Study Abroad (Part Four of Five)

I spent my first year of university in a student house. I’m hardly the most outgoing guy now, but back then I took shyness to a fairly extreme level. Having housemates who enjoyed hosting parties and going to nightclubs and things like that (normal people, in other words) lead to a fairly alienating beginning to my degree. The first semester of my second year was to be spent abroad, and perhaps as a response to my previous accommodation arrangements I elected to stay at a dorm rather than another student house.

Compared to the titchy room I had back in Britain, which had just enough space for a bed and a desk, my Canadian room was massive. From the window you could look down and see a decent amount of the campus, and there were actual shelves where you could put actual things and not have to keep them on the floor. This was going to be fantastic, I thought. Those first few days when there was no one else on the floor except a couple of other exchange student on the other side of the building were great. So great that I completely forgot to buy any bedding for the first three weeks or so, spending a lot more time using rolled up clothing as a pillow than I probably should have.

Then the Canadian students rolled in. My floor was almost entirely first years, mostly pretty nice people (despite the following tale), and a couple of utterly useless supervisors. It had taken me rather a while to get over my jet lag, so by the time the rooms around me became occupied I was still rather out of it. Years from now I’ll still remember the first time I was woken up at two in the morning by an ear-busting sound.

WUB WUB WUB-WUB-WUBWUB.

Yes, the soundtrack to my Canadian exchange is a dubstep remix of The Legend of Zelda theme. Everyday was dubstep day on my floor (well, four days a week, every week including exams weeks) going from around 8-9PM to 4AM per night. The party usually centred around the room two doors down from me, but the distance didn’t really matter because you could still enjoy the music from the next building over. Do you remember in the last article I mentioned my two thousand words a day writing schedule?

Yeah.

Most nights had me working in the library until it closed at eleven, then picking up the biggest size of coffee I could (which was a bit under half a litre) and supping it as I worked on my laptop in my room with my headphones on, blasting the loudest anti-dubstep I could find, until about 2AM. At this point I would finally have worn myself out enough to drop to sleep despite the racket (albeit sleeping on my side pressing a pillow down on the other side of my head).

In the mornings I’d wake up to some new thing done to the building in the name of fun. Let me think, there was the time a group of them decided to rip off all the doors on the toilets. That was fun. There was the time they kicked a hole through my wall, but don’t worry it wasn’t personal because they kicked a hole in every wall. That was fun. Then there was the time they stole all the soap and shower curtains from the floor bathroom. I don’t know what they had against our bathroom to be honest, but in the end I had to start taking my showers in the ones a few floors down. Oh, there was the time they nicked the door handle from the front of the building, making it really difficult to get in and eventually leading to me having to use the back entrance. That one was really fun.

For the rest of my degree I went back to living in student houses.

Study Abroad (Part Three of Five)

I was briefly taken aback that my lessons were in a class format rather than a lecture, more like how I was taught at Sixth Form. Back at my home university lectures would usually consist of a hundred or more students crowded in a big lecture hall, but here a class was considered big if it had twenty students. Oddly, this smaller class size and closer setting went alongside a far more distant and alien teaching style. This, along with an attitude to assessment that verged on punitive, made this period of my education almost completely unlike anything I’d experienced in the UK.

During my time there I was careful not to slide into Britishisms. Once or twice, when tired and hungry, I would ask the guy at the trash food stand for chips, leading to a few seconds of uncomfortable silence before I said “oh sorry, I mean fries”. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology this was not an issue with essays, as I could just write them naturally in British English and at the end change the language settings on LibreOffice to Canadian English. The one time my inconsistent use of Canadianisms actually created an issue, however, was when I accidentally addressed one of my teachers using their first name.

Over here the idea that you’d still refer to your teachers using their titles even at Sixth Form, let alone university, strikes one as childish. While it’s an illusion, encouraging the use of first names among students and lecturers does create the idea that they are on the same level intellectually, which encourages students to debate frankly and give their own ideas the credit they deserve. I had been told before to refer to my instructors as Professor Surname, but years of habit are hard to break, and in Canada failing to use proper titles in this context seems to be taken as presumptiveness rather than politeness. It wasn’t really that big of an issue, my main reprimand being a rather passive aggressive email from the Prof in question, but it did shake me out of what little sense of familiarity I had developed.

