Tag: Ben Kozlowski

At some point in April, I had just managed to finish grading the mid-semester papers, Spring Break was well behind me (but semester’s end still well ahead), and I had a bit of extra time evenings and weekends between classes and e-mails to students.  Alienated by my displacement from my condo and my president’s war on our National Parks, too poor and too busy to manage a proper vacation (and still smarting from the failed camping trip recently recalled by my earlier essay), but still spoiling for some kind of muted revolt against my responsibilities, I found I wanted to go to Morrowind.

Not play Morrowind, mind you.  But visit Morrowind.  Go to the place.

I want to make that distinction very clear, because I intend it to be both the conceit and the thesis of this essay: I was drawn to Morrowind as a place that I could visit, on the cheap—not just for five dollars a day, but for the five dollars I spent years ago buying the Game-of-the-Year edition on GOG for 75% off.  I wasn’t going in order to feel heroic or powerful (though those are nice side-benefits), but because I wanted to be there.  I wanted to walk beneath the giant mushrooms of the Pelagiad valley, to straddle the river Odai on a walk from Balmora to Hla Oad, and to swim through the scattered islands of Azura’s Coast.

This is not a new feeling for me—I’ve played Morrowind start-to-finish at least four times before now—but it was the first time that I felt, distinctly, that it was less about the story or the collecting of relics or the joy of building a new character, and specifically about the going-there.  And my play experience reflected that desire: I made a deliberate, conscious effort to wander—to fill in the pixilated map, square by square, as I strode through the blasted foyadas surrounding Red Mountain, or wandered across the rolling hills of Ashlander country, south of Tel Vos.  I spent extra time talking to scouts, familiarizing myself with the regions of Morrowind (Bitter Coast, Sheogorad, Ascadian Isles) so I could consciously notice the changes from biome to biome.  I tried to make sense of the ecology of the place, and did.

At time of writing, my play-through ran to about 120 hours over these last several months: 100 for the main game (and the bulk of my wanderlust); 10 each for the expansions: Bloodmoon and Tribunal.  It was a leisurely play-through, though I had my moments of determined focus, especially toward the end of the game as my completionist tendencies kicked in to collect the last few donations to the Mournhold Museum of Artifacts, or the remaining propylon indices.

In short, I took a vacation.  A vacation that required no airfare, no hotel bills, and no passport.  And, like every obnoxious tourist, I’d like to tell you about my visit—though less as an exercise in bourgeois wealth-flaunting, and more as a not-so-subtle encouragement that you should do the same—or at least consider the potential of video games as destinations.  (Again, $5 on sale…)

But First, Some Anticipated Objections

So a couple of strange things happened during my play-through of Morrowind that seem to be worth mentioning here, since they were both coincidentally hilarious, and because they address one of the key questions one might ask about my strange decision to revisit Morrowind (only the third Elder Scrolls game, well overshadowed at this point by its sequels: Oblivion and Skyrim).

Specifically, I was running through my lecture on research and writing technique for my Humanities students this semester, and happened to accidentally leave my google search history visible for a moment, which included the incriminating entry:

morrowind mehrunes dagon

At which point, one of my cannier students called me out for it and asked:

Dude, why don’t you just play Skyrim?

To which I replied:

F*** Skyrim.

This was an intentionally flippant response: it conveniently allowed me to proceed with the scheduled lecture rather than exploring the tangent that will almost certainly cost me the twenty pages I’m about to write, and woke up the students in the back with a glimpse of my humanity (which my students tend to like).

But it is also an exaggeration.  Skyrim is a perfectly good game that I have had very little inclination to play since it first came out and I first played it to its conclusion.  I found its world compelling, its vistas beautiful, and its jank endearing.  Skyrim is fine.  I just like Morrowind better.  I would (and will) argue that it is the better game, but, more importantly, it was absolutely the game I wanted to play at that moment—much more than Skyrim.

Even more relevantly, I was mid-Morrowind when the Oblivion Remaster came out and took over the Internet for a hot minute or two.  And I’ve played Oblivion at least twice at this point, and even entertained the possibility of buying the remaster and playing it after finishing Morrowind—but then thought better of it because I really don’t think a Remaster is going to salvage my relationship to Oblivion.  It’ll need more than a coat of next-gen paint to redeem that mess.

Professor Kozlowski vs. Bethesda

So let’s talk for a minute about this.

Morrowind is one of my all-time favorite games ever, period, the end.  I’ve given up on having a decisive list of all-timers since Lobotomy Corporation broke my brain, but I’m pretty sure Morrowind would take a top-five spot, no question.

But I’m not sure Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, or any of the other Bethesda favorites would make the top-100 in my estimation.  If any, Skyrim, but I would make no guarantees—I like a lot of games, and I have no reservations about slotting a tight and beautiful nine-hour game above the janky (yet endearing) multi-hundred-hour mess that is Skyrim.

The truth is, I don’t need multiple Bethesda games in my favorite-games rotation.  There are plenty of games that fulfill my fantasy of independently wandering across a beautiful open world and shaping it according to my will.  It’s a fantasy I want to experience fairly often, but I can realize that fantasy in Morrowind, in Fallout: New Vegas (that wonderful Bethesda/Obsidian hybrid), in The Signal from Tolva (look it up, it’s great), in most Assassin’s Creed games (which I find scratch a similar, but not identical, itch), in NieR: Automata, in No Man’s Sky, in most Zelda entries, and even in some of the 3D Mario games.  My unplayed backlog includes even more: Dark Souls (and its many successors), Tears of the Kingdom, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, Monster Hunter (pretty much all of them), Just Cause 2, FarCry (again, pretty much all of them), pre-Morrowind Elder Scrolls games like Arena and Daggerfall—the list goes on.

So I can afford to be choosy here. 

Now, not all of these games fulfill precisely the same desires or fantasies, but that’s just my point.  There is a specific niche fantasy fulfilled by Bethesda’s games—but they nearly all fulfill the same specific niche fantasy, and I am therefore less inclined to settle for the efforts that less fully realize that fantasy.

That’s not to say that Oblivion and Skyrim are unequivocally worse than Morrowind.  Oblivion has some famously great set piece moments—the climax of Sheogorath’s quest, the locked-room mystery for the Dark Brotherhood, or the big final mission to steal an Elder Scroll for the Thieves’ Guild: these are all favorites of mine.  Morrowind lacks these big moments—the engine is not designed to handle them as well—but it also lacks the tedious lockpicking and persuasion minigames that make up a much larger proportion of Oblivion’s playtime.  Oblivion has great moments nestled among pretty lackluster gameplay; Morrowind is great between the moments.  And if you want great moments in video games, well—there’s even more competition for that than with our earlier list of great open-world exploration-fantasies.

There’s also one other major consideration that led me to favor Morrowind over its sequels—but this one really is a matter of taste.

Relaxing vs. Exciting Vacations

My ideal vacation is one where I get to sit and read without interruption for a solid week or two.  Sure, I’d like to do it in a nice place, maybe with a good hiking trail or three, and a couple used bookstores within walking distance—but I’ll absolutely take that trip before I go on some cruise, or go on some busy vacation with schedules and timetables to do things that are otherwise exciting and novel—spelunking, scuba diving, amusement park rides, etc.

Morrowind is my kind of vacation.  I take the walk from Seyda Neen to Balmora, take over Nerano manor (by long tradition more than anything), and venture out on the occasional long walk to Caldera or Ald’ruhn between visits to Jobasha’s Rare Books in Vivec using the Mages’ Guild teleportation system.  And when I’m out and about, I can be reasonably sure that nothing too terribly urgent will interrupt my walk through the countryside.  Maybe I’ll get conscripted into delivering some pile of junk to a nearby town, or finding a healing potion for yet another stranded pants-less Nord, or end up escorting some hapless pilgrim to a holy site, but if I want to drop everything and wander into some bandit cave to see what I find, I can.

But I think this was perceived as kind of a problem by Bethesda when they were making choices about Oblivion and Skyrim.  A problem that they ended up addressing in two different ways.  The first and most obvious addition in future games was the fast-travel system, but that’s not what I want to talk about just now, even if it’s the more contentious change.

What I want to talk about are Dragons and Oblivion gates.

See, when you’re on a good long wander through the forests and plains of Cyrodil in Oblivion, there’s always the chance that you’ll be interrupted in your ambulations by the appearance of an Oblivion Gate.  They show up with a whole bunch of drama and violence, and start spitting out high-level enemies which terrorize the countryside.  So, naturally, you will want to drop everything you’re doing and go take care of it—which means navigating the long, hostile dungeon through the Oblivion wastes, picking up a bunch more loot (inevitably exhausting your carrying capacity—ever the bugbear of Bethesda’s game design), and straining your resources in the process.

And most of these dungeons just suck.  They’re time-consuming, hostile, frustrating, repetitive, and unrewarding.  Never mind the fact that you were just trying to find that dang Nirnroot you heard chiming, and had to do this whole big thing—and weren’t you supposed to be looking for some lost NPC or something?  Players hated these dungeons on the whole, and the Bethesda team took note.

So when you’re on a good long wander through the mountains of Skyrim, you won’t get sidetracked by obnoxious dungeons popping up, but you will get occasionally interrupted by dragons.  And Dragons are cool: they show up with a big musical cue (like Oblivion gates), and they’re a sudden, dramatic threat to the countryside (like Oblivion Gates), but the fights against dragons tend to be exciting and legitimately threatening in the early game, while becoming relatively trivial and quick to beat in the late-game.  Some of my favorite experiences in Skyrim involved me hiking up the side of a mountain in a blizzard, looking for some dungeon or quest or something, when the dragon music starts up and I’m suddenly in a fight for my life.  That’s pretty cool, and algorithmic storytelling at its best.

But the tenth time it happens, it’s just dang annoying.  Less annoying than Oblivion Gates, but still—as the old joke goes about golf—just a way to ruin a good long walk.  And the fact that dragons are more effective versions of the Oblivion Gate means that the designers are iterating on what they perceive as a problem: namely long walks.  Bethesda wanted to “fix” long walks.

When I wanted to visit Morrowind this past spring, at least part of the reason was because I wanted to go on some good long walks, without the threat of Oblivion Gates and Dragons interrupting me.

Not Just a Walk

I’ve presented this as a pretty simple conflict of priorities: Bethesda doesn’t want me getting bored on my long walks, while I actually want to go on long walks without interruption—but this plugs into a much more complicated discussion about the way an open world is presented to us.  See, Bethesda (1) wants us to feel like this world they’ve built is huge and full of possibilities to explore, while also (2) remaining within their budgets, and (3) allowing the player to access as much of this huge world as quickly as possible, for convenience’s sake.

Because while I keep talking about wanting to go on long walks, the truth is that I don’t just want to go on a long walk around a made-up world.  I want there to be things to do in that world.  I want there to be obstacles to my progress.  I want there to be things to find.  In short, I want a reason to go walking, and I want my walk to be interesting.

Dragons and Oblivion Gates are meant to make walks more interesting, but they frustrate my desire to go on a walk altogether.  Now my walk is too interesting, and it isn’t even really a walk anymore, because by the end of it I have to give up on my walk and dump all my swag back at the hotel so I can try this walk again—hopefully without getting too sidetracked this time.

But there are also problems if the walk isn’t interesting enough.  I am a pretty staunch defender of “walking simulators” like Dear Esther, Gone Home, and Ether One (and plenty of others), but that was not what I wanted to play on my vacation.  I wanted a bigger place, with longer walks, more open exploration, and more obstacles to make the walk interesting

Bethesda is pretty much perfect when it comes to providing a reason for a good long walk, though.  There is a gentle insistence that you should fulfill your quests, but rarely urgency, and then only in specific situations.

