Tag: Pop culture

Gwylim notes on Morrowind: Seyda Neen, the anatomy of a tutorial area

~ SamRandom ~ 1 Comment

Introduction

All players of Morrowind start their adventure by leaving their prison ship, and entering through Vaardenfell costumes office. They enter the game as a prisoner, brought to Vadeenfell under unclear circumstances, with only a cryptic dream of Azura to guide you. The Sedya Neen port is a customs office, giving the game a perfect excuse to ask the players questions about their race, name and profession. The office effectively presents the player with the workings of the Empire and your role within it.

This is a goal that Skyrim also achieved by having you give your information to the executioner. Morrowind shows the bureaucratic rigour of the Empire, while Skyrim shows the cold and careless part of the same bureaucracy. Both approaches are useful, and have their positives as well as negatives. While Morrowind’s approach is more diegetic, is Skyrim’s approach doubtlessly more action oriented..

The ship and the dock

The game slowly introduces you to the controls of the game, moving, talking and interacting, as you travel through the

ship and interact with your jailor. As you leave the ship you are asked to tell the first clerk where you are from. This being the game’s way of making the player choose their race diegetically.

The landing area is small, verdant with life, and completely closed off from the rest of the gameworld. The player is situated directly in front of the entrance to the survey office as they leave the ship. This gives the player a clear goal, while also giving them small glimpses of the world beyond the introduction area.

Getting registered

Entering the customs office you are met by an elder Imperial man, asking you to fill in your paperworks. He dryly explains that there are a number of ways that this can be achieved, and that the choice is up to the player. Here the player can make their own class, pick one from the list of premade classes, or answer a few questions to let the game pick a class for you.

While these questions are rather strange and surreal in the context of the registration for entry, the game has done enough groundwork for it not to be too immersion breaking. As you fill in your race, class and birth sign, is your character menu likewise filled in with the relevant information, making the UI feel like a natural extension of your characters paperwork. You get one last chanse to correct anything you are not happy with before leaving the character creation process. At this you are ordered to grab your papers of registration and show them to the guard at the end of the room.

Exploring the halls

Leaving the costumes office you are briefly left to your own devices in a series of small rooms. Here you can find a few interesting objects that I will explain later in more detail, as well as plenty of trinkets books. Right ahead of the player is a small set of stairs, leading to a number of barrels and boxes, containing clutter items as well as alchemical ingredients,as weöö as gemeral nicknacks.

Directly to the right is a room that is far more inviting in its decor and overall layout. Here the player will find a book case, a locked chest, a dagger and a lockpick. Picking up the dagger or the lockpick gives the player a small tutorial window relating to combat and lock picking, the game suggests that the player tries to pick the lock of the small coin chest in the same room. The drinks and the bread can be picked up, leading to the same short tutorial on alchemy described earlier. Leaving the dining room leads the player to a small outdoors area.

The ring, the knife and the lockpick

It is in this walled off outdoors area that the player finds their last tutorial item in a barrel, a magic ring. The barrel is located in such a way that it is almost impossible for the player not to have it directly in their line of sight as they enter the area. The knife and the lockpick is similarly located in the player’s direct line of sight, with the dagger being called out in a corresponding note.

Picking up any of these items gives the player a small explanation on how they work, and how they are equipped, slowly introducing the players to the game mechanics as and when they become relevant. While not the most interactive tutorial mechanics available, are they effective at the goals that they aim to achieve. At the end of the tutorial area, most players will be informed about the game systems of magic fighting and lick picking. Leaving the open area leads you to the last room of the tutorial area.

Release, getting your orders

The player enters the last small office, populated by a single guard that instructs the player to take a packet of contact in Balmora. The player is given a package as well as some instructions on how to carry out this task. This being the only guidance the player gets besides their cryptic dream from the introduction cutscene for quite some time. This approach teaches the player that Morrowind’s secrets are many, and that they need to find them out for themselves.

The player can ask the guard a series of questions regarding a number of topics, as well as trying their hands on the persuasion system. The player learns through the dialogue tree that asking certain things can lead to new topics being discovered. When the player is ready to leave there is a door at the opposite end of the room.

Epilogue, choices and consequences

Leaving the costumes office, the player is faced with the last mechanic that the game will teach them for a while. A Bosmer man wanders outside of the costumes office, apparently he has had his prized magic ring confiscated recently. The same ring the player just picked up. Here the player learns about unavoidable text options in the form of red text snippets.

Here the player is forced to make a choice, to give the ring up, or to keep it. Keeping the ring allows the player to cast a spell they would otherwise not be able to for some time, while handing the ring over raises the disposition of the Bosmer man. The man also hints that mentioning this to the local shop keeper will give you better prices. If the player were to help the man, and mention it to the shopkeep, they will indeed be rewarded with better prices at the store.

From here the player is free to explore at their leisure, with a stern but gentle suggestion that they should travel to Balmora first, to get that entire prisoner business dealt with. So begins all games of Morrowind, heading out from the confined tutorial area of the Seada Neen customs office.

