In the boardgame world, there are a few titles that are often described (generally dismissively) as “not a game, but a pastime”. I think that’s a fair description of Skyrim. It is undeniably addictive; I have played a couple dozen hours since getting out of school Friday, and I’ll probably play another four to six today. But even though I am having “fun” playing, I am also finding it to have an essential hollowness that I can’t quite forgive it for.
Part of it is the shear breadth of the game. There are hundreds of quests, some arranged in chains, some devoted to various factions, some just one offs, some infinitely repeatable. There are also skills to level, materials to collect, dungeons to explore, dragons to slay, and money to earn. You can even get married. In short, there is enormous amount to do, and I have never been more certain of getting my sixty dollars worth from a game. The problem is that virtually all of these choice are available to you virtually all of the time, and the game gives you little reason to prefer one to another. There is a main story thread, but it is not particularly compelling, and even if it were, I think the shear volume of other demands on your time would still threaten to drown it out. And while the freedom to choose your own goals makes for a more organic play experience, it also means that no one in the world is as interested in your success as you are. I take pride in being a generally intrinsically motivated person in the real world, but I play video games so that imaginary people will tell me how awesome I am. But almost no one in Tamriel seems to care that I am this close to being leader of the Thieves’ Guild, as well as being on my way to being the Arch Mage, a werewolf mercenary, a hero of the revolution, a defender of the realm, and perhaps in my free time, the Dragonborn savior of Skyrim. Not even my wife.
The leveling system in Skyrim is also somewhat off-putting. You advance by raising skills. Period. I’ve spent an hour hunched over a virtual table mixing alchemy potions and gained three levels, then spent three hours running around completing quests without the xp bar budging a pixel. That overstates the problem a bit; most of the time completing quests does workout your skills enough to incidentally keep you moving forward at a reasonable pace. It still bugs me though. I’m sure part of the reason is that I am an unrepentant quest whore in WoW, always chasing the hit of the visible xp bar growth that comes with a turn in. But beyond the simple frustration of being in a Skinner Box with different wiring, the problem with the Skyrim system is that is separates the emotional incentives (save the girl, kill your rival, find the mystic artifact) from the numerical ones (gain xp and levels). Again, it’s a case of Skyrim asking the player to invest his accomplishments with his own significance, which is fine advice from a self-help guru, not so much from a game.
Skyrim may also be the most anti-heroic and frankly amoral heroic fantasies I’ve ever seen. It’s not that it forces you to be a bastard (though that option is available to you), it’s just that no one in the game seems to care very much if you are, and they care even less if you try to go the other way. I can’t think of anything that I’ve done in the game that I’ve been encouraged to feel heroic about; even the praise I’ve received from the Jarls for slaying dragons and bandits has been couched in terms of destiny and honor, not saving people’s lives and livelihoods. And at times the game seems to go out of it’s way to forbid a “light” approach: the abused denizens of a cruel orphanage make it clear that there is little you can do to help them, and the related story hook which seems like a clear opportunity for a moral choice offers only dark or darker. I’ve no doubt that many people will count it as a point in Skyrim‘s favor that it does not suborn artificial sunniness in its ice-covered, dragon-plagued, civil warring world. My feeling is that once you’ve taken the liberty of letting me breath fire, it’s not such a stretch to let me save some orphans.
I like Skyrim. As I say, I’m playing it a lot. The world is big and rich and involving in a way that rivals WoW, and it creates that experience without subscription fees, without server queues, and without forcing me to deal with charmers like Buttball and Shooturface. I think it is an important milestone in the evolution of world building and storytelling in single player games. But I think they missed the mark by a pretty wide margin in integrating this wonderful world into a satisfying game. Skyrim is a nice place to visit. I just wish I wanted to win there.