Consider, by contrast, No Man’s Sky.  A few years ago I took a stab at the game and logged a solid 70 hours or so before falling off of it.  And it, too, scratches much the same “going on a walk” itch that Morrowind does—but eventually I got pretty tired of going on walks without any promise of a reward.  Goals and quests in No Man’s Sky are almost entirely player-driven, and while I thought it might be cool to have a bigger spaceship, a bigger house, the sheer number of mechanics and options and obstacles involved eventually became too overwhelming for me to care.  Sure, No Man’s Sky is functionally infinite in size, but it’s just algorithmically-generated, nice-looking planets, all the way down.  And as much as there is a lot of cool stuff to find, after seventy hours of the same rocks and critters and biomes and mysterious obelisks, I was no longer interested.  It was beautiful, but soulless and uncurious.

Or consider Grand Theft Auto—that most iconic of open-world franchises—and a game series I pretty much care nothing about.  Grand Theft Auto’s urban open worlds are busy and exciting places full of goings-on and player-driven questing, but they also tend to discourage exploration-for-the-sake-of-exploration.  You’ve always got multiple quests, your quest markers are always at the edge of your minimap, vying for your attention, and the game is always pointing you toward the next objective (and, in more recent iterations, always showing you the fastest route, GPS-style).  At this point, the reason for the walk obliterates the joy of the walk itself—the better choice is to get in the car and go to your destination as quickly as possible.  (Red Dead Redemption has always been more about “moseying”, and I’ve always liked them more than GTA as a result.)  I can get behind this kind of game design—I’m a big fan of No More Heroes and Saint’s Row for taking almost all the emphasis off the open world and sticking to fun, engaging missions instead—but that’s a different niche, fulfilling a different desire.

So this is always a balance, and a tricky one.  And it tends to be easily thrown off by seemingly-trivial decisions.

The Size of Your World

Take the famous fast-travel debacle.  Some design team at Bethesda looked at the long hours spent walking around idly and thought “we can fix this.  We can eliminate all this pointless travel time.”  So Oblivion provides a generous fast-travel system where you can automatically zip yourself to any big city, whenever you want, right from the beginning of the game. 

And players hated it.  Which is weird: it is a convenience that enables players to move more quickly through the game world, and you don’t have to use it, right?  But the fact that it was there to be used meant that gamers would, optimally, use it, and that meant that the big, sprawling world became, effectively, optional content.  The reason to go walking just up and vanished.

Bethesda tempered the system for Skyrim by requiring the player to visit each new location before being able to automatically zip to any found location—both more generous, and encouraging exploration—and it tends to be much better-loved by players.  It required those long walks and rewarded curiosity, but also enabled players to get around quickly during the late game, when they just wanted to get there already!

And this is part of the balance: since Bethesda games are so long and their worlds so huge, they are exciting to explore in the early game, but tedious to navigate in the late game.  Skyrim effectively fixed that problem, threading the needle of early- and late-game needs, but at another major cost:

It makes the world shrink.

Remember that Bethesda’s priority isn’t to make a huge, sprawling world—it’s to make that world feel huge and sprawling.  And as much as I’m grumpy about the Dragons and Oblivion Gates, they do contribute to making the world feel large.  Going on a long walk from one town to another and being interrupted by a dragon makes the walk feel longer, even if it isn’t.  Just as the cliff racers harassing you in Morrowind makes the walk from Ald’Ruhn to Ghostgate feel interminable—even if it’s actually a pretty short distance.

The history of actual world size in Elder Scrolls games is a fascinating one: according to GameRant’s page on the topic (https://gamerant.com/every-elder-scrolls-game-ranked-map-size/), Vvardenfell (the location of Morrowind) clocks in at a mere 16 square kilometers—a little over one-fourth of the size of Manhattan Island, even if it feels like it should be roughly the size of Ireland.  Oblivion is the largest of the three we’ve discussed, at a whopping 41 square kilometers, still well short of Manhattan’s near-60.  And yet it feels reversed: players often think that Morrowind is the largest of the three games, and Oblivion the smallest, at least in part because Oblivion’s fast-travel system makes traversal unimportant, while Morrowind requires a lot of walking due to the limitations of its fast-travel.  By the same logic, Skyrim’s size changes from early to late-game: it feels expansive and large in its first hours, when walking is mandatory, but it feels cramped in its final hours, when you’re zipping around the map without walking.

But Arena and Daggerfall, Morrowind’s predecessors, use algorithmic generation in roughly the same way that No Man’s Sky does, providing enormous game spaces.  Daggerfall manages over 160,000 square kilometers, making it roughly twice the size of actual Ireland, and approaching the size of Great Britain (just under 210,000 square kilometers) while Arena boasts nine million square kilometers (it just repeats—and glitches out—after long distances).  I can’t speak to how large they feel (the interfaces for both games are too cumbersome for me to get into them), but I can say that these algorithmically-generated worlds are rarely explored in their entirety.  Daggerfall may be huge, but the actual business of playing and beating the game requires a tiny fraction of that huge game space.

So let’s talk about how the smallest game in the mainline Elder Scrolls franchise manages to feel so dang big.

Why Walk, When You Can Ride?

Clearly threading the needle between convenience and necessary exploration is a tricky business, but I don’t think anyone has done it as well as Morrowind.  And, in the process, Morrowind achieves a rare feat in these games:

Fast-travel in Morrowind is entirely diagetic.

Like any actual transit system, in any actual place (contemporary or historical), Morrowind has multiple means of getting from place to place.

Obviously, you can walk and/or swim to wherever you are going.

You can also take the silt strider: a kind of giant, long-legged insect domesticated by the Dunmer to connect major cities across the island of Vvardenfell.  Even in your starting town of Seyda Neen—where the Imperial customs and excise office provides the only legal port of entry for the island—there is silt strider service to the nearby cities of Balmora and Vivec.  When you first land in Seyda Neen and are given your first mission—deliver a package to Caius Cosades in Balmora—the officer recommends you take the silt strider (a recommendation I usually ignore).  Clearly, the game wants to familiarize players with the silt strider fast-travel system, and to make use of it regularly.

There are also ships, which work the same way as the silt strider.  In both cases, you talk to the operator, pay a small fee, and the game automatically takes you to your destination (as in-game time passes).  But where the silt strider services the inland cities (Balmora, Ald’Ruhn, Gnisis), the ships service the outlying island towns (Sadrith Mora, Gnaar Mok, Dagon Fel).  Which means that these partially-overlapping transit systems make an awkward network, with hubs that allow for transfer between one system and another (like Vivec or Khuul, which connect to both Silt Strider and shipping services)—much like switching from subway to bus in a modern city.

And, of course, there is magic.  The Mages’ Guild provides teleportation services to each guildhall (Balmora, Vivec, Caldera, Sadrith Mora, Ald’Ruhn), and tends to be cheaper and instantaneous (no game time passes).  So you’ll often find yourself employing a combination of all three services to get from place to place—take the silt strider to Balmora, walk through town to the Mages’ Guild and teleport to Sadrith Mora, then ship out to Vos—it’s almost certainly the fastest way to get there.

But if you, too, cast spells (and why wouldn’t you?), you can learn teleportation spells of your own (or buy scrolls from a trader, if that’s more your speed).  Specifically, you can use:

Almsivi Intervention—which will take you to the nearest Tribunal Temple

Divine Intervention—which will take you to the nearest Imperial Cult Shrine

And Mark/Recall—which allows you to set a teleportation location (Mark) and return to it (Recall) whenever you like.

These also double as an excellent exit strategy—the game even encourages you to carry Intervention scrolls if you find yourself in a dungeon with no way out, or even to get you out of an overwhelming fight.  (I suspect they might also be intended as a kind of inelegant soft reset if you find yourself stuck in the world geometry, which does happen from time to time…)

So travel in Morrowind is simultaneously restricted and freeform.  There are huge sections of the map that will require walking to explore, but the major urban centers tend to be spaced out across this sixteen-kilometer island, and you can get from one to another pretty easily, so long as you are willing to engage in some creative transit use.  For example, when I started in on the Tribunal expansion, I would typically use the Mages’ Guild to teleport from my home in Balmora to Vivec, use Almsivi Intervention to quickly reach the south side of Vivec, use Divine Intervention to teleport to the cult shrine at Ebonheart, where I could find the one mage who could transport me to Mournhold for the expansion content.  All very quick and convenient, but still rooted in the logic of the world and paying homage to the reality of its spaces. The world still feels big, the cities still feel real; you’ve just figured out how to navigate them effectively, the same way you might figure out how to shave minutes off your commute by using a different bus line or cutting through an alley.

“Walking,” too, is a relative term.  There are roads that connect all of the urban centers—and many of the dungeons—throughout the world of Morrowind, and they’re great for wandering and exploration.  But if you need to get to Kogoruhn in a hurry, it might be to your advantage to cast a levitate spell and just float your way over the mountains north of Maar Gan.  Or if you need to get to Tel Fyr—where the reclusive Divayth Fyr keeps his wizards’s tower deliberately disconnected from the shipping services—you might want to bring along a potion of water walking, so you can run over the waves and avoid all those irritating slaughterfish.

And, ingeniously, you will gain more options the more powerful you become.  Silt-strider fees that seem punishing in the early game become effectively trivial when you’re sitting on thousands of gold.  Flying over mountains (or through the stair-less halls of Telvanni wizards) may require serious forethought and planning when you’re level two or three, but becomes routine after you’ve got your Wizard’s Staff from your promotions in the Mage’s guild—or when you’ve collected enough alchemical unguents to craft your own potions of levitate.

In short, the game never shrinks, except when you’ve gotten big enough to warrant it.  Travel is as much a measure of your power growth and mastery as your ability to fight bigger, scarier enemies or venture into more dangerous dungeons. And the world never violates its own logic to accommodate you: fast-travel is always a matter of using the same tools that were always available, since the very beginning of the game.

The Boots of Blinding Speed

Yes.  The Boots of Blinding Speed gets its own whole section.

The “Speed” stat is, like Strength or Intelligence, a measure of your growth in the game, and affects your abilities like in any RPG.  But your walking speed is mapped directly to this statistic—the higher it goes, the faster you walk.  Your running speed is additionally affected by a second statistic—Athletics—which is a skill just like your proficiency at teleportation magic (Mysticism) or ability to wield a bow (Marksmanship).  And all of these statistics are increased—as in Oblivion and Skyrim—with use.  Keep using your bow and your Marksmanship will go up.  Keep running and your Athletics will go up.  Level up your skills ten times and you’ll be able to level up your statistics (like Strength and Speed)—with bonuses for how many times the related skills were used.  So if you keep running, you’ll raise your Athletics, which will raise your Speed, which will make you run even faster.

But stats can also be artificially raised—using spells or potions or items.  So if you want to walk quickly, you can always down a potion that increases your speed, or cast a spell, or what have you.

Or you can equip the Boots of Blinding Speed.

There are many cool, unique items in Morrowind, but none seem so transformative to a playthrough as the Boots of Blinding Speed.  These light boots increase your speed statistic by a whopping 200 points as long as you keep them equipped—but, hilariously, the name is more telling than might first appear.  In addition to raising your speed, they blind you—completely.

This is the kind of brilliant design that I love about Morrowind.  On the one hand, this is just a joke—a bad pun, that contributes to the silly, janky, and rich humor of the game and its lore.

On the other, these boots are totally usable, if you know what you are doing.  Many items confer magic resistance on the player, which will mitigate the blindness effect of the boots.  Players who build magic-proficient characters will probably deliberately choose star signs that provide inborn magic resistance.  And especially sneaky players can enchant their own gear to offset the negative effects of the boots (like, hypothetically, enchanting a robe with Nighteye).  I played most of my recent run through the game with these boots equipped, sprinting absurdly across the long distances of Morrowind at competitive-cyclist speeds, and just raising the contrast on my computer screen to accommodate the darkness before I managed other, in-game solutions.