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Gwylim notes on Morrowind: Guild quests, the value of mundanity

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Mundanity is a powerful tool of storytelling, it helps anchor and expand the narrative, it gives the reader a chanse to recover from a particularly intense chapter. This last part is especially important for games where the players take a more active role than in for example film watching or reading. Morrowind has several organically formed downtimes, primarily traversal from one area and another, while this is a fascinating form of mundanity, and one that I will undoubtedly come back to, is there another mundanity I wish to discuss in this essay, the mundanity of faction questions.

Specifically the mundanity of the quests found in the joinable guilds. Unlike the later games in the series, these factions do not have a big Crisis to solve, no real villain, and no truly complete unbroken narrative. What you get from the quests is that of which you puzzle together on the way, vague hints and implications of grander plots. What makes these quests so engaging is that they often intersect with plots and narratives of both the main quest and other grander narratives of the game.

Source; https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Fighters_Guild

While you may only go to Vivec city to acquire a rare book for a colleagues research paper, you will inevitably find many more quests on the way, many more areas to explore, as well as some interesting hints and implication of the mystery of the Neravarine. The quests writing and design works rather effectively for giving you a reason not only to explore, but to place the player characters in regions and situations they may have otherwise missed.

The mundanity of the guild quests also helps with how Morrowind is designed to be interacted with. For the longest time, the player is not The hero of the tale, but a simple agent of the imperial crown, pardoned from an unspecific crime in return for providing a vague service to the crown. You are a person in the world, rather than a hero that happens to it. The game pretty early on heavily suggests that the player should join a guild or another organization, with the logic that the player will need some form of cover. Again enforcing that you are not necessarily the big hero, yet. So far you are a mere civilian and agent of the imperium’s spy network.

The mundane and pedestrian tasks of the guilds helps to drive this point home without making the process tedious and boring. The quests are often streamlined and located either near to the starting location or near one or several fast travel locations. The quests are often very simple from a purely mechanical standpoint, entailing going to a place, talking to or killing a person, or getting a thing. What sells the fantasy of the guilds is the consistent theming and narrative, giving everything you do a flavor unique to that faction.

Source; https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mages_Guild

The guilds have their own internal struggles and politics, and you get glimpses of, and partake in some of the politics as a player. There is bad blood between the thieves guild and the fighters guild, power struggles within the fighters guild, as well as discontent with the current mage guild leadership. As you carry out your orders, train your skills to raise in rank will the player inevitably find other quests and stories. The lack of a central narrative of a crisis makes it a lot easier for the writers to weave these quest tales in the wider tapestry of the world’s narratives.

Lastly, does this approach to quest design allow the player to more effectively play out the narrative of their character. Your role as a Mage guild member does not end when you leave the Balmora Mage guild in the same way that your role within the Mage guild in Oblivion disappears as soon as you leave the arcane collage. While the strategy of creating walled gardens for your faction quests may be more practical and easy to manage (I will return to this topic later), I would argue that the depth and life the Morrowind approach to faction quests entails, is well worth the extra work.

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Highways and industrial complexes: the melancholy world of eurotruck simulator 2

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Introduction

Simulator games are uniquely limited in scope and place where its narrative takes place. It is the only form of art where the players have the need to traverse the text’s narrative physically, where so much focus is put on the very action that the game aims to recreate. In the focus on the very executions of actions and interactions in a game world, do the text inevitably put focus on where these interactions end. Where the simulation stops, where the game, due to budget or usability or technological reasons, ends.

This essay aims to explore two instances where the simulation makes itself known, where gameplay necessity and immersiveness meet. Where technical limitations and real world expectations rub off on each other in interesting ways.

Highway meditations

Eurotruck simulator 2 is a game, where you drive a truck in primarily Europe. You are tasked with delivering cargo from one major city in Europe to another. These destinations are either large population centres, or well known destinations. The game limits tedium and creates a more enjoyable experience by drastically shortening the distance between these points. The game hides this shortening partly with the help of a severely sped up clock. One hour in the game is 3 minutes in real time. Twentyfour hours being roughly half an hour in real time.

The game further hides this space and time warping by having you drive on highways and other central connective roads. Not only does this make sense from a narrative perspective, you are after all trying to get from spot a to spot b as fast as possible. This decision to focus on larger arterial roads also lets the devs get away with fudging a lot of the granular details of long distance travel. Highways are often rather sterile and homogeneous, and the sensation of being on a highway is kept mostly intact even in their scaled down format.

This illusion is helped by the player now and then needing to take a sideroute or a smaller country road between highways or going in and out of towns. These diversions into the countryside are tightly designed and help to make the world you drive in feel more real, more alive. 

Eurotruck Simulator uses glowing yellow X:es to denote when a road or lane is not in the game. These barriers are easy to hide behind off ramps and junctions in highways, but become all the more apparent on small roads and small towns, where streets and roads has a tendency to snake off into small areas, or lead off to service paths.Towns in particular made the screening of of parts of the game world highly apparent, even more so when the player can see cars drive from and through these barriers that are not available to them.