Beyond the strange setting, the system of assessments took me off guard as well. In terms of essays, Canada prefers quantity over quality, to the extent that in terms of wordcount I wrote more during that one semester there than I did for the entire rest of my degree, including my dissertation. Half way through a class you have to do your midterms, which are a mix of exams and essays, and with some of these tests staggered by a month or so by the time you’ve done your last midterm it’s already time to start writing your final essays and getting ready for the final exams. I had been knocked out by some of the worst flu I’ve ever had just at the beginning of my midterms, putting me over a week behind on my assignments, a margin I never made up.

Back in Britain, where I would have three essays of about two and a half thousand words each and then three exams at the end of the semester, the pace was such that I could write a couple of hundred words a day and feel proud of it. In contrast, my final mini-dissertation for my Media course (which was only one of four courses I was doing) was six thousand words long, which I completed in three days. On top of essays and exams, I had to write a weekly seven hundred word blog for my Gender course, of which every single post was made at five minutes to midnight on the Friday.

While stressful at the time, this rushed pace taught me how to write quickly and without undue perfectionism. When I returned home suddenly everything seemed pretty sedate, and being able to write my essays without dilly-dallying left me a lot of free time to pursue other hobbies, eventually leading to me abandoning a career path that I was never really sure about to instead try for a career in the games industry, leading me directly to where I am now, about to start a Masters in Game Design. My exchange took up the first half of my second year at uni, and thankfully the student house I was placed in for the second half was full of nice quiet people, which made a welcome change from the Canadian dorms which I will tell you about tomorrow.

Study Abroad (Part Two of Five)

The free coffee was pretty good in the hall the foreign students had to wait in before orientation started. Well, it wasn’t that good. It was free though. I did my best impression of mingling that I could, which in my case consisted of standing next to one of the coffee pots looking pensive, occasionally refilling my comically undersized cup. I had a little chat with an Australian student called Aaron, who I ended up spending most of the exchange hanging out with (I probably learnt more about Australia than I did about Canada during that semester), and then we were all ushered into a big hall.

Most of orientation was just a rehash of the talk I’d received from my home university before leaving: tips are fifteen percent, don’t use your teacher’s first names (call them Professor or Prof), never cut in line. They missed out the bit about being careful about smoking Canadian cannabis, since it’s stronger than the stuff in the UK, and they also left out the bit where every university talk I had to go to in Britain offered free alcohol. My home university was nothing but practical. It knew some of its students would want to try the local drugs (not me, of course), so it warned us, and it knew that none of us would bother turning up to our prep talks if they didn’t give us all free glasses of wine.

It was probably to do with the fact that the drinking age in British Columbia is 19, so many of the undergraduates would have been too young for alcohol, but coffee really wasn’t much of an incentive to attend. As an aside, in my experience the students who were too young to drink would just smoke copious amounts of pot, since it was easier for them to get without ID. In fact you weren’t even allowed to bring alcohol into the dorms (one of the few rules I broke during my time there), despite the fact that the whole building stunk of grass. I can’t say my experience in Canada gave me much respect for strict drinking age laws.

There was a decent mix of different nationalities at the talk. The biggest country represented was China, which was about half of the exchange students. America was probably the the second biggest group, and was mostly people from southern states and Hawaii. The rest was a mix of all the commonwealth countries that got a free pass to study in Canada: Britain, Australia, South Africa, and so on.

After our safety briefing the elders of the local First Nations people who owned the land the university was built on came out to talk to us, offering us a slightly depressing prayer about how distraught we must be to be so far from home, and how they hoped we wouldn’t all become so upset that we’d throw ourselves off the nearest dock and make a break for the mainland. We then had to form groups and go on a “treasure” hunt, finding all the fun buildings like the first aid centre and the complaints office on a map and getting a stamp from them. While part of me wasn’t fond of being asked to take part in primary school level activities, it was entertaining enough and a good opportunity to talk to some of the other students.

Afterwards some of the students went on a whale watching trip, but I’d been on enough of those in my life so I passed and retreated back to my quiet, comfortable dorm. At this point there were no students in the building other than a few tame exchangers, so I was unaware as to how uncomfortable my dorm would eventually be.