And even if you’re no mage, there’s always the option to equip the boots, run blind in a straight line for a while, take them off to deal with attackers, and repeat until you reach your destination. It’s inconvenient, but a viable (and world-consistent) option.

Travel as Puzzle

See, this is part of the reason I love Morrowind so much more than its successors.

As with many things in Morrowind, travel is a kind of puzzle, and requires thorough understanding of the world, its systems, and the ways you can circumvent them.  And while the teleportation and levitation may be fanciful, the logic of travel is realistic—it corresponds to the way I might find my way home from Boston after a long semester (subway to train station to bus line to different train station) or how one might coordinate travel abroad.  And, as with travel in the real world, it is just inconvenient enough to make optimization interesting.

The first time I played the game, as a teenager in 2003, I laid the map (included in the box for the PC version) on my floor and used pieces from a board game to mark my different destinations, based on the instructions of the different NPCs—color-coded according to the faction offering the quest.  When enough pieces congregated in a given area, I would make the journey to the region and complete as many quests as I could—just as one might plan to pick up dinner from the Chinese restaurant because you were already in the same strip mall or shopping plaza as the cable company where you went to return your modem, or the Kohl’s where you made an Amazon return.  This sounds mundane and boring—I don’t deny it—but there is a joy to the coordination that arrives from the basic realities of the game world.  If you’re going to go all the way up to Ald Velothi for the Imperial Legion, you might as well stop over at that Dwemmer ruin Edwinna Elbert asked you to check out—and isn’t the Urshilaku Ashlander camp up there, too?  Might as well swing over that way and talk to them about the Nerevarine prophecies…and so on.

 And the game encourages this behavior.  There are eight different factions you can work for simultaneously, not even counting the vampire quest lines or the main storyline, and each faction has multiple quest-givers—so you could have twenty or more active quests at any given moment.  And while many of these quests are pretty small and mundane—find this book, give this person this object, talk to this person—plenty more are fairly involved or unspecific.  It’s not uncommon for a quest-giver to tell you to go to some tomb or ruin “somewhere West of Ald Velothi” and expect you to figure it out once you get there.  And if you’ve got a couple quests in roughly the same vicinity, you can save a lot of time stumbling into any one location while looking for the other.

Sometimes this can be annoying—I was definitely told to find a Dwemer ruin “West of Vos” (an instruction comparable to someone saying that Kansas City is “West of New York”), and spent an inordinate amount of time wandering over the wickwheat fields of Northeastern Vvardanfell, wondering whether or not I should keep going West over the mountains into the ashlands.  But these unspecific instructions also urge exploration and accidental findings—while looking for that mysterious Dwemer ruin, I definitely stumbled across some high-powered Daedra in a region where they didn’t belong, and found a tower full of wizards and magical loot.

And Morrowind is packed with these finds.  It may be the smallest map of the modern Elder Scrolls game, but it is almost certainly the most dense with tombs, caves, ruins, and treasures—all hand-crafted, and many with their own environmental-storytelling mini-narratives, or links to other quests or treasures.  For example, one of the earliest quests you’re likely to take—a Fighter’s Guild quest to take care of a rat that’s taken over the basement of a local Balmora resident, has a whole weird narrative spun out of it: the beleaguered Dunmer woman who made the request mentions, in passing, that she’s worried the rat will destroy her pillows.  And when you walk into the basement room, all of the baskets and chests are full of—dozens of pillows.  Talk to her again after you’ve killed the rats and she’ll mention that she was waiting for another shipment of pillows that hasn’t arrived—like this woman needs more freaking pillows.

But if you’re wandering off the coast of Sheogorad, you’ll find a ship wrecked on the rocky coastline that contains—you guessed it, even more freaking pillows.  And an invoice from the now-deceased captain listing this crazy lady’s overseas pillow order.  This isn’t a quest, mind you.  And there’s no loot but pillows.  But it just makes the world that much richer.

Morrowind is a People, and a Place

When I say that I want to visit Morrowind, it’s as much because of its people as its vistas.  Because, for me, one of the main selling points of this game—the thing that elevates it so far above Oblivion and Skyrim—is the way it builds a sense of the community of Morrowind.

But I think this is going to be a hard sell, so I want to back up and talk about verisimilitude for a moment.

In case you don’t know, “verisimilitude” is a fancy literary word for “seeming like the truth”—like that’s literally the word: verity meaning truth, similitude meaning similarity.  In fiction, this is usually characterized by sneaky details that make the writing sound factual.  Realist writers like Dostoevsky will occasionally include partial names like Mr. M—— or Baron von B—— to make it sound like these are real people whose identities are being protected by the narrator/author out of some kind of consideration for their status and anonymity.

But verisimilitude in video game is a trickier beast, depending very much on the objectives of the individual game.  Morrowind clearly has no intention to emulate real-world rules in some ways (you can cast spells, after all, and no attempt is made to explain why this is possible), but it is very invested in making the world a believable place—because, remember, that’s the whole fantasy they are catering to.

By Oblivion, Bethesda starts experimenting with algorithmically-determined social mechanics.  The finished game features characters with pre-determined day/night cycles: shops open and close at certain hours of the day, characters will cycle through predictable habits like getting up, going to certain places at certain times, and going to bed at certain times.  But there were rumors (possibly apocryphal—my source here is hardly trustworthy) that Bethesda was experimenting with much more dynamic social systems based around the different factions in the game, such that there were earlier iterations of the game where roving bands of townsfolk would attack one another in what was basically unintended procedurally-generated gang wars.

This seems…extreme—but seeing as similar procedural conflicts occur in Bethesda’s later games (like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, released shortly after Oblivion), it’s clear they were working toward this kind of dynamic, procedurally-determined social interaction.  And since there are multiple set pieces in Oblivion where guards will fight bandits (or Daedra), I’d say that they were clearly working toward this kind of simulated society.

I also don’t think it’s terribly effective.  Much as the procedural scheduling of Oblivion was a big deal at the time—groundbreaking even—I remember playing the game and thinking that it was basically just a less-effective version of what Majora’s Mask had done with the townsfolk in Clocktown back in 2001 (and on the N64, no less…).  Sure, it was an interesting system to navigate, but more annoying than immersive.  It didn’t make you believe that Tamriel was a real place with real people—it just meant that you had to sleep in a bed for a while if you needed to sell something.  That’s not incorporating the player into the game world—it’s driving the player to do un-immersive actions for the sake of a game world simulating a reality the player doesn’t participate in.  There’s no reward for following the day-night cycle, but there sure is a punishment for wanting to go shopping at the wrong hour.

Morrowind does not try to simulate community mechanically—it can’t.  The technology just isn’t there.  So instead it does the same thing Majora’s Mask does—it scripts community.

I’ve dwelt in Morrowind long enough to know its people as well as its land.  I know that if you need some weird book—usually because some spacey mage like Ald’Ruhn’s Edwinna Elbert asked you to find it and couldn’t possibly be troubled to leave their work—you can almost certainly find it at Jobasha’s Rare Books in the Waistworks of Vivec’s Foreign Quarter.  And I know Jobasha occasionally deals in illegal books—he’s got a copy of the Dissident Priests’ Progress of Truth—which has been formally condemned by the Tribunal Temple—which might be why the Temple Ordinators are posted on every floor of his shop.  But Jobasha is a shrewd operator—he’ll never admit that he owns a book, even as he sells it to you on the sly—and good luck sweet-talking him into a better price: he must have one of the highest personality stats in the whole game.  But he’s also just a good dude—when he hears that one of your friends-of-a-friend is suffering from Moon Sugar addiction, he’ll recommend the controversial treatise Confessions of a Skooma-Eater, with a comment that—like most Khajiit—he knows that skooma-addiction is incurable, but “maybe Khajiit know things that are not true” (and you have to figure that, as a rich, successful Khajiit working in a mostly-legitimate business, he’s probably one of the most important figures in the Vvardenfell Khajiit community, and knows plenty of Khajiit suffering from addiction).  He’s also almost certainly connected to the abolitionist movement in Morrowind (Khajiit and Argonians are the most common slaves in Morrowind), though he won’t talk about it unless you’ve managed to raise his disposition toward you, even after you rescue an Argonian from a racially-motivated bar fight with some of the native Dunmer by bringing him to Jobasha’s shop.

Or consider Baladas Demnevanni, the reclusive Telvanni wizard who has set up a wizard tower in Gnisis, far from the Eastern shores of Vvardenfell that the Telvanni tend to favor.  Baladas is probably the most knowledgeable person in Vvardenfell about the Dwemer—he’s even managed to animate a Dwemer Centurion as his personal guard—and he’s one of only two people in the whole game who can figure out how to read the Dwemer language itself—assuming you find the Dwemer book Hanging Gardens of Wasten Coridale—the Rosetta Stone text that allows him to translate the Dwemer texts The Egg of Time and Divine Metaphysics Adapted to the Meanest of Intellects (another worldmaker’s joke—it’s “Godhood for Dummies”).  But Baladas is utterly immersed in his work.  If you join up with the Telvanni, Master Aryon of Tel Vos—another decent guy, as Telvanni wizards go—will ask you to get Baladas to join the Telvanni council.  If you find some other Dwemer books for him, he will, but begrudgingly: “at least for the next century or two…”

The more time you spend in Morrowind, the more you will come to see its characters as a tightly-knit community of people, and learn to understand the dynamics of that community.  You’ll learn to check in with Percius Mercius of the Ald’Ruhn branch of the Fighter’s Guild before claiming any bounties from Lorbumol gro-Aglakh, because they might be coming from the criminal syndicate, the Camonna Tong, which currently controls the Guild.  You’ll learn to ignore the quests from the Archmage of the Mages’ Guild, Trebonius Artorius, because he’s an idiot who was dumped into the job by an uncaring Duke on the mainland.  You’ll learn that Crassius Curio of House Hlaalu will almost always be willing to help you in your dealings with the house—but he’ll usually expect some sexual favors in return.

And then, if you’re paying attention to the context—the big picture, and not just the day-to-day quests—you’ll start to notice the larger patterns.  You’ll notice that the Camonna Tong seems to be smuggling a whole lot of the same ash statues employed by Dagoth Ur’s Sixth House—which isn’t terribly surprising, given that Dagoth Ur is basically a Dunmer Nationalist calling for the expulsion of other races from Vvardenfell, and the Camonna Tong rarely accepts recruits from outside the Dunmer.  Or you’ll notice that the lowest-level quest givers in the guilds are Khajiit and Argonians, while the top positions all seem to be held by Imperials, Nords, and Redguards; whereas only House Hlaalu among the Dunmer Great Houses has quest-giving non-Dunmer members.  You’ll notice that the Tribunal Temples tend to be deeply integrated into the cities of Vvardenfell, while the Imperial Cult shrines tend to rest in the Imperial castles on the outskirts of the same cities.  You’ll notice that the Morag Tong guildhalls in the cities tend to be populated by Dunmer, while the secret headquarters in Vivec holds a much more diverse crowd of Orcs, Bosmer, and other outlanders.

None of this is algorithmic.  None of this is procedurally-generated.  None of this is mechanical, except insofar as it is reinforced by some pretty subtle touches—like the fact that members of your own race will always have a higher base disposition, or that certain factions will have significant disposition penalties against you, based on your race, faction membership, or other behind-the-scenes statistics.

It’s all scripted.  It’s all written.  Because, here in Morrowind, that was the best way to simulate a real, believable community.  The developers and writers at Bethesda had to script the interpersonal relationships between the NPCs.  They had to refer the player to other characters, or change disposition statistics according to manually-programmed conditions, or allude to details left spread around the world like bread crumbs.

On Talking to People

Video game developers and publishers talk a lot about immersion, but there seems to be a deep confusion about the way we reach that immersion.

