The Words of Shodan

Via GameSetWatch, an article by Keiron Gillen about System's Shock's deeply creepy villainess, Shodan. The deeply disturbed AI is in some ways a cliche, but Gillen examines why Shodan transcends genre tropes to become a truly unique character. From the article: "The core of understanding Shodan in System Shock 2 is to understand that she's no longer the AI she once was. In the first System Shock she was the cold, perfect bully aboard citadel station. The position she finds herself in orbit around Tau Ceti, millions of miles from Earth, is somewhat different. In short, for the majority of the game, she's not the antagonist anymore - but the main supporting actor and even mentor. She's not who you try to stop - she's who you work with."

Comments

Pretentious!

[mugnyte]

I think the only thing with more hubris than Shodan is the melodramatic headings in TFA. The author is...Too Much For Any Human To Bear:

SHODAN is
...the Comeback Queen
...Her Own Impersonal Jesus
...Our Ghost-story in the Machine.
...Human, All too Human. That is, Inhuman.
...Just a Girl In the World.
...the Hand that Wrecks the Cradle
...The Girl Your Mother Warned You About
...Lost In Format Translation. Thankfully.

  The finest Sophomoric Dorky Puns one can muster

Re:Melodrama

[Dachannien]

It's not just a monster-infested space station in the second game (actually, it's a ship, not a space station) - it's infested with your former crewmates.

Few things creep me out as much as a bloodied guy swinging a lead pipe at me while apologizing for it, or the ship's computer interspersing announcements about the upcoming holiday shopping season with announcements about your upcoming death. Of course, that was all actually The Many's doing, so in a sense, SHODAN was merely the grandmother of that terror.

Share the Love

[CrtxReavr]

It's certainly nice to see S.H.O.D.A.N. and the System Shock series getting the front-page /. props it deserves.

The System Shock series introducted me to an entirely differnet realm of video gaming: Fear.

I'm not a fan or horror movies and not into being scared by books or film, but for some strange reason, I love a scary video game and the SS games are the only ones that have ever managed to do it.

I'm such a fan of these games that I absolutely had to chase down and have the trioptimum dot com domain for myself.

-CR