From the article linked in that article:
In Westworld, rich guests have the opportunity to pay around $40,000 a day to visit a Western theme park full of lifelike androids, and treat them however they please.
I wonder if that's in today's money or future money with inflation. Regardless, they mentioned numerous times the guests are rich so needless to say this theme park is for the elite of society.
The theme park is essentially an open-world video game. The androids are non-player characters.
Exactly the way I've been thinking of the show.
Nolan says, "We’re no more sadistic than watching our friends playing Grand Theft Auto." He says his wife Joy is the only person he’s seen drive a car in GTA by following the in-game traffic signals. Everybody else just mows down pedestrians.
[...]
Nolan says he and Joy conceived Westworld’s purposefully ambiguous near-future as a place where VR is for the masses. Only the truly wealthy can indulge their fantasies with genuine sensory responses. "With Westworld," Nolan says, "we’re looking for the next moment" beyond video games, beyond VR. In the scripted words of the park’s marketing team, Nolan’s pitch to prospective attendees is, "Forget VR. Come here because it’s real."
That's dope. Other than it only being affordable for the wealthy, this is the type of future I'd love to experience.
Back to the original article linked above, about how Westworld is a terrible video game, I disagree! The author mentions how no one in Westworld shown so far is Role Playing and are essentially assholes, well that depends on who you play with, just like any multiplayer game. If you hop on a random GTA5 lobby, there are going to be a lot of dickheads running around being dicks. But if you hop on with a group of friends, your experience will be a lot different. And that's true for any online game or larping (lol), who you play with and what your goals are will vary greatly - if you play with people who want to role play, you can do that. Same is true with Westworld - you want to role play a Cowboy bounty hunter? Go for it. You want to hang out at the tavern the whole time banging Android hookers? That's you're choice! You make Westworld what you want it to be. We are three episodes in amd we've only seen a very small number of guests, so it's entirely possible we will see more "white hat" guests, more hero's and whatever else the author ie saying (gender inequality lol c'mon).
And right, everything is scripted as far as hosts and the quests, that's true for all games. Same thing really. I did like this part:
One of the big questions in Westworld is what's beneath the surface-level theme park. There are hints of a deeper game-within-a-game, and on a larger scale, Westworld's founder is clearly more interested in creating new life than catering to the whims of guests.
So it's entirely possible — even plausible — that Westworld is an intentionally dull, ill-designed place that self-selects for rich sociopaths with low standards. Hosts act out scenes that nobody cares about in order to nudge them toward consciousness