Sometimes, we absolutely want our immersion to be rooted in mechanical interactions.  SimCity is “believable” exactly because it simulates basic social considerations like simulated people commuting from home to work, or economic factors like land value fluctuations and changes in the market.  The crowds in Assassin’s Creed are believable because they behave according to mostly (but not wholly) predictable rules.  But I think every effort made by Bethesda to “simulate” real people since Morrowind has been a significant step backward.  Morrowind’s tacit lie of all these scripted NPC’s referring back and forth to one another is much more believable than procedural scheduling.

But even more importantly, I think some of the most basic features of Morrowind and Oblivion expose some traditionally-held mis-beliefs about immersion.

Take the obvious: in most of Bethesda’s games from this period (i.e., since Oblivion), conversations with characters involve a jarring animation transition that puts the player and NPC directly facing one another, with the NPC staring directly at the player, delivering dialogue in response to a fairly limited (and console-friendly) list of dialogue options.  All the dialogue is voice-acted, but the acting varies pretty wildly (especially given Bethesda’s habit of hiring one or two big-name voice actors like Patrick Stewart for Oblivion or Liam Neeson for Fallout 3, and relying on a pretty narrow pool of professional voice actors for all the rest of the voice-work).

And I say this knowing full well that I am in the minority, but hear me out:

I want it all gone.  All of it.  I want to go back to Bethesda games where there is little-to-no voice work.  And I say this knowing full well that I’m basically talking about Morrowind and a few spin-offs like Battlespire and Redguard that I haven’t played.  But I don’t think any of the gains from fully-voiced characters in Oblivion and Skyrim are worth the obvious sacrifices made on their behalf.

Let’s start with a practical example.

The first person you talk to in Morrowind (besides Jiub, your fellow prisoner, and a few guards on your ship) is Socucius Ergalla, chief agent at the Seyda Neen Census and Excise office.  His job (in-game) is to process your paperwork and release you into Vvardenfell proper.  His real job (functionally) is to get you to build your character and introduce you to the world you’re about to explore.  The role is crucial, and understated compared to similar characters in later Bethesda games—but just as effective in my opinion.

Ergalla has five lines of scripted, voiced dialogue.  Added to the lines of the guards (and Jiub, who achieves weirdly cult status after this, mentioned in Oblivion as “Saint Jiub, who drove the Cliff Racers from Vvardenfell”), you’ve got maybe a dozen, total.  That’s it.  The first five-to-ten minutes of the game is a dozen lines of voiced dialogue, some spreadsheet character building, and then Ergalla kicks you out the door to start the game.  You run through a few little tutorials with the menu, and then you’re faced with Sellus Gravius, an Imperial Soldier who explains your first mission (deliver this package to Caius Cosades in Balmora).  But unlike Ergalla (who you can talk to after building your character, and who figures in a side quest for the Seyda Neen explorer, but who doesn’t have much to say in either case), Gravius has something like thirty different topics you can ask about.  

See, now that you’ve got a quest, the game is quietly encouraging you to play with the dialogue system.  Ask about Balmora, and he’ll give you pretty involved instructions on how to get there on foot, though he recommends you take the silt strider instead.  Ask about “law in Morrowind” (one of the few topics he shares with Ergalla) and you’ll get a stern reminder that attacking random people in the street will get you arrested or killed.  Ask about Morrowind itself and you’ll get some lore about the province, the Emperor Uriel Septim, and even some puckish wall-breaking allusions to your new status as a player: “Morrowind has been part of the empire for 400 years…You haven’t been in prison that long, have you?”

This—a character who can introduce you to dozens of new ideas using a dialogue menu—is just not possible in Bethesda’s more recent entries.  This is old-school CRPG design, where you’ve got a mouse-and-keyboard (or, older still, just a text parser), and can choose to ask about any of dozens of possible topics.  Oblivion retained the menu (at least for the PC version), but drastically cut down on the dialogue options, because Oblivion couldn’t voice every one of those dialogue lines—and even if it somehow managed to record all that voice-acting, it would be obnoxiously long to actually listen to the voiced line—at least compared to quickly reading (or skimming, in some cases) the paragraphs of text on the screen.  Counter-intuitive as it sounds, reading the unvoiced dialogue was far more immersive than hearing it spoken in Oblivion.  And being able to pick Sellus Gravius’ brain to learn about the world does immense work in making Morrowind a believable, immersive place. 

But in the age of console dominance, text-on-a-screen is not a feasible solution to your dialogue problems.  Who knows how big the TV screen is?  Or how far the sitter is from the screen?  You’ve got to voice the line, because that’s the only way you can ensure that your player will receive it.

Now I should mention: Morrowind was released on Xbox as well as PC—in fact, that’s the first place I played it—but the interface was cumbersome.  It was clearly a PC game ported to console, and it was predictably clumsy as a result.  But Oblivion was the last Bethesda game to treat consoles as a secondary platform: Fallout 3, Skyrim, and their successors were all designed with consoles in mind, with the PC audience settling for consoles’ streamlined (and simplified) mechanics.

Wrong-Headed Immersion

I realize that picking on Oblivion’s dialogue system is like shooting fish in a barrel, so let’s blow this discussion out a bit to talk about the other missteps in immersion made between Morrowind and its successors.

Consider the dialogue process itself.  In Morrowind, you can literally walk up behind people and initiate a dialogue with them while they’re facing the wrong direction.  The game completely freezes, you go into the dialogue menu, select whatever options are relevant to you, and exit at your discretion.  The world resumes its usual behavior and you go back into running-around-fighting-monsters mode.

This sounds utterly awful, and un-immersive.  Which is probably why Oblivion insists on snapping into these rigid animations where the NPC faces you and addresses you.

But, honestly, that is so much less immersive.  Sure, it’s realistic, but it makes dialogue a whole ordeal, interrupting the game for the animation to catch up to whatever weird pose the NPC was in when you addressed them, slowing down the pace of the game to accommodate the voice dialogue, then snapping you back to reality with another animation.  The Internet has highlighted this silliness with memes—characters talking blandly about a quest while a monster, frozen in mid-swing, tries to decapitate them.  My understanding is that Fallout 4 “fixed” this problem by letting the world carry on during dialogue, but that just makes for even sillier interactions where dialogue keeps getting interrupted by attackers or accidental movement by the game engine, or any number of other issues—and each time dialogue is interrupted, you have to go into the same animation cycles of face-to-face turning, again and again.

Or consider the famously-bad Skyrim mining animation.  Your character has to slowly drift into position, then bend over—sometimes comically hunched—to accommodate the pickax animation.

In Morrowind, you go up to a vein of ore and it opens the same little menu you get when you loot a treasure chest.  Then you just transfer the ore to your inventory.  Realistic?  No.  Effective?  Yes.

Or consider the incorporation of physics engines.  Ever since Oblivion’s opening moments where the game shows off by asking you to shoot a dangling bucket with an arrow, Bethesda has clearly been proud of its physics engine.  But physics in the original Oblivion were comically bad—you’d shoot a deer and it would go somersaulting down a hill, forcing you to chase after it.  Or in the first days of Skyrim, you’d get smacked by a giant and ragdoll into the air, plummeting for thirty seconds or more before smacking into the ground.

And honestly, I love this stupid janky physics in Bethesda games.  I love it even more in Fallout, where the VATS system turns its absurdity into glory-kills.  But it is not immersive.  It’s silly and fun, but it detracts from any belief you might have in the reality of the world around you.  In general, I think it is very rare that a physics system contributes to immersion through realism.  More often, it just highlights the absurdities of the video game world—objects stuttering as they erroneously clip through the environment, bodies flying idiotically through the air after being shot, awkward shapes getting caught on world geometry—all the usual absurdities of physics engines.  Our physics systems are getting better, and I think games like Death Stranding and Outer Wilds are starting to harness video game physics toward immersion—but Bethesda isn’t making that kind of game, and Skyrim is definitely not immersive because it has physics.

Morrowind—nothing.  You can absolutely place objects on top of one another, then remove the supporting objects to leave the others floating in space.  In my first play-through, I did this deliberately: I left a gaggle of floating skulls at the entrance to Nerano Manor in order to scare off intruders like the Dark Brotherhood assassins who kept trying to kill me during my naps.  (It did not work, but it was still fun to do and to have.)

Immersion—as I understand it—has less to do with “realism” than “belief”.  It’s the difference between the correspondence and coherence theories of truth.  I can appreciate a game that accurately simulates real physics—like the excitement of seeing the well pail bounce when hit by an arrow—but I honestly dislike playing them because they tend to be unpredictable.  Immersion for me is about a consistent set of rules—being able to make interesting choices, informed by an understanding of the game world and its systems, to produce predictable, deliberate results.

In short, I find Morrowind immersive not because it is realistic (it most definitely is not that), but because I understand its rules and can use them to do fascinating things.

There are two different things I mean by this business of immersion-as-rule-consistency: one mechanical, and one oriented to story and lore.  But the mechanical one is, predictably, easier to explain, so let’s start there.

Breaking the World, Immersively

As I’ve mentioned, one of the things you can do in Morrowind is enchant items with magical effects.  It’s a cumbersome, tedious system, but it is also incredibly powerful if (mis)used correctly.  And if you took anything away from my love letter to Final Fantasy VIII’s Junction system, it is that I am all about powerful, cumbersome systems.

There are two statistics that influence your ability to enchant items in Morrowind: an “Enchant” skill and the Intelligence stat.  “Enchant” is terribly difficult to raise, as it requires you to repeatedly enchant items or use soul gems to recharge existing enchantments—neither of which are common or easy actions to conduct in-game.  So the more viable solution is to find trainers to teach you to raise the Enchant skill—which is expensive.

Moreover, even if you do raise your Enchant skill to high levels, the best enchantments will remain tantalizingly out-of-reach.  Sure, you can enchant an item to be able to cast spells, which is cool, but the holy grail of item-enchantment is to produce an item with a “constant effect”—that will raise stats or confer bonuses perpetually, so long as the item is equipped.

But this is a ludicrously complicated feat.  There are only two kinds of monsters: Golden Saints and Ascended Sleepers—two of the most dangerous enemies in the game—who consistently yield souls powerful enough to produce “constant effect” enchantments. And only the most valuable and powerful items in the game—usually Daedric weapons and armor, or “exquisite” (read: super-expensive) rings and clothes—can sustain these kinds of enchantments.  And when you try to produce an enchantment, the game will effectively “roll the dice” to see if you are successful, based on those two statistics—anything but the most basic “constant effect” enchantments will fail more often than succeed, even if you’ve maxed out both statistics to 100.  More complicated enchantments, like, say, enchanting a Daedric shield to give you a permanent summoned Dremora companion, are frankly impossible.

In my first play-throughs of Morrowind, I considered this limitation stupid, and shamelessly cheated my way to successful item-enchantment.  I opened up the in-game console and changed my statistics to accommodate my designs, only to find that I needed an intelligence statistic well over 5000 (remember, the maximum is supposed to be 100) in order to produce my more complicated enchantments.

But I have grown much cleverer since then.

This April my character build was a dorky magic-wielding Breton.  I gave him specialties in heavy armor, restoration, and conjuration, with the plan of summoning monsters to deal with my enemies while I tank damage and perpetually heal.  But my other skills were utilities—alchemy for potion-making, alteration for navigation, and enchant for making cool magic items.  (According to my head-canon, he was basically Charles Darwin, wandering around collecting plant samples and studying the wildlife while ignoring the monsters and tombs that attract most explorers—since, as I said, I’m here for a vacation.)

Alchemy sounds pretty boring to the inexperienced player, but I’ve loved the skill since my second run, because it allows you to brew potions and sell them for an inexhaustible source of money.  And, more importantly, the shrewd alchemist can make fortify intelligence potions to raise the same stat that governs potion-making to make those same potions exponentially more potent (and valuable).

Conveniently, though, intelligence also governs enchanting.

