Every night I see the northern lights over the Pale. The song Aurora rises to a crescendo as I give in to sleep. It drifts in and out of my dreams as it cycles on repeat until, eventually, the sun hits the edge of the horizon and I start another day.
Time to go make lunches...
If there is such a thing as a perfect storm, Skyrim has to be listed among that rare category of creations. There are few things like it in the game world. A mix of striking visuals, perfectly tuned audio, and a gameplay that works regardless of skill level.
Somehow this combination has had a tremendous influence on how I think about RPG design, art, and fiction.
When people wax poetically about Morrowind, the often touted pinnacle of the Elder Scrolls games, I sigh. I was there too. I am not ignorant of its charms.
I lost my life to those damned Cliff Racers. Jumped my way to a high athletics score. Contracted blight at the wrong time. And I faced down Dagoth Ur as the Nerevarine.
It was fun and different, but it didn't hit me in the right way. Maybe the visuals were too primitive at the time? Maybe it is that the audio tracks aren't as crisp? Maybe it was something else that I don't remember as it was so long ago?
For whatever reason, Morrowind didn't grab hold of me the way it did so many others. It didn't take my heart in its hand and demand I return again and again. It didn't inspire me to do something. Anything.
It was weird and wonderful, but not right for me.
I've done a lot of reflection on why I kept coming back to Skyrim over and over again. Why does it inspire creativity in me for my own work? Why did it capture the imagination of my oldest kid too?
It is a flawed game to be sure. The quests can be uninspired. The combat repetitive. The dragons quickly lose their sense of dread. The physics at times are astonishingly frustrating.
And yet, when I sit down to play the game, two things happen. First I craft an agenda or narrative I want to explore with the game. Then, after I start playing, I quickly feel my mind open up to possibilities I want to explore for myself. Not in the game, but in my art, or writing, or game design.
It's like clockwork.
The conclusion I have come to about why this happens, why it has such an influence on how I look at game design, is that the world feels old. When moving through the space again and again, with yet another strange concept to try with a new character, it always feels like I have stepped into a story in progress, not started one from the first page.
The visual language of the game is something akin to the original Star Wars movies. There is a sense that these people have built lives on top of something that was greater and grander long ago. It carries with it a specific feeling. What I imagine it would have felt like in the 1600's stumbling across a shattered Roman villa in the woods of southern France.
It creates opportunities for emergent story telling. Not quite as much as say Fallout 76 when it first came out. That was a masterclass in emergent storytelling that they ruined. Gamers are the worst...
That is a digression I don't want to depress myself with. What I mean to say is that Skyrim has emergent storytelling in spades, too.
The carved murals. The tombs filled with strange feast halls as if, while alive, the undead minions drank and traded stories there. The former Imperial fortress now home to a coven of necromancers up to no good.
All of these things are seeds of ideas that let me fill in the blanks. The story I create in my head is always going to be more fun, more engaging than anything that could be told to me. It is like how when reading Hills Like White Elephants, no person has the same picture in their head as to what the scene looks like.
Filling in the blanks is the juice. It lets you be a part of the development of the game. You aren't a passenger in someone's failed attempt at a novel, as so many computer and table top RPGs are. You get to be an active participant because the story isn't forced down your throat with long gobs of endless exposition.
That is where I think many RPGs and novels go wrong. They fall on either side of the divide. They either tell you virtually nothing, expecting you to do all the heavy creative lifting, or they bombard you with eye watering paragraphs of bullshit. Neither inspires me to want to create, which I think the best works of art do.
I came to this realization what seems like a lifetime ago. While playing the game, I was struck with an idea. What would happen to an ancient and mysterious place like this if two powerful forces went to war with one another? A master and an apprentice who rejected their teaching, but matched them in strength, fighting for the soul of the place?
What would a game like that look like? What kind of details would be enough to allow for people build their own story? Can I create a game where every aspect of it, including the tools used to resolve conflict, evoke the nature of the place and the people the players are inhabiting?
The answer was sort of. I wrote a game called Conspiracy of Shadows: Apprentice in a night. Revised it over a few weeks with some able friends providing their much appreciated editorial help, then launched my first and only Kickstarter campaign.
I am proud of the work, flawed as it is. It is weird, and kinda works, and is experimental in its presentation. For the top tier backers I made cloth maps, hand burned wood blocks to represent characters, and hand burned the rune stones used for conflict resolution.
All of this. All of this creative output came directly from the way my mind wandered as I played Skyrim. A flurry of creativity triggered by a combination of the pace of play and environment that fostered it. That doesn't happen all that often.
My appreciation for Skyrim is obviously very personal, but I don't think that at all diminishes its value. Its value isn't that it has sold so many versions or that its gameplay is perfect. It isn't objectively valuable.
We went wrong at some point trying to find objective truth in art. We broke our brains in the endless pursuit of making the number go up. It is why artists can't experiment anymore and create things that inspire.
Skyrim is among a breed of games that dared to try something ambitious. It got lucky that people made money off of it. I fear it is going to be a long time before we see a game this large, this grand, this detailed in its design again.
It is too risky. There are shareholders to keep happy. People don't want to be challenged en masse, but want that saccharin sweet fix that is easy to package. It is going to take something drastic to get a game like it out the door again.
Until then, I think I am going to make summoner who rolls in heavy armor and explore the idea of becoming a dragon priest. Who knows what that might inspire me to try next?