The endless warehouse district

Considering the choice of scaling, as well as the apparent and obtrusive cutting off of areas from the players, is it not difficult to understand why the devs have chosen to primarily set the game in industrial areas outside of cities. This again makes sense from a narrative perspective, as the player takes the role of a long distance trucker, and is as a result rarely involved in the “last mile” part of the delivery. From the vantage point of thoroughfares and warehouse districts is it easy to present the player with identifiable skylines and landmarks.

Intended or not, does this approach to world design lead to a separation between the world of the game and the player, a sensation of always being on the way towards something, but never truly arriving. The devs have alleviated this sensation in a small but rather effective way. Many of the warehouses where you pick up and drop off your cargo have a security guard or worker on break somewhere on the lot. They passively observe as the player comes and goes, but effectively anchor the game and stop it from becoming what could easily be a rather alienating and surreal experience.

The game similarly have work crews situated near new constructions, as well as police giving tickets of npc drives, as well as rescue personnel standing around car crashes and other accidents. It all comes together to create an experience that succeeds in feeling authentic, not because it tries to hide its limitations, but because the game shows them so clearly.

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Dredge: The Iron Rig and expansion in World Building

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Introduction

Drege is a fishing simulation and exploration game, where you are set to take over when the old fisherman disappeared

mysteriously. The game takes clear inspiration from Lovecraftian horror and tackles themes of loneliness, regret and isolation. There is something very wrong with the waters around your little peninsula, the fish turn strange, and murderous visions haunt you in the night.

Dredge is a game about personal tragedies with the background of cosmic horrors beyond anyone’s understanding. The tragedies that take place in this strange island paradise are distinctly personal. This all changes with the introduction of an oil rig in the dlc The Iron Rig. The rig itself dominates all around it, at night it almost outshines the lighthouses that used to be your guiding light in the darkest of nights.

The player is tasked with helping to ferry cargo to the rig, as all the companies transport ships have run ashore or otherwise been lost to the depths of the sea. A fact that the foreman is not concerned or surprised by. As you build the rig, more and more upgrades and tactical items become available to the player. The rig’s chief scientist further tasks the player to investigate and take samples from a series of new fish that seemingly appeared after the start of the rigs operations.

The oil rig as the other

The image of the oil rig brings with it notions of exploitation and destruction, of pollution and depletion of the natural resources. Fishermen like that one you are playing are part of those that would have their livelihood threatened by the arrival of an oil rig. Even if there is no oil rig would the disturbance to the seabed as well as the transport ships make your work harder. The Ironhaven Corporation is depicted as a ruthless corporation that cares little for those they hurt in the process. The title of the corporation itself hints at their brutal and cold exterior.

The writing makes it clear that there are those that are with the company, and those that are not. You as the fishermen, are clearly not one of them. Your presence is only tolerated as long as you can be of use to the corporation, and not a second longer. 

The rig invades your seas with oil spills and strange mutated fish, but it also invades your nightmares. The ghostly visions of fishing boats and safe harbors are slowly replaced by ghostly cargo ships and phantom oil rigs, tempting you to your death in the deep seas. Mentally and physically the oil rig dominates its surroundings.

They KNOW

The writing makes it clear from the very start that the company is not here to dig for oil. The chief operator casually notes that they have very little capacity to hold whatever it is they are supposed to be digging for, be that oil or minerals. The rig also has a surprisingly large staff of scientists and technicians, the chief scientist in particular seems to have no interest in the operation of oil mining, but a deep fascination with the area’s strange fish.

Your fears are justified with the arrival of the CEO of the company that seems hellbent on keep digging into the seabed, despite numerous attacks on the rig itself. He excitedly claims that “there is just one layer left”. He insists on digging despite the danger to his life and the lives of his crew. It is made clear by the text that the company, whatever they used to be before they went into oil mining, are fully aware of what they might find in your little archipelago.

While the rig is destroyed at the climactic end of the DLC, are the company still out there, the CEO being seen escaping on his helicopter at the final attack. The message is clear, you are no longer alone with the secrets of the deep sea. The outside knows to, and they will return one day.

Final thoughts

The Iron Rig effectively broadens the world of Dredge with a few well developed features and characters. Many of the activities of the rig have direct consequences for your friends in the surrounding fishing towns. The DLC opens the world by having it conveniently assert itself in your very backyard. It manages to hint at a much larger world without needing to make the game world itself much bigger at all. The DLC only has one new location, and it was previously an empty part of the map. The developers have managed to expand the world narratively without making the playable area much larger or complex. The dlc is a good lesson for other game devs, me included, you don’t need to make a new setting for your dlc to make your world feel bigger, you simply need to remind the player that there is a world outside the setting of the game.

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Gwylim notes on Skyrim: Books and magical excavations

~ SamRandom ~ 1 Comment

Introduction

Image taken in Skyrim with Library mod

Books are a fundamental part of the narrative building of the Elder scrolls series, they can often bring context to the greater narratives as well as specific quests. In this essay I will discuss four different quests, two from Oblivion and two from Skyrim. The unifying themes for these quests is that, except for one, they get a lot of context from the lore books surrounding, or being part of the quest

In this way I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of relying on a player to read a book, and when in the narrative the book becomes available to the player.