So one day, about midway through my play-through, I got the mischievous desire to see how far I could push this system, and began incrementally brewing fortify-intelligence potions (and quaffing them, making the next potions more potent), until I had raised my intelligence stat to a whopping 16,000 (again, out of a 100 maximum).  Then I made my Dremora-summoning Daedric shield on the first try, along with a pair of strength-raising rings (for carrying heavy loads), a belt that gave me constant water-walking, and my “Lucky Pants” which gave me a constant luck boost.

It was dumb.  It was silly.  It broke the game.

But I did not have to cheat.

This silly, ridiculous, game-breaking choice was all well within the rules set by the game world.  It was, in point of fact, terribly immersive.  Not at all realistic, and absolutely treating the game as a series of numbers and statistics and probabilities rather than actual real-life talents and abilities and predilections—but that’s like saying that physicists and mathematicians aren’t immersed in the work of solving equations and conducting experiments in quantum mechanics.

Morrowind has its own natural laws, and my little experiment to potion myself into an uber-genius capable of constructing a Dremora-Summoning Daedric Shield was no more absurd or unreal as the Manhattan Project or search for the Human Genome.

Honestly, I suspect it was less absurd—I didn’t have to work nearly as hard as those scientists did, after all.

Maybe being able to break the world is just a part of how realistic worlds work.

So What Even Is Immersion, Then, Anyway?

Like I said, every game has its own aspirations to immersion.  This is not a hard, fast rule.  But I am immersed in Morrowind when I’m allowed to plan long walks through the wilderness to check off a list of chores or errands without being interrupted by otherworldly threats.  And I am immersed in Morrowind when I figure out how to bend the rules of the world to accomplish my goals quickly and effectively, or to just see how far I can push them.

I am not immersed when the game intrudes upon these desires.  When the game slows down my progress with clumsy animations or tedious voice-acting.  When the game interrupts an otherwise-satisfying quest with an admittedly-memorable but bespoke set-piece moment.  When the game insists that a certain power (Tom Francis once suggested this “might be the saddest phrase in game design”)—does not stack.  And, consequently, I find Oblivion and Skyrim much less immersive than Morrowind, even if they aspire to an increased realism.  Call it a cousin of the uncanny valley effect—Morrowind, with its mechanical coherence and indifference to correspondence achieves immersion by avoiding the uncanny valley of quasi-realism; Oblivion and Skyrim, reaching toward realism with their graphics upgrades and painstakingly half-baked animations and voice-acting, fall headlong into the valley, rushed all the faster by their mechanical incoherence.

And if there are any game designers out there reading this, I really want to drive this point home: employing new technology into your game is rarely an unqualifiedly good idea.

Technologically, both Morrowind and Oblivion were ground-breaking games employing new techniques.  But Morrowind’s 3D environments were little more than a one-to-one adaptation of CRPG techniques well-worn by game design conventions and experience.  And it succeeds because it cuts out much of the technological ambitions of its predecessors (no procedurally-generated dungeons, no aspirations to huge worlds) in favor of hand-crafted environments and carefully-written dialogue.  Whereas Oblivion “improves” on Morrowind by sacrificing much of its depth for the sake of superficial aesthetic advances: physics engines and spoken dialogue and a larger map with glossy graphics (for the time, anyway—I suspect they’ve aged even more poorly than Morrowind’s graphics, ironically enough).

Meanwhile, Morrowind’s density of dungeons and rich, well-populated world remains uniquely engaging and fascinating.  Its janky systems of spells and statistics accommodates a much wider variety of play because it avoids setting limits on its own rules, and allows the player to break its difficulty.  Oblivion’s tailored experience as often fails as succeeds, but Morrowind is consistent, providing a space for the player to truly play—experimentally and creatively.

Bioware vs. Bethesda

I said there were two ways that I understand and can use the rules of Morrowind.  It’s time to talk about the second.  But I feel like you should be able to predict my argument at this point:

To understand Morrowind and properly affect it is to understand not just its mechanics—the physics and metaphysics of the world—but also to understand its society.  And I think this is kind of unique among video games—or at least very, very rare.

I have sort of mixed feelings about the trajectory of the CRPG as a genre.  I am no purist: Morrowind was almost certainly my gateway to the genre, and I still haven’t gone back and played some of the greatest games the genre has to offer.  I’ve played (and loved) Planescape: Torment, but haven’t even tried Baldur’s Gate (1 or 2).  I’ve enjoyed my outings with modern Obsidian offerings like Pentiment, Tyranny, or The Outer Worlds, but bounced hard off of their first Fallout games and haven’t tried their tentpole Pillars of Eternity franchise, either.  And I can’t, for the life of me, get into Bioware’s back catalogue: I still haven’t played Mass Effect 2 or 3, or any Dragon Age games beyond the first half of Origins.  And, obviously, I’ve got pretty mixed feelings about Bethesda’s career, even if I absolutely love Morrowind and are more familiar with their games.

But Disco Elysium and Shadowrun: Dragonfall are both among the best video games I’ve every played, full stop.  And I’ve watched enough Noah Gervais videos to have tremendous respect for the storytelling chops of these studios, even if I can’t always appreciate them first-hand.

But I think at least part of the problem dividing me from this genre is that these games tend to prioritize character relationships over social dynamics.  By which I mean that these games are often about persons where I’m better at dealing with people.

This taps into a whole complicated network of ideas for me—Dostoevsky’s portrayal of hypocrites who somehow claim to “love all mankind” but who also hate every individual person around them; Kierkegaard’s radical claim that God wants us to “love our neighbor” regardless of their personal characteristics; the usual academic preference to treat “humanity” as a subject of study rather than building interpersonal relationships with actual human beings.  And this all taps into my own deep-seated misgivings about whether I’m actually a decent, caring person—or just very good at convincing myself that I am decent and caring because I’ve read a lot of books.

But I want to lay the complicated personal morality aside for a moment and raise an idea.

I suspect that modern CRPGs prefer to depict personal relationships—i.e., between the player character and a select handful of NPC companions—than social dynamics—i.e., between the player character and their community.

And I, for better or worse, favor the latter.

Now I suspect that this is atypical, and that I’m writing from the perspective of a minority of CRPG-players here.  My friends and students who love Mass Effect, or Baldur’s Gate 3, or other contemporary CRPGs tend to do a lot of shipping, and dive deep into the romantic options offered by these games.  They have strong feelings about individual characters and will get pretty worked up talking about the decisions these characters made—whether with the player’s guidance or without it—in describing their experience with the game.  They have clear preferences for some characters and not others.

Meanwhile, I cannot remember, for the life of me, any of the player companion characters in the original Mass Effect, despite playing it twice.  I can barely remember any of the companion characters in Fallout: New Vegas, though I’m pretty sure I’ve played it at least three times.  People will literally ask me who I romanced in Mass Effect, or what choice I made in a particularly important scene—and I have to shrug and tell them I seriously don’t remember.

But I can tell you all about Divayth Fyr in his tower with his four daughters who are actually some kind of weird clones who he also uses for sex…?  Even though he’s just one relatively-minor character in this game with its cast of dozens of similarly-minor characters.

I’ve got theories on why this might be:

1. I definitely owned the strategy guide for Morrowind at one point and read it obsessively.  And the author was especially interested in paraphrasing these kinds of relationships in much the same way as I do here, such that Jobasha or Divayth Fyr or Percius Mercius became properly contextualized for me outside of the confines of the game.

Caveat: I definitely did not own the guide for Tribunal, but I can also tell you all about Helseth and Almalexia’s rivalry, which is every bit as real and vivid to me.

2. I am almost certainly a visual learner, and the move from text to voice is actually kind of disorienting to me, beyond the argument made above that voiced lines are typically less immersive and more resource-intensive to game design.

Caveat: There are definitely voiced characters in other games (in other genres) that I have similarly-strong feelings about.  The best counter-example I can think of is the anarchic redneck driver of the missile buggy in Red Faction: Guerrilla—you literally never see him in-game as a character (i.e., no visual component), but his voice is distinctive and his personality is larger-than-life.  The mission where he turns on you (spoiler alert) freaking breaks my heart every time I play it.  And this is in a stupid, stupid game about blowing up buildings.

3. I am just a heartless sociopath who cannot connect to actual human beings as human beings (see above thinking re: Dostoevsky/Kierkegaard, etc.)

Caveat: Do sociopaths know they are sociopaths?  Would you even trust me if I said I wasn’t?  Would you trust my wife?  But in all seriousness, I think I may not be able to engage with video game characters in quite the same way as many people do, even if this isn’t sociopathy.  Hence my questions/concerns.

4. I am only able to engage with video game characters when they serve a distinct mechanical or thematic function in the game somehow.

At the risk of leaving my sociopathy undiagnosed, I’m going to argue for (4) here.

Because I understand and relate to the characters of Morrowind according to their role in Morrowind society, according to their function in the game world, and according to their relationship to one another.  There is a sense of position here, and I can keenly understand each character’s positioning relative to the other characters, better than I can understand their “relationship” to those same characters.  That is to say: I can’t tell you jack about who I romanced as Shepherd in Mass Effect, or what our romantic connection was based on, because the emotional content of this relationship was jettisoned from my brain as soon as I turned the game off—but Jobasha makes all kinds of sense to me because he’s the guy with all the book connections, and I have to visit him every time I need a new book. He is a part of the game’s world, and you associate him with his function in that world. “I need to go see Jobasha” is something you will think often in this game.

I’m also pretty good at understanding characters relative to some kind of philosophical perspective they hold—so Red Faction redneck anarchist guy makes sense to me because he represents a sort of extremist foil to the main character’s pragmatism.  The companions from Planescape: Torment make sense to me in terms of their relative ideological orbit to the Nameless One—inflexible Justice Armor dude, chaotic Thieving Tiefling girl, the literally flaming guy who is basically just the personification of destruction, etc. 

As much as there is a ton of ideology and lore behind the various companions of Mass Effect—paragon or renegade, representatives of dying races or outcasts—this ideology and lore is always secondary to the main plot.  You have to complete their quests as distinct activities, separate from the functioning of the world and its mechanics. 

This is subtle to the point of being just imagined self-justification, but I think there is something very important at stake here.

In Morrowind, understanding character is crucial to progress through the story and world.  You need to build a network of contacts in order to complete quests effectively and navigate the world. You need to juggle their priorities and interests in order to make progress in the game. In short, there is a mechanical reason for getting to know this society and community, and understanding these relationships.

Whereas, in most CRPGs (and especially Bioware games), understanding character is just a matter of listening to them talk about themselves for a while before doing a quest utterly-unrelated to the dialogue (shoot the thing, bring to the place).  You don’t actually have to listen—you just have to follow the quest marker and do the thing.  (And I’m apparently too impatient or stupid to care about anything besides going to the place and doing the thing, such that I need Morrowind to take away the quest markers before I start paying attention to these things.)

Now this is not to dump on Bioware.  My understanding is that, by clicking through the dialogue and doing the thing, I’m actually very much playing Mass Effect wrong.  Serious fans play through these games many times, and have a clear understanding of how specific choices affect later events in the game, such that they’ve built a kind of map of cause-and-effect that transcends the game’s run-time.  They will play—as I play Morrowind—with a plan in mind that includes certain decisions to explore or ensure certain outcomes.

Just as I play Morrowind from a God’s eye perspective, trying to see how the various people interact, they see Mass Effect or Dragon Age in terms of selecting which of the many “possible worlds” they want to make real.

Story vs. Place

But the disadvantage to this style of writing is that it requires peering behind the curtain to understand.  When you ask me why I’m flying over the mountains West of Balmora, my answer is diagetic: “I’m going to use the Hlormaren propylon chamber to teleport to Berandas, because that’s the fastest way to get to Gnisis, and I want to see if Baladas Demnevanni has anything to say about this Dwemer book before I report in to Edwinna Elbert.”

