A couple months ago I had the
displeasure to read Tom Bissell's Extra Lives,
which ticked me off in a dozen ways but most especially regarding a
certain 2006 fantasy video game, Oblivion.
TB's feeling about this game were pretty much the same as his for
Fallout 3, GTA4,
and Metal Gear
Solid
in that it's fun and bizarrely liberating/enslaving, but the content
of the game was really about as pursuant to his thesis (how video
games are similar to cocaine or something) as the brand of sofa he
was sitting on. I want to expound this game, which was released at
the exact peak of my adolescent dissipation and so is forever
unsolvably torn between nostalgia and shame in my own head. But,
more relevantly, I'd like to submit that Oblivion
also highlights a very interesting time for the fantasy genre and my
generation's use of (/by) entertainment.
Art, I've heard, exists for two
reasons: to escape from ourselves and/or to reflect upon ourselves;
the meteorically popular and successful fantasy video games of recent
years are widely considered the former. So what are such a booming
demographic so eager to escape? The obvious answers are loneliness,
impotence, and, most powerfully I'd say, boredom. This is a genre
where the most profitable works, World of Warcraft
and EverQuest, are
centered on the concept of a dynamic world with regularly updated
content so that, unfortunately, the adventure never ends. The final
subjugation of ennui. But Oblivion
holds a special place in this dominion because it turns out to be
extremely dull.
There's
something almost fascinating about how boring Oblivion
is. Its prequel, Morrowind,
was set in a very strange place with mushroom trees, giant
invertebrates, and a uniquely awesome culture sort of like colonial
China. But Oblivion
takes place in the blandest fantasy world you could come up with.
There's bad goblins, bad demons, elven ruins, a shining but
threatened kingdom, quaint pseudo-medieval architecture, harp music,
predictable skills and attributes, cookie-cutter polytheism, and
areas named "The Imperial City" and "The Great
Forest". And unlike almost every other game before or since
(notwithstanding an extreme and unrelated experiment in Daggerfall
earlier in the series, which featured a truly vast area of playable
space even by today's standards, but where the point was a gimmick
for advertising, not immersion for players),
Oblivion's terrain was
procedurally generated rather than being built by level designers,
supposedly in pursuit of realism. But it only amplifies the surreal
ordinariness.
So what's the deal?
Is 2006 the point where gamers got so comfortable with their escape
that they no longer wanted to see it as an escape- just another
everyday sword & stroll? Did Oblivion's devs realize or
conclude that they could sell more copies by watering down the
setting and appealing to as many casual gamer dipshits as possible?
Or was it a reasonable next step in roleplaying games, in that it
offered a fairly naked, plain setting for players and modders to
project themselves onto with greater freedom?
It seems like the
popular reaction to Oblivion's setting was fairly negative,
and both its expansion and Skyrim were a response to that. Having
put in thirty hours of grinding achievements in Atom Zombie
Smasher, I've yet to try either. To be continued...
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