Excavations and exploration

The magic institutions of both games have large questlines tied to them, both that eventually will see the player become the leader of said organization. In Skyrim this is the college of Winterhold, while in Oblivion this is the mage guild. Both of these have quests that take place in an excavation of one form or another.

Oblivion’s quest takes place rather late in the quest chain, and is used as a simple way of showing the player a common task of the guild, as well as to give hints of the internal struggles and conflict within the guild. There are some lorebooks and journals tied to the excavation, but it does not drastically change the context or importance of the quest. The quest itself is mostly there to help the player feel more like a member of the guild.

In Skyrim the quest is the first real quest that the players are sent upon, and also ends up being the inciting incident for the entire quest chain. This is already a stark difference from the Oblivion quest, where the dog was shown to be important, but had nothing to do with the war against the worm cult that the questline later became to circle around.

Image from https://www.imperial-library.info/

The dig in Skyrim takes place in Saarthal and is presented as a rather mundane task, after all they are letting the first year students take part in this dig, and you are told you are there to “find novel uses of magic”. The player is given the task to find any form of arcane items, finding several rings, as well as a necklace that upon taking, traps the player in a corridor.

This all eventually leads the player to finding the Eye of magnus, an incredibly powerful item that seems to have been forgotten. Everyone in the college of winterhold is shocked by the discovery, and no one seems to be aware of where this item comes from. 

This is most likely how the player will react as well, as the player has been given no information about the digsite or its history at this point. This leads me to my second comparison, books, book hunting, and incentivising the player to read.

Hunting for knowledge

Both Skyrim and Oblivion have quests related to acquiring books. The two quests I like to discuss in this essay are the acquisition of the four texts of the Mythic Dawn cult, as well as the Winterhold college text to acquire some stolen books. Both collections of books are related and tied to the quests in mention, but the games take considerably different approaches to how the players acquire, and are incentivised  to interact with these books.

In Oblivion the player is tasked with acquiring all four commentaries created by the founder of the Mythic dawn. This leads the player to peruse book shops, talk to book collectors and finally meet with the cult itself to get the final book. The books are given slowly over several stages of the quest. The player needs to acquire these books in order to find the hidden base of the Mythic Dawn cult.

After the player has acquired all books they are tasked to discuss what they have found with a member of the mage guild. The woman will offer to solve the riddle of the books for the player, but will only do so after twentyfour in game hours, as she first encourages the player to try to solve the riddle by themselves. This gives the player some downtime with the books, and may peak their curiosity. While the books themselves are mostly superfluous, it does give the player some interesting insights into the philosophy and goals of the Mythic Dawn.

Compare this with the quests Hitting the books, a quest that sees the player fight a guild of differently minded mages to acquire a series of books regarding the newly found Eye of Magnus. The dungeon is in and of itself an interesting case study, and worth its own essay all on its own. What is relevant to this essay is the way that the players acquire the bespoke books. They are located at the end of the dungeon, in a strange barren room containing only three pedestals, as well as the dungeon’s boss.

The player can choose to leave a prisoner behind to acquire these books as a trade, or fight the final boss for the same reward. The books The Last King of the Ayleids, Fragment: On Artaeum and Night of Tears. The players are told at the offset of the quest that the book may contain some clues on The Eye of Magnus. The players are then directed to return these books to the library, upon which the librarian mentions that the Night of tears has some interesting implications.

The Night of Tears does indeed contain a very direct and obvious explanation that the place the Winterhold College were excavating was indeed holding some arcane item so powerful the Nord inhabitants gave their lives to keep it hidden. The other texts present the player with some more context on the Ayleids as well as the Psijic order. The player gets no further incentive on reading the texts, and as far as I am aware they are never brought up again.

What is notable about the quest Hitting the books, is that actually reading the books, drastically reframes the entire questline. The player is told in the quest dialogue that the dig at Saarthal is routine, safe and simple. Reading the Night of Tears makes it clear that this was never the case, and brings up some unintended implications of either the college’s incompetence, or duplicity. It seems like a stretch to imagine that neither the Arch mage, or one of the faculty in charge of this site did not know about the site they were excavating, especially since the book would be available to them.

Final thoughts

I have presented four quests in this text, two have involved excavations, and two have involved the procurement of books. All are related to acquiring information or performing research in one form or another. I hope to show different ways that lorebooks can be used to further a narrative, and how it can harm it. I would argue that it is vital that the player still gets the vital information they need, regardless of if they read supplementary texts or not.

The commentaries of the Mythic dawn are pushed on the player who is incentivised to carefully read and examine the texts. Even if they do not, the player still has plenty of options to acquire the same information they got from the book elsewhere. In contrast, the books in Hitting the books are never actively pointed out as important until after they are handed over to the quest giver. This is done despite the fact that the book contains vital context to the quest that the player will not find through playing through the questline.

I have also presented two ways that excavations can be used in RPGs, and what different goals their inclusion may have. While Oblivion used its excavation to present the player to mounting dissatisfaction in the Mage guild, Skyrim uses the excavation as a suspense tool to build up to the big inciting incident for the College of Winterhold questline. Both are valid approaches, but will lead to vastly different experiences, and leaves the player with different connections to what they have explored.