Whereas if I ask you why you’re picking Drack for this mission in Mass Effect, the answer might be: “Because it’s the only way to get a certain cutscene to play so I can fulfill his loyalty mission in a later game.”  And that’s cool and all—actions with long-reaching consequences are what make Bioware games great—but it’s a very different kind of immersion.

Again, I find it immersive when I understand the world well enough to make interesting, informed choices that affect that world.  And Bioware games fall on the two sides of that immersion: either you don’t know what the outcome of your decision will be, for dramatic reasons (which is a valid choice, but does not facilitate the kind of immersion I’m trying to pinpoint in Morrowind), or you have to understand the game as a game in order to be immersed in the choice and understand your influence.  Either you’re invested in the uncertainty (“I don’t know how the world will respond, but let’s find out.”), or you’re invested in choosing a known outcome from a known script of possibilities (“Based on my certain knowledge of what happens in the distant future, this is the right choice.”). 

Mass Effect, by this logic, isn’t a place.  It’s a story.  Which is fine—I’m just not going to go vacationing there.  Retelling (or having a story retold) is a fine way to spend one’s time, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect as going to a familiar place.

In Morrowind, character is always subservient to the place.  And in most Bethesda games, that is true.  That is the fantasy they are trying to deliver, after all.  And we can debate whether the decisions made by one game or the other effectively contribute to that fantasy—whether the interface of Morrowind is too archaic to be enjoyable, or whether Daggerfall is superior despite its own technological limitations, or whether the voiced dialogue in Oblivion is more or less immersive than Morrowind’s text-on-a-screen.  But I really don’t think it’s the key reason I keep coming back to Morrowind, rather than the other games in the series.

The real reason is that Morrowind is so much more utterly immersive in its place-ness.

There is a care to its worldbuilding that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any game since, and you are more welcome to explore its every corner in a way that even Oblivion and Skyrim do not achieve.  Morrowind can be understood, and the deeper you dig the richer its secrets become.

Take another superficial, aesthetic detail for an example.

In Oblivion and Skyrim, each major town has a distinct design from all of the others.  The style of architecture, the location of the city—these are all unique from one another.

I like this choice.  I think it’s a clever way to make clear to the player where they are at any given moment.

I think it’s also a step down from Morrowind’s take on the same idea.

Provinces of Vvardenfell

If we take Morrowind’s Mages Guild transit system as our guide to the largest cities in the game, we are left with five radically-distinct urban environments.

Balmora, Ald’Ruhn, Sadrith Mora, Vivec, and Caldera.

But these distinctions are tied to the deep lore of the game.

Balmora is the seat of Great House Hlaalu, the merchant house, who has started rapidly expanding due to their allegiance to foreign powers like the Empire.  Their buildings are squarish, utilitarian, and familiar (it’s no accident that this is the first major town you’re sent to in the game), often with roof porches and balconies, or outdoor staircases connecting separate apartments on different floors.  Balmora itself is a major trading hub, located on the River Odai, and most Hlaalu councilors live in similar buildings dotted around the temperate regions of Southern Vvardenfell (Bitter Coast, Ascadian Isles), especially as plantations presiding over smaller towns (Gnaar Mok, Suran) or farms (Dren, Arvel Plantation).

Ald’Ruhn is the seat of Great House Redoran, the conservative warrior house, stagnating in central Morrowind’s ashlands, but also most embattled by the blight-laden ash-storms and excursions of Dagoth Ur.  Redoran uses the shells of dead silt striders as inspiration for much of their architecture (you can see these abandoned shells across the ashlands), and tend to employ elaborate underground basements to protect themselves from the harsh weather, but this makes the architecture seem alien and unfamiliar.  Furthermore, most Redoran towns also grow up around important Tribunal Temples or pilgrimage sites—which makes sense, since the Redoran are by far the most pious of the three Great Houses.  The entire Redoran council (with one exception) lives under-Skar, a massive complex of manors under an enormous shell in Ald’Ruhn, and Ald’Ruhn itself sits dangerously close to the Ghostfence—the magical barrier that encircles Red Mountain and imprisons Dagoth Ur—and is by far the closest major town to Ghostgate—the last bastion of the Temple protecting Vvardenfell from Dagoth Ur. In a very real sense, Redoran towns like Ald’Ruhn are designed to blend into the hostile ashlands of Morrowind, and (both literally and figuratively) weather the storm.

Sadrith Mora is the seat of Great House Telvanni, the wizard house—but the wizards are flighty and reclusive, and inhabit a series of towers on islands throughout the Azura’s Coast archipelago, and the bordering Grazelands region (where Master Aryon’s Tel Vos resides).  Wizard towers are grown, not built—and they rarely use staircases, protecting their privacy by requiring visitors to levitate up the central shaft of the tower in order to reach them. They also tend to be reclusively academic and elitist, a tendency effectively symbolized by their hostile, labyrinthine architecture.  Additionally, rumors abound of rogue Telvanni wizards engaging in aggressive expansion toward Vvardenfell’s center.  This rumor is made especially believable by the fact that Master Aryon’s Tel Vos is a tower planted in the middle of an Imperial Legion fort—one of the most remarkable architectural wonders of the entire game: twisted vines and bulbous Telvanni porches spring from the square gray crenellations of a medieval castle.  It’s a perfect architectural symbol of Aryon’s ambitions: his aggressive interest in expanding the Telvanni into unfamiliar territory pairs with a willingness to try newfangled and creative magic to achieve his ends.

Vivec is the seat of the Tribunal Temple, and home to Vivec himself, the warrior-poet god-man who stole immortality from the heart of the Dwemer construct god in the citadel now named Dagoth Ur.  Vivec city is a series of “cantons” (conveniently justifying a series of loading screens for this largest of cities in Morrowind)—huge, square structures that loom out of the Ascadian Isles with temple domes and rounded archways and ramps.  Temple architecture in the other towns is similar: the internal layout tends to employ the same stacked-ramp style as is used in the cantons—and the temple city of Molag Mar on the edge of the Molag Amur region is described as “a lost canton,” separate from the others in Vivec.  But the cantons unsubtly divide the inhabitants between upper and lower: rich citizens live in top-floor manors; middle-class traders and craftspeople favor the “waistworks,” on the next floor down; outlaws, criminal organizations, and the occasional impoverished loner will hide out on the lowest level, the “canalworks;” and the truly desperate or antisocial (including several daedric shrines) camp out in the rat-infested “underworks,” which are little more than sewers. This striated housing reflects the strict, conservative stranglehold of the Tribunal Temple over the lives of its citizens: Vivec is patrolled by Temple Ordinators, possibly the most powerful city guards in the game, who tend to be extremely surly with you (unless you’ve joined the temple and performed the requisite pilgrimages). Vivec’s lower levels are also home to ancestral tombs—the Tribunal worship has wrapped earlier ancestor-worship traditions into its liturgy—so tombs found in the countryside share similar architectural characteristics. The rounded archway doors familiar to Temple buildings also resemble Redoran architecture (again suggesting the connection between the two). And just as Vivec is the largest and most imposing city in Morrowind, so should you intuit its authority over the whole island.

Caldera is the oddest of the five—not connected to silt strider or shipping services, and smallest by far in size.  But Caldera is a new colony, built by the East Empire Company (yes, it’s what it sounds like) to mine ebony from the local mountainside.  The architectural style is rare on Vvardenfell, though recognizably similar to the thatched roofs and rounded towers of Seyda Neen (you know, the Imperial census and excise town) and Pelagiad (another recent colony with no silt strider service). These are colonial towns: Caldera doesn’t even have many native Dunmer residents. Instead it is inhabited almost exclusively by Imperials, orcs, and other outlanders. These towns are a symbol of the powers challenging the traditions of the Tribunal Temple and infiltrating the homelands of the native Dunmer. This world is not only rich in detail and diversity, but we are seeing at a specific historical moment, poised at an instant of waxing and waning powers.

And there are other distinct architectural styles as well: the imperial forts like Buckmoth and Moonmoth, integrated into empire towns like Pelagiad and Ebonheart, but on the outskirts of Dunmer towns like Balmora, Ald’Ruhn, and Sadrith Mora; ruined Dwemer architecture where Dwemer cities once stood—massive spires of stone and metal often found rising from lava pits, filled with inscrutable steampunk machines and telescopes; Daedric shrines representing the ancient traditions of Daedra-worship with their aggressively-disorienting uneven brickwork and mesmerizing ornamentation, typically housing one (or more) statues of the various Daedric gods and inhabited by fanatical, violent worshippers.  And we shouldn’t forget Dagon Fel, the lone town still inhabited primarily by Nords who stayed in Vvardenfell after the rest were driven back to Skyrim.  Nor should we forget the Ashlander camps—clustered yurts utterly removed from major towns or transit services.

But these styles are not isolated to a given town—they are, as I hope I’ve communicated—a part of the worldbuilding and storytelling, and you can make informed conjectures about the world and the people who live there just by looking at these buildings and their arrangement.  You can tell that the Imperial Conquest of Morrowind is still a fresh wound—Seyda Neen’s towering census and excise office is the center of a bustling town, but also overshadows a shantytown of hastily-erected shacks owned by poor displaced residents.  Similar towns have sprung up along the Bitter Coast in major smuggling centers like Hla Oad and Gnaar Mok, often overshadowed by Hlaalu manors, and as frequently controlled by Camonna Tong goons (who have close ties with the Hlaalu).  The major Great House centers—Balmora, Ald’Ruhn, and Sadrith Mora—are all, individually, uniform in their architectural style and are home primarily to Dunmer residents (Balmora excepted), but each also has a nearby Imperial fort watching over them menacingly.  And Vivec, that most important religious center in Morrowind, is adjoined by the Imperial administrative center, Ebonheart (don’t miss the clear implication that the Imperials only value the province for the Ebony trade—there’s even a prominent statue of an Imperial dragon circling a massive stone of Ebony in the center of town).

The astute player will notice that this particular detail: the holy city of Vivec neighbored by a massive colonial fortress/administrative center – should remind us of another famous holy city and its neighboring city of landlords: specifically, the Roman city of Caesarea a stone’s throw from Jerusalem.

The Meta-Lore

This is not an isolated historical reference, either.  Seeing as this is my first time through the game since I became an amateur historian of ancient cultures, the references and their implications were a constant fascination of mine this time around.  The Imperials seem an obvious reference to the Roman Empire (even if their architecture is more medieval), what with their recent conquest of Morrowind and insistence on the divinity of their emperor.  Daedric architecture smacks of ancient Assyrian or Babylonian designs, though more surreal and off-putting (the names, though, are a dead giveaway; I definitely found one shrine literally named Assurdirapal, which is far too close to the name of the famous Assyrian king Ashurbanipal)—and the Daedric religion (like Roman Zoroastrianism) is nominally forbidden but tacitly tolerated.  And the Nords are, well—Nordic.  Y’know.  Vikings.  Anglo-Saxons.  With meadhalls and thatched roofs and runed swords, etc., etc.

The Ashlanders, though, are a tricky bunch.  The obvious point of reference seems to be medieval Mongolian society: like the Mongols, Ashlanders are nomadic, following the guar herds—but there are clear connections to Native American traditions as well: multiple quests reach toward an acknowledgement that Ashlander culture is being snuffed out by the competing interests taking over Vvardenfell—the Ahemmusa are justly wary of the Mages’ Guild’s efforts to make contact with them (not hard to think of Colonial American pseudo-scholars stealing indigenous artifacts on the dubious grounds of studying these people) and there are several missions (of varying sensitivity) that feature Ashlander warriors at odds with Imperial traders and missionaries.

