Skyrim as actualization tool, Skyrim as game

Skyrim has come to occupy an interesting place in the reward centers of my brain. If you've read the contract I put in my last post, you'll see that I'm not playing video games until I get a certain amount of work done. I've been holding to that, so every time I actually get to fire up the Xbox 360 is a declaration of victory, of sorts: that I have imposed a certain amount of order and productivity on another day, in spite of being accountable to no one but myself for how I spend my time. It's hard to overstate the significance of that. When I was unemployed in 2006 and 2007, the task of managing my own time (and my depressing failure to do so) crushed me beyond any hope of productivity. That period has grown to monstrous proportions in my mind. (It's worth remembering that I had more than being unemployed to be upset about at that point of my life.) I need to remind myself occasionally that it was really only two periods adding up to less than five months.

I say this in part to explain that another element of my victory consists of how little Skyrim I've played since Christmas. I could very easily have completed the game by now and be feeling very bad about myself. But I have played enough that I feel like I can talk about it.

While researching for an article on Dwarf Fortress, actually, I stumbled on this neat blog post. It reminds me of some speculation I did back in college about story in video games but haven't done nearly enough of lately. The upshot of the post is this, and what I've played so far bears it out: Skyrim could do without a main plot, and overarching plots are becoming a vestigial feature--even a detriment--of open-world games. The future is one of player-defined objectives.

I am excited for the game that fulfills this prediction, though the cool future is always a few steps further away than it looks from here. The game worlds--at the very least the ones put together by Bethesda--are becoming rich enough for players to create their own goals. The system of receiving and completing quests feels imposed at this point. It constrains some goals by specifically defining them, and delegitimizes others by not mentioning them.

Take one quest early on. A village girl's two peevish boyfriends both ask me to deliver letters to her forged in their rival's name. This is a "quest," so it is in the official list of things I can do and remains there until I do it. I can help the first one by smearing the other, or I can help the second one by smearing the first, and those are my options. In my game, the quest remains uncompleted, and probably will remain so.

Now, if I had my own way perfectly, I would tell this girl that both of these guys are pricks. That's not an option, and I can even understand how you might not be able to walk up to a stranger and say that to them. But if that weren't an option, my next choice would be to destroy both letters and not get involved. To me, that would seem like a conclusive choice, but it wouldn't "complete" the "quest." Whatever narrative I construct for myself, there's a loss of satisfaction in seeing, in text, that the game doesn't acknowledge my decision.

So while I enjoy Skyrim, I'm constantly butting up against the boundaries of its narrative structure. I'm also finding myself comparing it--much to my surprise, unfavorably--to Fallout 3.

For many of these same reasons, I found Fallout 3 frustrating and never finished it. Comparing the two games, however, there are some places where Fallout 3 clearly wins out, and I hope maybe a lesson or two can be learned before we make the Truly Open-World Game of the Future.

First of all, there's the characters. Interesting characters are a pretty elementary thing in good storytelling. In the first three hours or so of Fallout 3 I remember meeting at least a half-dozen characters who I can still remember several years after playing. I liked Amata, I felt sorry for Butch, I worried about the Overseer, and I was sorry to leave all of them. I liked the hideous ghoul bartender Gob and the quixotic sheriff Lucas Simms. I felt bad about getting Lucas killed by Mr. Burke, who I found more than a little creepy. Conversely, in Skyrim, I'm sorry to say I don't really care about anyone I've met so far. I hope this changes.

The world of Skyrim is pretty and all, but I felt more comfortable in the depopulated Capitol Wasteland. It didn't seem so strange there that, given a little patience, I could meet every inhabitant of a large city. Skyrim has more people but it feels more like a world in miniature, with populations and distances more noticeably scaled-down. Similarly, I never thought twice about the ubiquity of bandits in what was essentially a Mad Max pastiche. In Skyrim, I have to wonder about how anyone can farm less than a five-minute walk from not one but two bandit fortresses.

All that said, I'm really looking forward to getting my allotted work done today so I can grab my ancient Nord war axe of frost and clear out another bandit stronghold. Maybe after that I'll even get back to the plot.