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: Fictional essays and their use in worldbuilding

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I have previously written about the importance of in game stories and nonfiction books in world building and storytelling, especially when it comes to fantasy and sci fi. In this text I wish to go even more granular and discuss a genre that is close to my heart, the essay. Often more loose in form than a report or a paper, essays are great for presenting ideas and concepts in a condensed yet easy to understand format. 

Essays often exclude some of the contexts needed to understand the texts if it’s common knowledge. This allows the text to focus more on the topic at hand. This makes essays uniquely suited to give a player tidbits about the world a game is set in, without needing to present a lot of information all at once. Essays allow you to bring small packets of information in a condensed format. It allows the player to put together the information themselves over the length of the game’s narrative.

Essays have a further advantage of having a more personal voice in its writing. This allows you to not only tell stories with the essay itself, but also be able to create a writer of essays. A person that allows for a unique point of view. It is this point of view character that makes the essay such a vital tool of narratives.

The Elder scrolls series is no stranger to in-universe texts, some have gotten physical releases as well. Elder scrolls has several texts that not only discusses parts of the world, but argues for or against certain assumptions of the narrative. For example, the many schools of magic are hotly debated in a number of texts. Necromancy in particular is debated and arguments for and against.

Likewise many historical events of the narrative are discussed in great length. In this text  I would like to discuss two such texts in particular. The life of Barenziah and the mystery of the Dwemer. Both are excellent examples on how elder scrolls play with the idea of an objective reality in its narrative.

Dwemer, myths and misinformation

The disappearance of the Dwemer is described as one of the largest mysteries in the narrative of The Elder Scrolls. Their obsession with science, their alien philosophy and of course their sudden disappearance from Nirn all together have fueled discussions both in game and amongst fans. There are many texts discussing and arguing the minutiae of Dwemer, science and beliefs. Some texts like On Dwemer law and the Dwemer series are written as serious scholarly attempts to try and get to the bottom of Dwemer culture, and what impact they have had on Dunmer and Altmer culture.

There is also the series of Ancient Tales of the Dwemer. That presents the Dwemer in a very different light. The Dwemer described in these tables are considerably kinder, more peaceful and overall friendly than the Dwemer that can be found in other texts. 

This discrepancy is something the players will find for themselves when devling into the many Dwemer dungeons and facing the many sadistic traps and torture chambers of the old Dwemer holds.

This is a point that the scholar Hasphat Antabolis discusses in his text Dwemer History and Culture. He argues that the tales discussed in the Ancient Tales of the Dwemer are in fact re-packaged folk tales that have been rewritten to be given a certain exotic Dwemer flair.

That the kind and friendly Dwemer became a lot more palatable for the middle class reading rooms. These texts have as a result been spread and read by thousands, and are today still very prominent, despite the fact that they have been thoroughly debunked. The idea of a historical narrative remaining true even after decades of disproving is something that can be found in many places in real life.

The text brings up ideas of how dark and brutal histories and cultures can often be softened and simplified in order to make them more palatable to the general public. This is a wonderful example of how Skyrim uses real life phenomena within history and anthropological research to make its game world feel more complex.

The life of Barenziah and Biography of Barenziah

The controversial character of Barenziah has two texts written about her. One official series of biographies titled Biography of Barenziah paints her as the first and only Dunmer empress and describes the struggles of her life with a kind and borderline naive tone, breathlessly praising her numerous grand qualities. The second unofficial text written by an anonymous scribe titled The Real Barenziah is scandalous, provocative and deeply judgmental with poorly hidden sexism and racism contained through the text. The role of Straw the stable boy is one of the decisive differences.

What is interesting about these texts is the transparent intent of the authors behind both series. One series is describing in short and somewhat dry terms the life of the only Dunmer ruler of the empire. The other is a series of character assassinations and brutal accusations of promiscuity and debasement. Sadly this is a tactic that has, and still is used to discredit many women who have been in power. Furthermore, the first text is written as a simple document that retells major events in Barenziah life, while the second is written like a serialized romance novel, with rich descriptions of events and lengthy dialogues.

The stark difference in the texts presented narrative forces the player to look at this one historical figure from separate points of view. While the text of Skyrim makes it clear in the presentation of the texts which one is the more probable and reliable. It does nonetheless make a clear case that not every text that the player encounters can or should be trusted. Like in real life are all narratives created by a person, a person with a specific worldview, historical background and motivations. Both texts have clear biases, and both have clear goals with their narratives. It is up to the player what parts to believe.

Final thoughts

I like to conclude this essay by discussing another series, Rising threat, a series describing the rise of the Thalmer from an Altmer point of view. It is interesting for several reasons, one of them being the only purely Altmer narrative in the game, as well as for giving well needed context to the rise of the organization. This series explains how the Thalmer monopolized the sudden end to the Oblivion crisis, and claimed that they were the true heroes of the calamity.

Despite this falsehood eventually being disproven, has it nonetheless become a truism within the history of the Altmer. Furthermore, the texts are interesting for the disclaimer made by Praxis Erratuim that warns the reader not to take some of the more fanciful speculations of the texts all too seriously. Like with the Anecdotes of the Dwemer this text presents the idea that history is sometimes not created by the most reliable facts, but by the most prevailing of narratives.