Read some of the books scattered around Morrowind, and even more layers to this picture begin to emerge.  Follow the plot, read some of the dissident priests’ proscribed texts, and it just grows richer and richer.  Morrowind has centuries of history: a successful war to drive the Nords (with only partial success) from Dunmer lands; a cataclysmic war of Dwemer against Dunmer, in which the Dwemer mysteriously vanished altogether; an unsuccessful Dunmer war to repel Imperial invasion; and here, now, the colonization and exploitation of Vvardenfell for its taxes and ebony.  The setting of this game is dense with these histories: centuries-old Dunmer Great Houses try to survive in this complicated political environment, even as Imperial institutions like the guilds muscle in on their territory; Imperial mining operations for the East Empire Company employ Khajiit and Argonian slaves despite the outlawing of slavery outside Morrowind; Dunmer antipathies toward all outsiders manifests in the xenophobic Ashlanders, nationalist Camonna Tong, and racial supremacist Sixth House; religious schism simmers within the Tribunal Temple as Dissident Priests challenge doctrine, all while the Temple tries to withstand the incursions of the Imperial Cult; House Hlaalu struggles to forge uneasy alliances with the Camonna Tong crime syndicate and Twin Lamps abolitionists—the first, presumably to build a thriving trade in smuggled goods as an assertion of Hlaalu independence from Imperial control, the second, a convenient, morally-unobjectionable method of currying Imperial favor while undercutting the expansion of rival House Telvanni.

This is what I mean by a place.  This is what I mean by a community, or society.  This is a world carefully wrought of countless competing interests, using history as a guide to understand the various complicated interrelationships among all of these factions, and architectural design as one (of many) keys to unlocking the deeper meaning behind all of these ideas, all of these people.  Someone, somewhere, asked themselves what it meant to be a penniless Dunmer of an Ald’Ruhn noble house and how that could be turned into a player quest—and then fit that into the overall picture of this world.  Or how to decorate the apartment of a Khajiit skooma addict on the lowest level of the St. Olms canton in Vivec.  Or what the manor house of a bunch of nouveau-riche orcs in Caldera should look like.  And I believe it.  Sometimes it’s silly.  Sometimes it’s a wink and a nod to the player. But it rarely ever breaks character. There are always reasons for these people to be living here, always an explanation behind the seeming-absurdity. 

That’s why I believe in this place.  So much time and effort has been dedicated to portraying this big-picture world of titanic forces at odds and in tension, but only one dialogue, one character, one domicile at a time. Because that’s how the world works.  History is composed of people.  Great movements and political shifts are nothing more than many, many individual people making decisions based on their own understanding of their own individual circumstances.  Dukes and councilors and miners and traders and slaves all try to make a bit of sense of the world and eke out the living they believe they’re owed, or have earned, or have had entrusted to them by generations past.

But that just shines the spotlight on the most important choice of all…

On Becoming a Savior

So we’re thirty pages in and just now starting to talk about Morrowind’s story?

Yup.  But this won’t take long.  I promise.

Morrowind’s story is about a savior.  Perhaps even the Messiah.

This is not subtle.  Dagoth Ur is frequently referred to as “the devil,” especially by Temple faithful, and the Nerevarine (player character) is framed as Saint Nerevar, reborn—the same Saint Nerevar who first teamed up with the Dwemer to drive out the Nords, only to end up fighting against the Dwemer when he found out they were messing with divine powers and endangering all of Morrowind.  The same Saint Nerevar who (according to the Dissident Priests) was stabbed in the back by the same Tribunal (Vivec, Almalexia, Sotha Sil) the Dunmer now worship as gods.

Awkward, that.

Recent history in Morrowind has also been littered with “false Nerevarines” who claim the title but fail for one reason or another—usually when the Temple finds out about the blasphemy and straight up kills them. There’s even a mission you can take for the Temple where you silence one of the false Nerevarines in Suran (though there are several possible interpretations of “silence” in this case).

And, like the Bible, prophecies about the Nerevarine are obscure, and even possibly-contradictory.  Dagoth Ur seems to believe that he will team up with Nerevarine to drive the outlanders from Morrowind (i.e., much like Roman-era Jews believing Messiah would kick out the Roman Empire—again, the connection is not subtle).  The Tribunal Temple, when it isn’t denying the existence of Nerevarine altogether, seems to think he’ll show up to oust Dagoth Ur and restore godhood to the Tribunal (though, again, the Dissident Priests seem to think that the Tribunal betrayed Nerevar).  And the Ashlanders have an oral tradition that says Nerevarine will destroy the Tribunal (who the Ashlanders see as false gods) along with Dagoth Ur, and effectively rule Morrowind.

And then you show up.

But here’s the hiccup in the whole grand plan:

You were picked to be Nerevarine.

Caius Cosades intimates this to you pretty soon after you reach Balmora.  Things are getting bad in Morrowind; Dagoth Ur is moving to take over the whole province, and the Emperor knows just enough to know that this is very bad.  But the Emperor apparently also knows about these mysterious Nerevarine prophecies, and has sent you—some rando in his dungeons—to go be the prophesized Nerevarine and fix everything.

I cannot tell you how much I love this choice.  I cannot stand the typical “chosen one” narrative, where it’s just “destiny” that this person has to be the prophesized savior—and here is a game where a character straight-up tells you that he’s grooming you to be a savior, that you’ve been maneuvered into this role by a bunch of shadowy secret agent types—and it’s basically your job to go fulfill all the prophecies so people will take you seriously (and also save the world).

It’s also perfect for Morrowind’s aspirations.  Bioware games prioritize player choice and end up having to bend over backwards to accommodate the ways that a player might choose (and possibly interrupt the trajectory of the story).  But here is a game that cannot afford to do this.  The story must not change.  So we are told, from the outset, that this is what’s going to happen: you’re going to fulfill some prophecies, go to Red Mountain, and kick Dagoth Ur’s butt. This is what you have to do to beat the game.

And now the question becomes: why?

This is literally a question multiple characters ask you over the course of the game.  Azura herself probes the idea in the opening cutscene (which you likely dismissed as a dream).  Caius Cosades, your Imperial handler, muses at one point that he’s starting to believe you actually are the Nerevarine, despite the fact that he’s in on the plot.  When you go to curry support from House Redoran, you’ll find that the Temple has started circulating a scandal sheet exposing your connections to the Empire, and one Redoran councillor will rather die fighting you than accept you as Nerevarine. (But does this scandal really disqualify you from fulfilling the prophecy?)

Nibani Maesa, wise woman of the Urshilaku, wonderfully summarizes the situation with this line:

You are not the Nerevarine. You are one who may become the Nerevarine. It is a puzzle, and a hard one. But you have found some of the pieces, and you may find more. Do you choose to be the Nerevarine?

Vivec poses similar questions when he officially acknowledges you before the Temple, and accepts the end of his godhood.  And, of course, in the final confrontation with Dagoth Ur, you finally get to provide an answer.  He asks, “Are you really Nerevar reborn?”

And you can answer:

1. I am Nerevar reborn
2. I’m a loyal servant to the emperor
3. I make my own fate
4. I don’t know

All that changes is Dagoth Ur’s dialogue response (voiced, tactfully in this case), but I think the question is more important than the consequences here.  Here, in this massive world of conflicting ideas and ideologies, where beliefs define the factions in their struggles and tensions with one another, it stands to reason that we must ask: why?  Why do what we do?  Why did you take on the mantle of savior?  Why did Azura accept you as her champion?  Could it have been different?

In a sense, no.  This is the game, folks.  You can play it or not; those are your choices.

The Path Less Traveled

But in another sense—yes, you totally can.

There’s a famous meme from this game: if you accidentally (or intentionally; you do you) kill someone crucial to the plot of the game, a little message pops up on the screen:

With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

So there is, clearly, an intended experience.

But as long as you fulfill a few little early-game criteria, you can still defeat Dagoth Ur and beat the game.  It gets super-weird.  Rather than fulfilling prophecies, you have to kill the Tribunal god Vivec himself and take Wraithguard from him, survive the unprepared Wraithguard’s magic effects, and then steal Sunder and Keening without his help.  But it can be done.

You get to make your own destiny, after all.  Be the savior your way.

Or don’t.  It’s a vacation, right?.  Maybe you futz around killing vampires and freeing slaves until you get bored and play something else.  Maybe you decide to actually do Archmage Trebonius’ quest to count all the things in Morrowind.  Maybe you kill all the guards in Fort Buckmoth and fill it up with pillows instead—wall-to-wall pillows—and then hack the game and relocate what’s-her-name from the Fighter’s Guild quest to your new pillow-paradise forever.

Or, better yet, you take the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit—included with every copy of Morrowind on PC—and you build your own dang game.  Plenty have.  And others used the Oblivion (and Skyrim) engine to re-make Morrowind altogether.

It’s a place, remember.  Your place.  That’s the Bethesda hallmark, after all. If you think you’ll enjoy the vacation more with mods, or by going on a murder spree, or by collecting all the ash statues and drowning them at the fallen shrine of Boethiah, who’s going to tell you not to?

On the one hand, it’s easy to revel in this freedom.  On the other, I’m not sure it makes for a great approach to the game.

After Morrowind, I think Bethesda realized that its player base was just as happy futzing around in the world and playing it their own way as it was going through the intended experience, and accommodated that.  Fallout 3 is very laissez-faire about player decisions, up to and including letting you nuke an entire town.  Fallout 3 is just sandbox, and Skyrim follows suit, to a point. Stretch the line further and you can see Minecraft as the apotheosis of this idea: all sandbox, no story.

But it’s hard for me to square this unfettered freedom with the richly-realized world Morrowind offers.  I have no problem breaking the game by drinking intelligence potions until I can make a shield that gives me a permanent daedra friend, but I have never made the deliberate choice to go around murdering campaign-critical characters just for funsies.  I get a certain schadenfreude out of following Larrius Varro’s veiled recommendation to basically perform a mob hit on the Camonna Tong at Balmora’s Council Club, and even more from wiping out the thugs at Dren plantation (and freeing all the slaves while I’m at it), but these follow the logic (and the morality) of the world in front of me.  You might (rightfully) question the morality of these decisions, but they are consistent with what the world of Morrowind asks of you—it’s a pretty messy place, after all. But without these believable factions, my actions have no meaning. Without the world of Morrowind with its complicated network of characters, relationships, and interwoven lives, there is no value to the choices I make in a quest, even if that quest is scripted.

One of my favorite of these morally-messy non-decisions comes, not in the main game, but at the end of the expansion, Tribunal.  The expansion is set in Mournhold, the capital of Morrowind on the mainland of Tamriel, and largely features a microcosmic power struggle of the same sort so common on Vvardenfell.  Almalexia (the Tribunal goddess) and the Mournhold Temple are engaged in a pretty tense little cold war with the newly-crowned King Helseth.  Both Almalexia’s priests and Helseth’s guards will offer you quests, each subtly undermining the other faction, but the Temple is kind and deferential to you while the guards are haughty, curt, and unhelpful.  It becomes increasingly clear the Helseth poisoned his way to the throne, murdering the last king and his intended heir—the guard captain doesn’t even bother to deny it if you ask.  He doesn’t even suffer a disposition penalty.

But as the expansion continues, Almalexia’s requests begin to reveal her insanity: she reacts to a cult leader prophesizing the end of the Tribunal by causing unprecedented (and destructive) ash-storms in Mournhold, destroying and poisoning its people.  Turns out, she murdered Sotha Sil and unleashed his monsters on Mournhold just so she could sweep in and save the city (another interesting example of someone choosing to be a savior, though this time for absolutely the wrong reasons).  You fight her in the last confrontation of the game, and destroy her, leaving only Vivec of the Tribunal gods.

But if you tell anyone about what happened, they will deny it.  They will be offended, even.  There are some few exceptions—Barenziah, the Queen mother, or the dissident Temple Informant in the infirmary.

Most notably, though, Helseth takes it completely in stride.  Yes, he’s a poisoner, and assumed the throne through cunning and murder—but here in Morrowind, that seems like a pretty good resume for kingship.  It’s not hard to think he’s a scumbag, but by the end of the expansion the why becomes the more interesting question.  He’s an effective tyrant, greedy for power, but unflinchingly pragmatic and rational in a way that the mad gods of this world simply aren’t.  He will protect the people of Mournhold well, if only because he knows that’s how to best preserve his reign.

