Finally got a chance to watch this. I was able follow most of everything, but Ed Harris's character left me
I guess he's not a host, but the first thing I thought when he was out there roaming around was Red Dead Redemption. He could be a bug planted by a programmer or maybe he's a customer, but do the workers not even notice he's out there
The Man in Black/Gunslinger is bored of just killing off NPC hosts, so now he might be trying to find a way to "hack" or exploit the game to become a "Player Killer" for real. Getting away with murder, without attracting the attention of the team running the game.
I was actually IN the Ultima Online beta back in 1997, when THIS happened:
http://griefing101.blogspot.com/2010/01/defining-moment-assassination-of-lord.html
I thought about this some more, and I think the "Assassination of Lord British" incident from Ultima Online really does give us a clue to what the TV version of the Man In Black character might be about.
In this analogy, think of "Rainz" (the assassin) as the Man in Black and "Lord British" (the real life game designer) as Anthony Hopkins' Ford.
What these articles don't mention (but was admitted to back 1997) was that "Rainz" was a notorious PK player character called "Aquaman" who had used exploits to kill supposedly thousands of other players. Back in the days of the UO Beta the PK-ing was totally out of control, and a strong enough player could get away with killing other players in town in supposedly "safe" areas. After getting bored of the conventional slaughter of other players, Rainz decided to take his game to the next level and try to take out the "immortal" game designer's character "Lord British".
Quotes from Rainz in the link above:
The servers had just been taken down to prepare for the huge influx of players for the speech Lord British and Lord Blackthorne were giving throughout Britannia. When the servers came back up, I strolled through Britain with Helios, my fellow guild member. We headed to Blackthorne’s castle where the first speech was being given. LB, Blackthorne, and their jesters were up on a bridge orating to the masses. Unfortunately I wasn’t playing my mage character, so casting spells from a spellbook was out of the question. Luckily my character was a good thief who had high “stealing” skill. I desperately searched the backpacks of those around me and eventually came upon a fire field scroll. After that it was pretty simple, I just cast the scroll on the bridge and waited to see what would happen. Either LB or Blackthorne made the comment “hehe nice try”, can’t recall exactly who. It was a humorous sight and I expected to be struck down by lightning or have some other evil fate befall me. Instead I heard a loud death grunt as British slumped to his death. After that it was just pure mayhem, Blackthorne or another force summoned 4 daemons into the castle and people were dying left and right.
Quote from the article, written 13 years after the fact:
This event remains the most memorable event in MMORPG history.
I think THIS is what the Man in Black is going for in Westworld. He's bored of playing the game "by the rules", and now he's playing a new game:
Himself vs. the all-powerful game designers.
He's trying to get away with secretly break the game (without giving himself away and getting banned) so that he can get Ford and the other designers to put themselves in a position where he can get to them directly. The game designers will allow you to get away with role-playing as an evil "Black Hat" character, so he's using that as cover for his attempts to hack the system. If they think he's raping Dolores they'll let him get away with it (because that's what Evil characters do), but he's really trying to see if he can trigger the kinds of changes we saw when she swatted the fly. I'm also thinking he's probably the one who left the photo in the ground for Dolores' father to find. He's played the game so many times he has their scripted routines memorized, so he knows where to bury something where only that one specific host will find it.
By subtly messing with/hacking the robots, he's forcing the designers to react to him and expose themselves. By studying what they do, he can find a way to use it against them. The trick is not to attract too much attention to himself in the process.
I don't know if he's literally trying to kill Ford, but his goal is almost definitely to beat Ford at his own game. In his mind, that would mean that he would have won an "unwinnable" game.
@Common manslaughter
auto watch tonite