Study Abroad (Part One of Five)

In about a month, I’ll be in Copenhagen ready to begin my Master’s degree. While I wait, I’ve been reflecting on the last time I studied abroad, my student exchange to Canada during my Bachelors. It was both the best and most stressful part of my degree, my fear of being so far from home compounded by an alien education environment and clamorous neighbours. Here are some highlights, perhaps with a little knowledge sprinkled throughout the anecdote.

“My word, that’s a lot of trees”. I would have liked my first thoughts as the plane came to land at Victoria International to be more apposite, but thanks to my inability to sleep on planes I was fairly tired. A long boring bus ride later and I was at the university, I picked up my keys at the desk and made my way to my room on floor three. I shouldn’t have expected the dorms to come with bedding, but for whatever reason I had neglected to pack any. I stayed awake just long enough to set up my laptop and let my parents know I’d made it safely, before going to sleep resting my head on a bundled up hoodie.

Waking up the next morning I realised that I didn’t know where I was going to get my morning coffee. I’ve cut back since then, but in those days I was hopelessly addicted to caffeine. Google Maps informed me that there was a Starbucks within walkable distance of the university, so I made my way there. Sadly my degree was in politics and not Italian, and being sleep-addled and jet lagged I was not quite prepared for the array of different coffees on offer. Not knowing which one was black coffee without milk or sugar I chose at random. Turns out that Mocha is half hot chocolate and half coffee, and let me tell you it is not a pleasant way to start the first day of the first foreign trip you’ve ever taken on your own. The croissant was nice though.

The next day I rectified my mistake and ordered an Americano, which is technically not plain black coffee but watered down espresso but who cares. Having realised from the day before that I hadn’t figured out one was supposed to tip, they proceeded to make my coffee as slowly as they could. But coffee is coffee, even if it takes a quarter of an hour to make, and luckily that was the last day I had to sate my addiction there. The next day the university’s wide array of cafés opened for business.

I don’t know if this is common to all Canadian universities, but at this one there were no self-catered dorms. You paid to get your meals at the cafeteria whether you wanted to or not. While at the time I wasn’t fond of spending the extra money I did eventually came to appreciate a worry-free source of French Toast and coffee. Foreign students had to arrive a week or so before the domestic students, so without lectures or even many people, it was a fairly mellow start to my exchange. It was just a nice, relaxing wait before the International Orientation talk began the semester.hange. It was just a nice, relaxing wait before the International Orientation talk began the semester.

Too Much of a Good Thing

I could be wrong, but I feel like Assassin’s Creed was the first game to start this unfortunate trend in mainstream gaming where a publisher will decide to make something a “franchise” before the first game has even been made. It’s why a critical and commercial flop like Homefront is getting a big budget sequel, and the overwhelming feeling towards Watch Dogs was that at least the next game in the franchise would probably be less rubbish. Despite being oft-maligned critically, the original Assassin’s Creed was seemingly planned to be a franchise and later installments did manage to fix many of the problems the first game had.

I quite liked the first Creed even in the face of near-universal scorn, and perhaps that’s why it’s one of the few franchises where I wanted to play the sequels. Despite generally being considered the better game, I was a little disappointed with Assassin’s Creed 2. The main criticism that Creed 1 faced was that it was repetitive: with comparatively small environments and only a handful of assassination missions, much of the game was centred around repeating tasks to gather intelligence about your next target. You’d sit on a bench listening in on people’s conversations, interrogate someone in the know or pay off informants by doing them favours, and you’d do all of these things dozens of times.

Using this information you’d find your target, discover guard patrols and potential escape routes and stitch everything together into one smooth in-and-out assassination. The sequel, alternatively, was so full of potential targets that there was no time for intel, instead relying on visually impressive set-pieces to make up for the lack of intelligent or engaging gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed 2, but the original game had a tight focus, it knew exactly what it wanted to do and despite crumbling slightly under the weight of overambition it mostly achieved its goals.

The next games of the franchise was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which I liked more because despite still being a rollercoaster ride (a game that limits player agency in order to provide a tightly scripted experience) at least the game seemed more self-aware this time. If you’re going to be a rollercoaster, then at least give the player a few fun toys to play with as the scenery flies past. Being able to summon swarms of assassins to take out a particularly annoying guard was just about entertaining enough that the lack of depth never really felt like it made the game boring.