My goal with this text is to present my reader with a  few examples in how ambiguity and contradictions can be used to deepen a narrative and make a fictional world feel more complex, more nuanced and more alive. I would also like to argue for the use of books and journals for the furtherance of narratives and lore that would be unwieldy to present in direct or ambient dialogues.With all this said, this kind of narrative presentation has some serious shortfalls. The chief being that the player needs to first find, and then read the text to get the information needed. I will discuss a few of these pitfalls in a future Skyrim essay: Books and magical excavations.

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: Stairs, gameplay and narrative guides

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Introduction

Skyrim is the latest installment in the Elder scrolls series. The game series is an open world rpgs filled with magic, monsters and intrigue. Skyrim is set in the fringed northern land of the same name. This land is deeply inspired by a romanticized version of Viking and Nordic culture. The land is rugged and mostly barren, with a few scattered cities hidden behind grand walls. There are small farms scattered amongst the landscape, so are strange stone formations, caves, old temples and many many burial mounds. Skyrim is a mountainous land, and very few areas are completely flat. 

This makes the inclusion of stairs feel like a very natural part of the environment. One of the problems with open world games, especially those that are as large as Skyrim is the risk of players getting lost. Skyrim has many clever way of leading the player towards points of interests, from stone canines, small rocks statues, and dirt paths. One of the greatest way that the game leads the players is with stairs, low stone stairs that do not impede the players walking speed, but that subtly show that there is something important nearby. 


Height has also been used with great effect in Skyrims two latest predecessors. Cyrodiil in Oblivion is markedly bowl shaped, with the imperial city in the centre of the bowl. The effect is that if the player goes downhill they will eventually end up in the Imperial city. A logical design considering how vital the city is for the game both narrative and gameplay wise.

Vvardenfell in Morrowind is likewise built around a specific geographical feature, namely the red mountain. The cause of the red fever and home of Dagoth Ur. The presence of the red mountain in the centre of the map, in combination with the constant belching of smoke gives the game a constant sense of dread and urgency.

The player often simply needs to look up for a reminder of what they are fighting for, and trying to destroy.

Mountains and cliffs

The decision to make Skyrim a very mountainous area further helps to funnel the player in to areas of interest. Roads snaking along valleys and across vaistas is an easy way to lead the player towards points of interest. This strategy is very much enhanced by the combination of stairs leading up otherwise unscalable hills and cliffs. The world design takes great advantage of its mountainous areas to create breathtaking vistas from many of the games key locations.

The dragon priest ruins having several high points from where they practiced their Thu’um also makes for great vantage points to the players. Mountains also make for natural barriers, and while they do not often work like that in practice, mountains are great theoretical barriers to keep the players away from certain areas, or from taking unintended routes.

The introductory road to Riverwood being a great example of this, as the players snake along the road down the cliff they are faced with the vastness and emptiness of Skyrim’s wilderness.

Miraaks temple is placed on a hill, at one of the highest points of the island. The castles of the vampires and the Dawnstar are both located on an elevation, letting them loom over the players as they approach.

Cities and stairs

The main cities of Skyrim all use elevation in interesting, and often historically accurate ways. Windhelm is very clearly stratified around elevation, with the jarls kept at the top, leading down to great families, then the traders and last the common citizen. Morthal has a similar design with the temple of Diala and the jarls keep rather literally lording above the lower levels of the city. The poor are literally forced underground, while the rich live in cliffside residents. 

Winterhold is rather flat, with two exceptions, the docks and the grey quarters are both located at the bottom of steep stairs, putting them at a both spiritual and visual lower level then the ruling nord classes. It also increases the sense of isolation and destitution of these areas

Solitude has an interesting dip in the middle of the city, as well as a hill approaching it. This detail means that both the blue palace and the imperial fort are located uphill. The player will always approach these structures from below. Riften has the most obvious height dichotomy, with its most poor literally living underground, while the Jarl fort is also located at the top of a small hill.

The college of winterhold also is kept at a distinct elevation from the ruins of its former patron city. Finally at the greybeards located at the highterst top of the world, both in literal and spiritual sense.

Conclusions

Height and the traversal of height is a vital part of Skyrim, both from a narrative and gameplay point of view. The ways that Skyrim uses height can be mirrored in the way that Oblivion and Morrowind uses height. The concept of elevation can be used both as a gameplay tool, and as a narrative tool.

The volcano of the Red Mountain in Morrowind both works as a goal, but as a deterrent to the player. Doubly so with the addition of the ghost fence cutting the player off from the peak for most of the gameplay. It is a deterrent, but also a sign of the ultimate goal for the player.

Oblivion uses its bowl shape to give the player a constant reminder of the Imperial city, the seat of power for the empire, and the very thing that the player is working to save. From a gameplay perspective does Oblivion use the high tower of the Imperial city as well as its central location as a tool for the player to navigate, and find their way back to the central hub of the game.

Skyrim likewise uses elevation, and stairs both for narrative and gameplay use. The narrow valleys help guide the players towards points of interest, and the elevation of certain buildings relative to its surrounding can tell the player a lot about a place without saying it expressly. 

