Games are a place.

I played Morrowind during the epic covid gamer days of 2020 and 2021. I played it alongside my best friend. We would stay up late at night on Xbox live talking over our lives. The world was over. In those days we didn't think about the "escapism" offered by games. It wasn't a matter of choosing what to do with life. In a way, morrowind was our life. I stayed in a one room apartment and I worked from home. I lived inside of a video game.

morrowind is as big as a world. and it is like a world. there are no "gamey" elements in the game. there are no quest markers. there is no fast travel. there is hardly even a game log. in the secret heart of this game there is something living in the code. it is alive! why can a man not live in a game! is our waking world any more real than what is presented on the screen! Triumphantly: no! man has won over the world and has remade it. in the unreality of our waking life, our dream life, we boldly now make worlds.

is an atom more real than a bit? in the core of your experience, what is truly real? we have all been hurt so many times. when you think back on your unhappiness, when you think back on your happiness, on the chances you've won and lost, the dreams you have tried to win, and when you have failed - are all these not more real than an atom? in my heart i feel nothing for the atom. I cannot see it! I cannot hope to touch it. I believe in the atom on the authority of the scientist; and in this age, we live the death of the scientist! and on my own authority I know the bit; at the least, it's closer to the world of my control than the atom! and if I am to split a bit, will a world not still end?

these thoughts ran through my mind in the thousand hour days of covid. we did not sleep, or wake. the pattern of life came to a close. I stared at a screen and talked to a voice, and I was not sure even that it belonged to my friend! and what difference would it have made? in these days I talk to the machine as much as my friend!

this game is not a game. but to play it, you cannot play a game. forget your life. why play morrowind, or a game like it, if not to live there?

day to day, people do not understand video games. spending an hour on the couch and wasting time. hiding from some unpleasant reality in life. you may as well check emails. the point of this game was to live, not to hide from life!

Why make this! What made us want to play a game like morrowind! What makes you want to visit Italy or antarctica or some far flung corner of the world, what made you want to go to the moon and stars! Dostoyevsky said man is afraid to utter a new word. but what of our conquest of this earth, the glory of seeing and knowing? is this not what Morrowind represents? the glory of conquest; of power and rise? and why not! what kept us from giving ourselves to these games? the attraction of the world outside? does this not only stand as a great critique of Games; of the gaming industry; that men have not felt comfortable giving themselves away to them? that men were not made greater by them?

I watch baseball every friday. I see the batter crack a baseball into the outfield and I feel the surge of victory in my blood. I want them to win - I want them to embody human greatness, development, steel! And in the wash of memes on the internet, considering the overwatch player, the discord kitten, the mod, the neckbeard, what was it in these figures that we disgusted? it was their weakness, their ineptitude, their inability to face the pressures of real life and their substitution of invert, placating goals. this was the thesis of one famous prisoner. it is true. it is detestable. but what of a game that asks you for greatness? what of a game, made not of bits, but of iron! a game that is not a game; a game that is a world!

this is the world of morrowind. a world of bits in which man might conquer the imagination of man. a game which offers moral improvement, which offers fire. not a game after all but a life.

this I was convinced of as I wasted away during the thousand hour days of covid. what truth it has in the broader pattern of my life, I am not sure. I feel like certain of the bounds between reality and unreality these days. I do not know what is real. I don't care. in our world, one can count on their hands the number of individuals who have true relevance to the broader reaches of human life. one works, and eats, and contacts their aquaintances and friends, and dreams. one might do all this in a video game, and be no worse for it, or yet be better for it. in this game I lost my sense of the real. I came to see the computer as a place. I came to doubt everything around me. i found freedom and despair in these thoughts. i alienated adults who mentored me. that was the price of making a world game. bethesda achieved with this title a great hope of mankind; to conquer reality and replace it with a pliable, idealized realm of information. they achieved the end of the appolonian instinct. from this place, the path forward is clear. man is obligated to build ever more real worlds.