You can kill him (and I have), but I think it is more satisfying to let him live (not that it matters much; the expansion ends with Almalexia’s death, either way).  You’ve built your own little political tension here.  He dismisses you to go back to Vvardenfell and protect your people—not as his puppet, maybe as his rival, but with respect for your prowess.  He’s just another player in the game of Houses in Morrowind—like the Camonna Tong, the Morag Tong, the Empire, and Dagoth Ur’s Sixth House.  And that’s the story.  You can change it if you really want, but why would you?  What threat does he pose to you, the player—or even to the world around you?

This is the story.  The real question, then, is how do you choose to interpret it?  Is this a tragedy, in which Almalexia’s insanity dooms Morrowind to the whims of a tyrant?  Or is this a victory—the old guard falls as a new, ambitious, competent leader takes their place?  Maybe you write a new ending—wipe out Helseth and his guards and leave Morrowind with no leadership but you—but that’s still just your interpretation of the story that has been told.  Almalexia’s fall and Helseth’s rise are not choices, from the game’s perspective.  This is just history.  The more important question is what you do with that history—how you turn the isolated events of the story into a narrative.

And you can’t make these kinds of choices or interpretations without the rich, believable world that Morrowind provides. Oblivion and Skyrim (and Minecraft) may provide a more fun sandbox, but without a believable world, the sandbox cannot have stakes or significance beyond what you lend to it. NPCs in Minecraft are just empty homunculi; NPCs in Oblivion strain toward humanity, but fall short. NPCs in Morrowind exist in a community, and make the place into a proper world. Yes, you can break the story, kill characters, violate the spirit of the game’s rules, if that’s what you want to do. But if you do, it’s your own fault: you broke your own immersion. And if you don’t: if you choose to honor the story and the world…well, that’s exactly what makes this game so dang immersive. In giving you the freedom to break the world, Morrowind gives you the obligation to protect it. In showing you the path to follow (and the choice to stray), Morrowind makes it your choice to complete the game as-intended. And as much as there is no room for Dagoth Ur to triumph, or the Nerevarine to fail, or Almalexia to conquer Helseth, there is plenty of room for you to reflect and make meaning of your decisions and of the world.

Missteps

And, look, I’m not saying that Morrowind is some kind of unassailable masterpiece.  It has a lot of problems. And not just the usual endearing Bethesda jank (though there’s plenty of that, too…).

For sure it is subject to same critiques of fantasy-racism as Dungeons & Dragons, or Lord of the Rings, or most fantastic properties which propose to deal with racism.  There is justification for the criticism that Khajiit are basically stereotypes of Arabic culture.  And that the orcs are code for black people.  There are definitely problems with the whole structure of the story—where you can walk in as a white-as-the-driven snow Breton (because you can choose your own race), and be held up as the savior of the dark-skinned Dunmer.  Heck, the story of the Dunmer even includes a scene where they are “cursed” with being dark-skinned—they were originally the light-skinned Chimer and condemned by Azura for the betrayal of Nerevar.

The game also doesn’t always encourage a player morality as complicated as its world design would require.  Walk into a dungeon and most of the characters will attempt to kill you on sight, obligating you to kill them: even if there might be a narrative reason to spare them. Join any one of the Great Houses, and while you begin building your own stronghold, you’ll be asked to visit the rival strongholds and assassinate the leader, with a fairly weak justification that these strongholds are illegal (yours is always the legal one).

Or take the Raven Rock quest line in Bloodmoon.  The native Nord Skaals insist that the Imperial colonists are destroying the ecosystems of Solstheim because they fail to respect its natural order.  This is kind of a major plot point for the whole expansion—though it doesn’t really factor into the big climax where nature-God Hircine collects each faction’s champion for his big end-game hunt.  But then the Imperials recruit you to help build the new Raven Rock colony—a really fun line of quests that has you build a settlement from the ground up, in true social dynamics fashion—but one of those quests includes a mission where you have to poison the local tree spirits who keep attacking the colony, and you kind of…have to do this pretty dodgy thing…that the Nords have been warning you about since the game began…if you want to see the whole quest play out.

To see all the game’s story and plot, you’ll probably have to do a little murder.  And a little colonialism.  And a little racism.  And possibly a little slavery.  But I find it hard to get too mad at any of this, just because it is all so well contextualized.  Even the criticism that the quests require bad behavior is contextualized by the fact that every faction is kind of terrible.  Sure, they tend to be benign on their face: Percius Mercius is a better choice for Fighter’s Guild Grandmaster than Sjoring Hard-Heart, that’s for sure—but he still has no questions about collecting bounties or wiping out cultists, so long as they are orders coming from legitimate Imperial authorities and not Camonna Tong bosses.  If you’re working for the Telvanni and they ask you to put down a slave rebellion—well, they’re the Telvanni—they have 100% built their wealth on the slave trade and slavery: what did you think they were going to ask you to do?  (And, by the way, I totally skipped that quest as my Breton and ended up head of the guild anyway.)

John Gardner argues in On Moral Fiction that immoral art and bad art are typically one in the same.  A failure to be compassionate or understanding or decent is as much an artistic critique: the writer or artist failed to appreciate the perspective of a certain character, or minority, or the justification behind a certain philosophy held by that character. 

And in Morrowind, I think this is very clear.  Since the game understands and contextualizes so many of these complicated relationships and rivalries; since the game offers conversation after conversation, book after book of lore and historical explanation, the actions of the characters—including the scripted path of the player character—are justified.  Even when the game depicts immorality, the game is true: an accurate depiction of what that character would do, in that place and in that time.  You can criticize the game for making you complicit in colonialism with the Raven Rock quests, but there’s no doubt that Falco and Carnius would, unapologetically, poison the tree spirits to ensure the survival of their ebony operation.

Furthermore, there are even more abundant examples of the game paying attention to these moral decisions. If you’re a member of the Fighter’s Guild and Thieves Guild, you’ll find yourself in multiple situations where you’ll find your Fighter’s Guild (and Camonna Tong) masters ordering you to turn against your Thieves’ Guild allies (and in one case, you’ll be literally called upon to choose sides). Join either House Hlaalu or House Redoran, and you’ll often find yourself attacked on sight when you encounter rogue Telvanni wizards in their towers in the wilds of Vvardenfell; join House Telvanni instead and those wizards will be reasonably friendly (though their minions will still attack you on sight; Telvanni assume that you should be able to take care of yourself if you come visiting unnanounced). Many of the quests dealing with ashlander relationships have a wide varitey of possible outcomes: do you side with the ashlanders? Do you side with the Imperials? Have you already completed the relevant Nerevarine quests for this particular camp? All of these factors may play in to the possible outcomes, leading to surprisingly sophisticated solutions.

Fictional Historiography

And, more importantly—we’re having these conversations.  The game, tacitly or explicitly, clumsily or effectively, raises these questions.  It invites us to wonder and explore the world, not just to win loot and scour tombs, but to interact with this world as a real, living place.  It’s why I feel compelled to respect the sanctity of tombs, to forego quests enforcing slavery, or declare a vendetta against the Camonna Tong—because these decisions mean something in the world of the game, even if they aren’t explicitly rewarded or acknowledged.  Like Saint Jiub, the hero who drove the cliff racers from Morrowind, I want to leave behind a legacy, and I want to shape that legacy into something personally meaningful:

Nerevarine, who freed all the slaves of Vvardenfell.

Nerevarine, who saved the Thieves’ Guild and Fighters’ Guild from the control of the Camonna Tong.

Nerevarine, who avenged the Ashlanders and drove the Imperials from Vvardenfell’s shores.

Nerevarine, who stole everybody’s pillows and stockpiled them in Fort Buckmoth.

When Dagoth Ur asks the question: “Are you Nerevar reborn?”  It isn’t a question that can be answered by the plot, or by the actions you’ve taken in the game.  It’s a question of interpretation.  Why did you do what you did?  What did it mean?  The story is rigid; the plot fixed.  The game doesn’t want you to ignore or reject the guardrails set for you by its developers.  It wants you to go through the motions—fulfill the prophecies—and then, afterwards, when the game is nearly-done, ask yourself what it meant.  Why did you do these things.  Because you were told to do them? (By Caius Cosades, Imperial agent?  By Vivec, Mehra Milo, and the Temple prophecies?  By Azura?  By the game developer?)  Because you wanted to do them?  (For self-aggrandizement?  For the sense of completionism?  To see what would happen?)  Because it was moral or right to do them?  (By whose standard?  Would the Camonna Tong agree?  Would the Imperial Cult?  Would Azura?  Would Sheogorath?)

The story of Morrowind—and the world of Morrowind—invite interpretation and understanding.  We are presented with a galaxy of different in-game interpretations: the game’s many factions trying to make sense of themselves in the context of their world—and we are left to make our own sense: decide who are the heroes and who are the villains.  But the end of the game does not change based on our behavior.  There are no Fallout-style epilogue slides to show the future we’ve made.  Oblivion and Skyrim will mention the events of Morrowind in passing, but the legacy left behind will not be of Nerevar-the-pillow-collector, but of Nerevar who destroyed Dagoth Ur and ended the Tribunal (you know, the same legacy that predates your actions in the prophecies of the Ashlanders).  This is history: fixed, fated, immutable.

But what does it mean?  Was this the heroism of a savior?  The monomania of a tyrant?  The ambition of a collector?  The whim of a visitor?

That’s left up to you.

Applications

This would be the logical time to talk about applications.

Morrowind, by encouraging us to think sociologically about the world it depicts, invites us to explore and consider the ideas and interests that shape our own world.

Morrowind, unlike its successors, is the product of painstaking personal creative work—scripting and consideration rather than procedural generation or slapdash design—and is therefore a compelling argument for the superiority of human art over AI soullessness.

Morrowind prioritizes the believability of its society over graphical fidelity or modern video game conventions like voice acting and realistic animation, and thus shows us what we have lost by adopting new technologies without careful consideration.

Morrowind diverges from other CRPG design to emphasize realistic social dynamics among peoples and races, rather than individual relationship dynamics between characters, and thus presents a more compelling picture of a video game world as a place.

Morrowind’s rigid storytelling may limit the freedom of the player compared to other games like it, but, in doing so, provides a more accurate depiction of life in a world that provides little opportunity for social mobility or political influence.

…but that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it?

Morrowind doesn’t tell us what to believe, or how to interpret what is presented to us.  Instead, it asks those questions, leaving it up to us to answer.  It does an amazing job in making us believe in this world, and thus invest in the answer to these questions, but it does not answer them.

Morrowind is a playground.  It is a place to explore and wander.  It is a place to experiment and test the bounds of its design.  It is a place to rest from the rigors of a world where the consequences of our choices are all too irreversible, and where those consequences ripple out from us, resulting in unforseeable effects.  And, in true playground fashion, it is a place where we can—if we bother to look—begin to see the way the fabric of our society is woven together.  The playground is where we, as children, begin to learn about cliques and rivalries, greed and kindness, authorities and rebellions.  It is—perhaps more than in our classrooms—where we first begin to build a picture, an understanding, of how the world works, and how to understand our place in it.

But these are not lessons you are taught, except in some cosmic or divine sense of the word.  Learning, after all, is typically more effective when no teachers are present, or are well hidden. 

Morrowind invites us to learn.  To understand.  To play, but not in the pejorative sense.  It fires our curiosity, and sates it when asked.  Like the real world, it rewards our efforts to understand it.  And like the real world, it only gives what we ask of it.  You will only get out of Morrowind what you invest in it.

Because Morrowind is a place.  Inert, yet reactive.  Logical, yet whimsical.  Predictable, yet surprising. Real to its marrow.  Believable.  Immersive.

Wish you were here,

Prof. Kozlowski