The core gameplay of running up to a dude and stabbing him remained as fun as ever, but with only one year between Creed 2 and Brotherhood I was feeling some shanking fatigue set in. When Assassin’s Creed: Revelations came out I didn’t pick it up for a long time, and when I finally did play it I only got a couple of hours in before stopping. There was nothing wrong with the game, nothing about it that made it less fun than the previous games except that, well, it was doing the same thing. Assassin’s Creed 3 was supposedly a bit of a disappointment, but I’ve heard good things about 4. However I’m almost certainly never going to play those or any new entries in the series.

It was amazing to me how quickly I had gone from really enjoying a core set of mechanics to being utterly sick of them, and this is one of the problems with franchises. Since you don’t want to alienate people who liked the previous games, they almost never are willing to change the core gameplay, so they are stuck with adding more features and making the whole thing bigger and more unwieldy, as happened with Assassin’s Creed 2 versus the original, or change essentially nothing, like with the Modern Warfare series.

This is not a problem unique to games. When I was at university I started reading through all the Discworld novels in order, and despite loving Terry Pratchett’s writing I had to stop after Sourcery, the fifth book. I guess ultimately the solution is just, if you don’t like having the same experiences over and over again then buy different books and buy different games. It’s just a bit of a shame when you’re dumping out a large cross-game narrative that you’re actually quite invested in for reasons other than the narrative itself. Something like Mass Effect kept me interested enough over three games that I never got tired of it, perhaps by making its combat mechanics relatively sedate and unobtrusive, and I got to see the end of my own Shepard’s trilogy.

Maybe that should be the new rule of thumb, if you’re not going to make any significant alterations to the core experience then your story can’t be told over more than three games. Better yet, maybe make a lot more games which are just self contained stories, rather than stretching out the narrative to intentionally try and make players of the first games continue with the series. Otherwise, even the best beginnings will eventually turn into gaming’s equivalent of the Transformers movies.

Language

As a child I could recite to you the names of all one-hundred-and-fifty-one Pokémon, in order, from memory. While that knowledge has mostly been replaced with useless information such as what the capital of Cyprus is and how to play Stairway to Heaven on the ukulele, even today I could probably score pretty high on a flash who’s-that-Pokémon quiz despite not really having thought about Pocket Monsters in a decade. Right now I can remember reams of rules about the systems of games like XCOM, Dark Souls or the Settlers of Catan without ever having to look them up, and I have no issue recalling the exact series of steps needed to get into hell in Spelunky. This couldn’t be further from extraordinary.

I have a fairly short attention span. The rules to cricket have been explained to me any number of times and I still can’t reliably remember how many balls are in an over. I’ve begun learning a foreign language more than once but usually stopped at around the time I’ve had to memorize grammar. The main writing practice I get is that of scrawling everything I need to remember down before I forget it. Because I probably will forget it, whatever “it” is.

But for anybody playing a good game, even me, being able to remember often complicated information about systems, rules and controls is a non-issue. The barrier to learning something is more often than not our own disinterest in what we’re being told, but games have the amazing ability of making us interested, and can teach us things in a nice, controlled manner that doesn’t overwhelm (even in games like Spelunky which presents almost no information within the game explicitly). We quickly memorize rules, such as the card combinations in Catan, and words such as the names of Pokémon, or spells in Persona, and we have fun doing so.

This is the reason that I’ve always thought that there must be some ingenious solution to learning a foreign language involving games. Most “gameifications” of language learning are little more than digital clones of flash cards and pop quizzes, which I find about as effective at helping you learn a language as being beaten over the head with a national food product. I previously mentioned Persona, where many of the spell names are derived from words from various languages, creating a vocabulary all its own that players quickly pick up. “Agi” means fire, “Bufu” means ice, “Ma” means more, “Dyne” means a lot more. So Agi is a fire spell, Mabufu is a strong ice spell, and Maragidyne is a very strong fire spell.

What Persona does is teach you a simple language, and it uses no more complicated a trick to do so than making the player want to know what his or her spells do at a glance. A game that tries to do this with a real language could be an extraordinary teaching tool, especially for the chronically distracted such as me. I’m moving from my cozy home in the English Midlands to a cold student flat in Copenhagen next month, where I’ll be living on and off for the next two years. Even though everybody in Denmark speaks English, often better than the average English person, I’m planning on taking this opportunity to learn a language while immersed in it and hopefully become fairly good at Danish before the end of my degree.