Gwylim notes on Skyrim: The joys and frustrations of in game book hunting

~ SamRandom ~ 2 Comments

I am sure that many of my readers have had the joy of finding a specific book in an obscure bookshop or lurking in a digital archive somewhere. The frustration when you are missing but one text in your collection, the unwillingness to start a project before you know that you are all the texts you need to start. I admit that this is not a problem that many people have, but I am sure that at least some of my readers can empathise with my plight!

A book from Skyrim in the reading view of the game.

I have had a similar experience in skyrim recently. I have discussed the wealth of reading that can be found in the elder scrolls series many times. There are novels, poems, essays and unhinged ramblings to be found in all of the main games. In many of these games there also exist book sellers in where to easily and effectively acquire this reading materials, as well as libraries aplenty.

Skyrim is different in this regard, as it is the general store sellers that sells but a paltry few books. The only libraries available to the players are also located at either the seats of power, or at Skyrims two seats of learning, the bards college and the College of Winterhold, the primary location to learn the arcane arts.

The second of the two colleges have an especially stringent and suspicious librarian. Due to his dour nature, or due to a lack in coding, can you in fact Not borrow books from this library, though he does sell some of the texts he stores there. Due to a quirk in the book shelves in the Winterhold library can you only read the majority of the books if you steal them from the shelves, as they are not located in the regulair open style bookcases.

There are on the other hand other ways to acquire reading material in Skyrim. First and foremost does the otherwise uninterested populus of Skyrim own a fair few books themselves, as at least two or three can be found in each household. Likewise does it seem that everyone from blood crazed necromancers to cut throat bandits have a bend for reading. As a result the dungeons are populated by sentient races often surprisingly full of books, journals, scrolls and other reading material.

Many of these seemingly brutal and bullheaded robbers seem to have an interest in obscure history and advanced magical theories. As it is more common to find a thesis on Mysticism next to a bandit bed, then it is to find something salacious like The Lusty Argonian Maid.

This means that the best way to expand your library is to either delve into a dungeon, or go thieving in the neighborhood. I want to make the argument Skyrim has moved away from the cities being as much of a hub as they were in Oblivion and Morrowind. The wilderness and the quests and adventures that take place in the wilderness between the cities, has taken over much of the time spent in the cities, especially Oblivion. In the earlier games most quest givers lived in the cities, as well as large part of the quests themselves taking place in, or near cities.

An in game view of the city of Solitude from the game Elder Scrills: Skyrim

As a result would it make sense that much of the amenities that the player needed, weapons, potions, books and other gear would be available to them in the cities. Likewise does the specialized stores help create a sense of urban life in both Morrowind and Oblivion that I believe is deliberately absent from Skyrim.

It makes sense for the seat of the mage guild to have a dedicated staff shop for example. Likewise would it make sense for Vvardenfell capital with its many educational and administrative centres to have a well stocked bookstore available. These shape the narrative of the world itself.

Skyrim is a much more rugged place, but also a different game. Many quest givers meet the player on the road, or in small villages, and when they are located in the cities do they more often than not direct the player to a cave in the wilderness. The courier is another mechanic that delivers quests to the players with the constant letters and requests. Specialized stores that only accepts certain kinds of loot would slow down the game loop of:

Visit town, get quest.
Visit wildernets, finish quest and get loot.
Visit town, sell loot, repeat.

A book from Skyrim in the reading view of the game.

All of this gives the gameplay a much more mobile feeling to its gameplay. I would argue that the lack of specialist stores have also had an effect on this. You are less likely to spend time in a town when every single town offers the same, smithy, general store and alchemist as the next.

All these design choices make Skyrim feel differently from their predecessors. You explore and interact with it in different time scales and relate to space in different ways. The way you interact with the hour to hour gameplay is subtly different in many small ways. For example how the player interacts and considers the loot from dungeons and quests.

As a result is it only natural that you would need to interact with the lore book in different ways. While I do miss The First Edition from Oblivion very much, I must admit that a bookstore in Skyrim would not fit into the differently phased and organized gameplay that the game works around.

Warhammer exploratory essay: Who gets to be human

~ SamRandom ~ Leave a comment

Introduction

I have alluded to the idea of personhood in earlier chapters, but in this text I will discuss it in more clear terms. All the playable factions are humanoid in one way or another. The non-human factions are either adjacent to humans like Elves or dwarves, or they are more inhuman like Lizardmen, Skaven and Goblins. All of them have humanoid characteristics and keep some sort of human culture.

What became clear when I started researching this topic is just how human centric the Old World is. Humans as humans, exist in Europe, Africa and Asia, with clear, if often tokenized versions of their real life counterparts cultures. There are humans in fantasy Arabia, even the undead of the setting version of Egypt are still decidedly human, despite their undead appearance. It is this prevalence of humans and human adjacent races like Elves that makes the less than human races stand out so much more.

