User:Kung Fu Man/SHODAN

SHODAN, an acronym for Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, is the main antagonist of Looking Glass Studios's cyberpunk-horror themed video game System Shock and its sequel, System Shock 2.

Conception and design
Originally, SHODAN's gender was intended to be ambiguous, with the writers actively trying to avoid using male or female pronouns, and original editions of System Shock lacked a voice due to storage space on the game's floppy disks. When the Enhanced Edition was developed using CDs, SHODAN was changed to female after Terri Brosius, a member of a local Boston-based rock band Tribe, was hired to voice her. According to programmer Marc LeBlanc however, at one point in development they considered having SHODAN be male, but using a female voice to be "creepy or sexist" and imply that the trope of it presenting itself as a "nagging, evil computer lady" was an act.

During development, the team was originally unsure how to approach the final battle with SHODAN, with half of the development team opposing the idea to have it take place in the game's "cyberspace" levels. While they ultimately did go with the cyberspace environment, originally the game was intended to let the player choose to either destroy SHODAN or restore her ethical constraints. However the latter option was considered too difficult to implement in the original game. Another option that went unused however was to have the game appear to crash, only for the player to realize their command prompt no longer worked and the implication to be that SHODAN had overtaken the player's actual computer.

In System Shock 2, Levine added a moment where the player could consciously reject SHODAN's directions and enter an area she had forbidden them to, in which she would respond by disabling the player's cybernetic implants. Levine intended this moment as a way for the players to directly communicate with SHODAN, frustrated that such was often excluded from first-person shooters at the time. As a result the player's ability to communicate in Levine's eyes was done by action to contrast SHODAN's strictly verbal means of communication.

Critical reception
Liz Lanier of Game Informer named SHODAN one of the best female villains in video games, stating that while she was not a woman in the traditional sense, "what she lacks in femininity and humanity she makes up in creepiness" and that her face and voice would "send shivers up even the most seasoned gamer's spine."

The staff of GameSpot praised how "she seems to be one step ahead of you all the while and taunts you every step of the way" in System Shock, and felt the tight-corridor based environment of the game was one ideal for her. Comparing her to 2001: A Space Oddyssey's rogue AI HAL 9000, they stated that while she may lack HAL's modesty, "she is every bit as dignified and even more self-aware than that soft-spoken machine". In particular, they felt SHODAN was conscious she was made by human hands, and that she held resentment in particular towards their involvement in her creation due to their "fallible nature".

The sentiment was shared by the staff of IGN, who praised her "ominiponent" presence in the game due to her use of the station's security network and expressed that each insult she threw at the player "actually felt like a slap across the face", and in a later article elaborated that most of the impact from SHODAN's insults came from her " ability to intimidate and disturb you with her twisted rationalizations" that often made the player feel powerless and insignificant while she made herself appear "untouchable and beyond injury". They also emphasized however that while at the character's core she was a trope common in science fiction regarding AI, sharing GameSpot's comparison to HAL, she also represented the horror of a complex program exceeding the boundaries of predictability and the uncertainty that resulted. They felt this helped make her memorable, and likely had an influence on similar characters such as Portal's antagonist GLaDOS.

Amanda Lange in the 2017 book 100 Greatest Video Game Characters drew parallels with how humanity at the time viewed artificial intelligence, relying on "omnipresent and disembodied voices" to aid people through the day and form a centralized network. Due to the ubiquitous nature of computers however Lange felt people tended to notice them most when they stop working as they should, and she the distortions and cracks in SHODAN's voice helped emphasize this factor alongside Brosius' portrayal of her. In System Shock 2 Lange saw post-reveal SHODAN as a reversal of this aspect, with the player now an extension of her as her "avatar". She additionally drew comparison to other AI-based characters introduced in video games later on, feeling in many ways that they were very akin to SHODAN only with traits such as humor or caring for the player's wellbeing added to them.