Much like being in a physical location, games can immerse you in a world of specific cultures and laws. As an ignorant Englishman who knows about two words of French and about four words of Dutch, I’m not really the person to be able to design a game that could fully take advantage of its ability to teach a language. I hope someone does give it a shot though, and hey, maybe in two years I’ll be nearly fluent enough in Danish and I’ll be able to try it myself.

Jammin

They say that to get better at something you should do that thing again and again. Painting, singing, tax evasion: the skill comes in the practice. This is one of the reasons I began this blog in the bygone age of two days ago. For indie game developers, the primary form this exercise takes is of the game jam. A game jam is a short event, usually encompassing a weekend or a week but sometimes longer, in which developers create a small, generally rough game. Sometimes these games are developed by a group and sometimes by an individual, sometimes the jams are held in a physical location and sometimes they’re online, and while most do not have prizes for the top rated games some do.

After all the games have been created and submitted, your game is then played and commented on (and in some jams given a rating) by other developers. It’s an excellent way of soliciting feedback, trying out new ideas and seeing how other developers approach their work by looking at games that are raw and new. The most popular game jam is Ludum Dare, which is held every three months or so and in the main competition gives individuals forty-eight hours to create a game based around a given theme.

To date I have taken part in five Ludum Dares. Sometimes coming fairly high in the rankings and sometimes fairly low, but always learning something new about myself and about game development. Oddly, as frightening as the idea of creating an entire game in two days sounded when I began, I became so used to it that when I first took part in a week-long game jam I had no idea how to use all that time. In the end I became too ambitious and the final product suffered immensely. The more times I do longer jams the better I’ve got at using the time wisely, however, and I’ve been considering not doing any more Ludum Dares.

Forty-eight hours is more than enough time to make a game; unfortunately it is not long enough to polish one. At least not for me. A game will usually be finished in a rough state long before it is released, and a huge proportion of development is about going through the game, testing every element, and tweaking the smallest parts until they’re perfect. Things like adjusting just how many coins drop per enemy, how much things cost at the store and exactly how these things are supposed to interrelate. There’s almost an infinite number of variables in most games to alter and calibrate, and while some find this part of development tedious I really enjoy it.

I’ve always been fascinated by how seemingly tiny changes can have massive effects. For example, whether an action triggers when a button is pushed down or when the button is released can fundamentally change the “feel” of a game. Increasingly I’ve come to realise that week long game jams give you the opportunity to try things like this, to prod and poke at your game until you’re really happy with it. The last game I made for Ludum Dare I was very disappointed with, but with a few more days it could have been fantastic. However the games I made for the most recent week-long jams I’ve done, the Public Domain Jam and Fuck This Jam, I’m really proud of.

For Public Domain Jam, where you had to create a game based on stories or characters that are in the public domain, I nearly lost two days when I discovered that I was basing my game on a story that wasn’t quite out of copyright, H.G. Wells’ The Red Room. Despite this, I soldiered on, reading through a bunch of short stories to try and find one which would be suitable and eventually stumbling upon Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Just like The Red Room it was almost entirely set in a stately bedroom, which allowed me to reuse a lot of what I had already created, and it was perfect for the theme of the jam, “Paper”. In the end the game I created was better than I think The Red Room would have been, and it came top in three categories and second overall at the end of voting.

Fuck This Jam, which asked you to create a game in a genre you disliked, was a lot smoother. I decided to make an economic sim farming game in the vein of something like FarmVille, but of course in an effort to make an actually good video game I found ways to make it interesting. I ended up with a game about a sinking farm, where your land would be constantly flooding and you needed to spend most of your money on draining it. Some crops would give you a lot of cash but cause your farm to flood faster, while some were more sustainable but with far less profit. For a game like this that is entirely based around making compromising decisions, having time to tweak and balance the quite complicated economy - how much seeds cost, how long they take to grow, how much the plant sells for, how long it will survive and how much it damages the land - is of utmost importance. So being able to devote a couple of days just to playing with numbers helped make the game playable and fun.

