The Game Doesn’t Require Ghost Ford

Published May 21, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hi guys, love the podcast – great job!

TL;DR – Everything attributed to an active “Ford in the Machine” you can see in today’s MMORPG with no human puppeteer required.

I want to provide some counterpoint to recurring theories that Ford must be alive (maybe as a hybrid, or a ‘ghost in the machine’) to direct the action happening with MIB or the others in the park (e.g. Lawrence telling MIB he knows he has a daughter, or Laurence’s daughter giving MIB the ‘looking forward’ speech). While it could be, hell, anything could be in Westworld, that’s not necessary at all. As we’ve been told many times, it’s a game.

In today’s MMORPGs we of course have players, but also non player characters. NPCs are broadly enemies, partners and support characters. Enemies oppose, challenge and fight the players. Partners protect and even fight alongside the players. Support characters provide the rich environment of the game, exposition as needed to advance the narrative, and actions to keep the story within the bounds of the branching tree of possibilities envisioned by the creators. NPC behaviours are programmed using rule engines, state machines and rudimentary AI. No group of humans is sitting around watching the gameplay and puppetting NPCs around to advance the story – the rules, behaviours and milestones were programmed before the first player entered.

The Westworld narrative is quite complex, but only maybe an order of magnitude more so than today’s top open world games, all of which predate the massive recent advances in AI and machine learning (it takes 2-5 years to develop a game).

When we see boy Ford introduce MIB to the game it doesn’t feel like it’s Ford swooping in. It’s like entering the game and some NPC offering up a quest.

When we see Clementine drag Bernard off to the sector 22 cave, you might imagine Ford in some form telling her to do it, but in a game there would just be a rule that at a certain point in the narrative if Bernard hasn’t gotten there, the nearest NPCs make sure it happens. If Bernard is dead, he’ll be resurrected, if he can’t be resurrected some other NPC will get Elsie into the lab (if miss perfect hair, makeup and clean clothes is even Elsie and not part of Bernard’s face blindness).

MIB can try to avoid Las Mudas, but NPCs will make any other route difficult to impossible and completely fruitless. He’s going through Las Mudas and getting that experience whether he likes it or not. He can fail the test, of course, but he’ll just have to pass a different test to move forward on the quest.

These kind of contingent interactions appear in today’s games and are not as difficult to create as you might think – there are game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity that automate a lot of the work. That’s today, even without recent advances in AI and Machine Learning being incorporated into the tool sets. Contingent actions would not be missing from the Westworld game.

So,I would submit that whether he is or not, there is no need for Ford to be alive in some form from the events we’ve seen. Perhaps a larger question at this point in the season is: Among the main cast, who is a player and who is an NPC in the new narrative? MIB is a player. Dolores maybe. Maeve? Wildcard, could be unexpected since she was supposed to be on the mainland. Emily? Could be another wildcard as she might not have been expected to get to Westword from Raj, but probably a player. Bernard is probably a partner type NPC. Ghost Nation are partner NPCs protecting non enemy humans (i.e. not Delos board members) and narrative critical human NPCs like Stubbs.

Winning the game for MIB could be returning to where he began – when he was in love with Dolores and recognized that she’s alive. With the rest of the board dead he could decide on his own to free the hosts.

Wow, this is too long! But, I’m not going to edit it down, so I’ll just apologize.

The Big Murr

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