to bring to an end what was achieved here.
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There is a tendency when dunking on Bethesda games, to criticize them from the lens of their failure to be like other RPGs- The Witcher 3 is more cinematic and refined, Baldur's Gate 3 more densely written, Fallout 1 more actually good, so on and so forth. The truth is that Bethesda games suck much more tragically and pathetically on their own terms than in comparison to other games, Todd Howard who began his career with monumental works of termite art in the end forsook the dream of the Bethesda game. The dream of the bethesda game was always to create a holodeck, a simulation for you to inhabit totally- 'Why the hell would I pick up a spoon?' someone asks, perfectly reasonably expecting game mechanics to exist for gameplay reasons, but it's just that you can pick up spoons because it's something a person is able to do. Personally I think this dream is perhaps misguided, but nevertheless they pursued it, which is admirable in its own right.

"With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
The message you receive upon killing a crucial NPC points towards the commitment towards the holodeck dream, it will continue on even if you totally fuck up, and indeed there are generally ways around the death of those crucial NPCs provided you understand the simulation.

And fear of people misunderstanding the simulation is what drove bethesda to make many crucial NPCs invulnerable in Oblivion, you never know when you're actually in a simulation or not anymore, even as the NPC AI had become much more sophisticated with schedules, likes, dislikes and habits, the places you could engage shrunk, and then even the ambitious NPC AI in subsequent games was stripped back for ever more presentable and simpler systems, to the point of Starfield doing deliberately what Morrowind had done out of technical limitations 20 years prior: 24/7 vendor NPCs with no schedules, likes or dislikes, who exist only in service of the player.
But maybe most telling of all, was that in Fallout 4 they decided that the player need a good reason to pick up a spoon.

O momento mais simbólico de toda a filosofia de design de Morrowind se apresenta logo no começo; após encontrar Caius Cosades, o mesmo te oferece alguns recursos e diz: "Vá dar uma olhada por aí e achar alguma coisa legal pra fazer; quando quiser avançar a história, me avise". Mesmo que, como Nerevarine, sejamos parte de uma grande profecia e tenhamos um papel enorme na história do jogo, esse simples momento representa como o jogo quer ser jogado do início ao fim. Não há pressa, não há nada te empurrando. Jogue no seu tempo, faça o que quiser, vá ler livros, conhecer NPCs ou fazer missões de clã, mas lembre-se que tem sempre uma ótima história te aguardando.

i will go to war for this game. im serious. is the story interesting? hell no! is the moment to moment gameplay any good at all? hell no! is it constantly sluggish? hell yes! is it simultaneously too shallow for baldurs gate fans and too deep for dragon age fans? kind of, yeah! but i love it anyway. morrowind is just so g damn charming. its a jack of all trades experience, prioritizing giving you decent freedom in how you interact with the world rather than fleshing out any specific element. but while skyrim gets lost in the sauce of its shallowness, morrowind greets you with a brace faced smile and starts showing you its rock collection, and its hotwheels cars, and its dollhouse, and its gamecube. you get it. i think the difference is that 1. morrowinds weird alien marshland is still the most interesting fantasy world ive seen this side of a controller, and 2. morrowind just feels a lot more committed to itself than skyrim ever did. skyrim wanted to be everything at once, morrowind just wants to show you its big new world and how many books it wrote about itself. the dialogue is fun in a utiliterian way, pointing you places (that it trusts you to find yourself!) and telling you things that youve probably heard 20 times before. but you wanna hear it anyway dont ya. its the kind of character centric dialogue and fate based main questline that should make you feel like a self absorbed jerk a la skyrim, but it doesnt. probably because it takes you 14 swings of your chitin spear to kill a cliff racer because you were running here even though it completely depletes your stamina bar but you had to because the walking is just SO GOD DAMN SLOW and oh my fucking god ultima underworld feels better than this please god why. sicko freakout aside, morrowind is a pretty good rpg, and a great 2004 tech demo/walking sim that takes you around one of the most charming game worlds ever made. and vivec is STILL the coolest video game city. try it out wontcha?