As much as Ludum Dare has helped me become a better developer, and I would recommend it to anybody wanting to learn about game design, I’ve come to realise that I don’t operate as well under those conditions as I once thought I did. I can make games which are good as Ludum Dare games go, but rarely do make anything that months later I still want to point at and show people. Longer game jams give you the chance to make mistakes, something which is key to the creative process. Moreover they give you the ability to proofread your games, to test them and make the little changes that are the difference between an interesting game and a good game. Annoyingly devoting a week to projects like this can be difficult, what with work and university and life and all those other distractions, but if you can scrape together enough time to devote to your preferred artistic exploit and show it to the world, personally I would consider that the most worthwhile way to spend seven days.

If you’re interesting in looking at my entires into the Public Domain Jam and Fuck This Jam then you can find them on my itch.io page.

Dragon Age

Dragon Age: Origins might just have been my favourite game of all time. One hundred and twenty two hours I’ve clocked up playing it, completing it, restarting it, playing a bit as an evil character, then recently playing it through to completion again. It is a game about its world more than anything else, and the universe BioWare has sketched out for the Dragon Age franchise is an interesting one indeed. During its adventures through this world your character is faced with any number of difficult decisions, most of which will end up hurting innocents in some way or another.

I played the game originally when it came out, in November of 2009. That would have made me eighteen. As a Sixth Former with an underdeveloped attention span, Dragon Age was the first truly long games that I finished (I believe it took me around seventy hours to complete the first time round). That it managed to grip me so much when most other games I grew tired of after only a few hours of play meant it was something very special in my eyes. In my memories it quickly became shrouded in nostalgia and it rose to the top of my own personal Greatest Games Ever list.

A few months ago, being in the empty void between graduating from a Bachelor’s degree and going off to do a Masters, I decided that the time was right to play through Origins again, with the intention of taking that character through Awakening (the stand-alone expansion to Origins) and that character’s world through Dragon Age 2 in order to have a very personal save with which to import into Dragon Age: Inquisition when it comes out. You see, my original character died at the end of Origins, which meant that I couldn’t use him or his world in Awakening (at least, not without unexplainedly resurrecting him, which is something I didn’t wish to do).

Even through my rose-tinted blinkers this was one element of Origins that I found frustrating back when I was a bonny lad of eighteen. To me, my character’s world was more important than the character itself, and I would have quite happily played Awakening with a new character but preserving the planet-altering decisions my previous incarnation had made. Sadly this was not an option, and so I instead had to create a new character who existed in some strange parallel universe to my old one, where the Queen had suddenly decided to become a King and a drunken Dwarf I’d barely heard of was suddenly a really good friend of the previous story’s hero.

My new character was an Orlesian (read: French) warrior with a neckbeard. I have no idea why I gave him a neckbeard, but it was a fairly large contributing factor to me putting the game down half way through. I played Dragon Age 2 not long after it came out, but I decided to run the Playstation 3 rather than the PC version which meant there could be no save importing of any kind. This game I did manage to complete, but once again in a slightly off parallel universe to the two previous ones I had explored.

Dragon Age 2 gets a lot of criticism for its repeated levels and simplistic combat encounters, but to me it is certainly not a bad game. Indeed, thanks to its tighter plot, more varied characters and livelier tone there were many elements which I preferred to its longer, deeper predecessor. It was because of the fact that I wanted to see my own, personal story carry over from Dragon Age 2 to Inquisition that I started playing through the series again not long ago, and it surprised me what a difference four years and a lot more critical experience with video games makes.

In a world before Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Dragon Age: Origins stood tall as a game that was about choices. Making decisions which would impact large numbers of people and where there wasn’t always a black and white answer. However now being in the position of having made quite a few games of my own and comprehending the underlying mechanics better, I realised that a lot of the moments in the game where I thought that you had to make a who-lives-and-who-dies decision actually had a nonsensical third option where actually everybody wins and there are no downsides and lets all sing songs about Puff the Magic Dragon because everything’s not as dark as it first seems.