The humanized

The humanised creatures are those that are clearly based on a real human culture, and also has humanizing features. Here you can find the Dwarves, and the Elves, both are staple of the fantasy genre when the setting was made, as they still are today. THe dwarves are proud and the Elves are arrogant, both see themselves as better than the short lived humans. Wood Elves are likewise seen as more wild but yet arrogant and in many ways superior to humans in most ways.

The lizardmen live in the south of the Old Worlds version of Africa, as well as the southern version of South america. The aesthetic of the Lizard men are hard to miss, living in large stone cities with grand temples to golden serpent gods, gods that require living sacrifices in large numbers. While still a sympathetic depiction, there are still some connotations to certain conspiracy theories that makes them a bit uncomfortable to consider. As part of being reptilian are to varying degrees been described as unemotional and mechanical, going from almost pure automata at their inception, to the strange and otherworldly, but yet fully sentient creatures in the later editions.

The second example of the use of human cultures for nonhuman creatures is less easy to explain away. The Ogres, the hungry, dumb and brutal race of giant humans, are both located where real life Mongolia is, as well as sharing some physical features and stereotypes of Mongolian men.

With thick eyebrows and rather characteristic mustaches, their connection to gluttony, violence and stupidity is a rather unfortunate one to say the least. But with this said, are they still considered moral in one way or another, and are often seen as neutral, if not good. Vampires and undead, are likewise seen as monsters but are still human when it comes down to it. This is in rather starch contrast to some of the other humanoid factions in the setting.

The inhuman

There are two factions that I wish to discuss when it comes to dehumanised, or monstrous versions of humans in the Warhammer fantasy universe, first of them are the Orks and Goblins, playing much the same role that they do in dungeons and dragons and similar fictions of the time. They are violent and aggressive, and live only for combat. They are the stereotype of a villain. They soely exist to fight, destroy and eat, but unlike their ogre counterparts do they have very few humanizing features, or seen as capable of any good. THis pigheaded and absurd evil is often played as a sort of comic relief, playing off the improbability of their civilizations to begin with.

Orks are strong, resilitand and sprout out of the ground, being grown from fungi.They have absolute faith in all that they do and can never be persuaded to leave their path of destruction for one simple reason, they are finding it all too fun. Goblins are ted tibet as the menial cast of the faction, working, carrying, farming and building, though the quality of these efforts are often described as subpar at best. They also trade and barter, giving the faciton their only hire non violent connection with the other factions.

The second faction to discuss is the Skaven, a fascinating society of half ratmen, that lives under the cities of all the world’s major factions and civilizations. The Skaven are depicted as man’s worst qualities, selfish, greedy and ambitious, each Skaven lives only for themselves, and will not hesitate for a second to sacrifice another of their kind if it meant gaining an upper hand in their competitive and cut throat society.

While some are vaguely human in their organisation and culture, are they not as closely tied to a certain culture or nationality. Both the Orks and the Skaven are clearly meant to be parodies or exaggerated versions of some of humans’ worst sides, and vices. Even more so then the followers are chaos are these races often used as dark or warped mirrors of humanity. Orcs are aggressive and ambitious in the extreme, while Skaven are greedy and cowardly in the extreme.

Conclusions

The question of who gets to be human and who doesn’t is not a question that is unique to warhammer, but is one that tends to turn up in many high fantasy settings. For example does the Elder scrolls make a clear distinction between, elves, humans and “the bestial races” of orcs, argonians and khajiit. The concept of having other or near human races is not a problem in and of itself.

It is a great way to add some variety and texture to the world. Likewise is it not a problem in itself to base these races on specific human cultures, Elder Scrolls argonians for example shares their mesoamerican inspiration with the Lizardmen of Warhammer fantasy. Problems can arise when certain races are tied to both a specific culture and a specific negative trope tied to that culture. For example the brainded hunger of the Ogres, or the cold and alien Lizardmen.

Furthermore can a non human race become rather flat and simplistic if it is only allowed to have one cultural expression. This is especially apparent, if like in the elder scrolls series, there are several human cultures but only one Argonian culture. The Warhammer examples are very good at making a varied and complex set of cultures, even amongst the more comedic races. There is a large difference between the plague worshipers of Clan Pestilence and the quirky engineers of Clan Skryre. Despite this do the races as whole have a uniforming feel and cohesion that makes them easily recognized.

The tokenization and alienation of real cultures is not a problem unique to Warhammer, but can be seen across many series and settings. The Kajiit of the Elder scrolls used to talk, and to some degree do in a stereotypical Romani coded voice, and are also depicted as being semi nomadic, and known for thievery. To take another example, the goblins in Harry Potter are only seen working in banks- They are long nosed, greedy and untrustworthy, a sadly still all too common anti semitic trope in fantasy.

It is only through nothing but biases and assumptions in writing that we can become better writers. If we wish to aim to write a more true and inclusive fantasy world, must we first explore what inspiration we draw from real life and why. That is why it is vital to listen to voices different from your own. I am not innocent of this as well, there are many times I have had to step back from my writing and re-evaluate, when I am getting too close to tokenizing or orientalising a culture or race in my writing. Tokens and stereotypes are powerful because they are easy to recognize to a reader, and a useful shorthand as a writer. This makes it even more important that we use them with respect and caution.