felt like it? Why not? Massacre a homestead? Why not? What exactly is the challenge or the fun there? What stops you? They can't hurt you and as far as I can tell they can't even detain you. The best the Corporation seems to be able to do is "slow you down" which I can only imagine means throwing more robots with guns at you. Inevitably you get bored and they have to close down the park because your mayhem just about ruined everyone else's experience for the day.

So the next day you come in and do the exact opposite. You roleplay as someone, maybe even a fictional version of yourself. You follow a story line or two to completion. Inevitably you find that it lacks any real challenge. It's unlikely that your experience is going to be a multi-day one (doesn't seem like it at this point), so at best you get a multi-hour singular quest, most of which is probably filled with walking/riding. Any combat you face would be rather boring after you realize there's no gameplay element to make you give a shit about not getting shot. And eventually you just sort of shut off and terminator yourself around the place until you complete the quest. At which point you probably realize that there really isn't that much The Game could offer you besides fight, fuck, or talk scenarios and you end up leaving early and heading back to your hotel somewhat bummed out that you just blew 5 figures on a rather mediocre experience that never came close to what the advertisements/your friends said. You never learned anything about yourself, just that the game is kind of shallow if you scratch the surface even slightly.

/r/westworld Thread Parent