For example, and this is a very minor spoiler, there is a moment in Origins where for reasons that make sense in context you have to decide whether a mother or her child dies. Now, even though it’s technically the child that has done horrible things to do with demons and the undead and not the mother, it’s still not that difficult a choice, and the first time through the mother died to save her child. The more recent time I played the game, however, I noticed a third dialogue option that my mind had apparently glossed over all those years ago because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Basically, you’re in a situation where every night people are dying because of this demon child, and you need to stop it right now because the town won’t survive another night. You get to the demon’s lair and one of the options is “hey, let’s go on a month long road trip to the magical land of the wizards and get them to fix it”. The correct response to this would, of course, be “that’s a stupid idea because literally everyone would die”. The part of me that understands video games, however, realised that they probably wouldn’t actually make everyone die and so we went on said adventure to the enchanted country of the thaumaturge and lo the wizards did fix it and nobody had to die after all.

What bullshit.

Now, Origins is still one of my favourite games. But I have realised that it’s not as committed to being in the grey area of morality as it thinks it is. Maybe I’m a horrible person, but I like a story where there isn’t some whiter-than-white hero who is beyond reproach, a story where innocent people die when they could have been saved and sometimes bad people have to survive for the greater good. I thought Origins was this story and it turned out I was just playing it wrong, and this disappointed me greatly. Perhaps I should replay the original Mass Effect too...

The Wasteland

The dulled resplendence of the wasteland surrounding me, a gun in my hand that barely functions and enough bullets to drop two, maybe three radroaches. Fallout is the series that first exposed me to the beauty of a game that stretches nearly into infinity, one where I could choose any direction to walk in with the full knowledge that adventure would be waiting for me there, and I would have true freedom to experience it in any way I wanted. Fallout: New Vegas, specifically, was the first game where I would just load it up and walk, get lost, and then get killed by some pricks from Caesar’s Legion. I never actually finished the game, because never has a story been more about the journey than the destination than with Fallout.

Before I began to explore the ruins of the Nevada desert I had, in fact, spent well over one hundred hours playing through The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. One might think that this game should be the one given the honor of introducing me to the ideal of the unending personal story set in an unbounded impersonal world, but I don’t think it is, that came later. As with a lot of thoughts that cross my mind on a drink-hazed friday night, I didn’t fully understand why it was that Fallout was different, that Fallout managed to make me feel not like I was playing a character in a nonsensically proportioned game, but myself exploring a place as real to me as Narnia is to Aslan.

At first the setting seemed the obvious culprit. While Fallout is itself set in a fantastical world it is one grounded in concepts that seem very real to me, like guns, cars and poor customer service. Skyrim, conversely, is a world grounded in the concepts of fantasy while being set in the mundanest of worlds. Talking cats everywhere, men wearing ill-advised hats, racism. The universe of Skyrim bears more similarity to the internet than it does to Earth, and it does little within this world to make it more interesting than the sum of its clichés.

The settling, however, isn’t the biggest factor. Perhaps the stories are what lets Skyrim down, preventing it from transcending virtual reality to become something that is virtually reality. It is true that side quests in Fallout vary from a murder mystery ending in brutal vigilante justice to finding a new brain for Elvis Presley’s robot dog. Those in Skyrim, barring the occasional interesting Daedric quest involving talking dogs and Wabbajacks, usually run along the lines of murdering vampires, saving life trees and other rote heroisms.

While these elements are important, personally I think the bigger problem is the philosophy of quest design in the Elder Scrolls compared to that in Fallout. While the morality meter is oft-maligned by those who quite rightly argue that virtue is more complicated than a swingometer, it quantifies the idea that there is no thrill to being the hero when we have no other option. Some quests in the Elder Scrolls let you make a choice, and these are often the best quests, but most do not. The ones that do often offer a choice that is either amoral or black and white. The concept of choice is not one that permeates the Elder Scrolls games in the same way that it does Fallout, and freedom without choice doesn’t feel very free at all.

Games like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout often suffer from poor central questlines. This is, of course, because these games are not about one line of narrative but are instead about lots of small stories coming together to tell you who the character you are playing really is, and what his or her place in the world could be. While it is often an illusion, by being so centrally focused on choice Fallout gives you the space to be anybody you want, neither good nor evil but somewhere in between, and by doing so it gives your character a viewpoint from which to look upon their world. The Elder Scrolls, on the other hand, gives you a painting but no frame, letting you experience a world but at the mundane level of a mundane character. The times when Skyrim lets you be who you want to be are the best, but by not committing to these moments The Elder Scrolls shows itself to be content with being explored by a faceless, voiceless protagonist.