While researching a game-related matter, I somehow stumbled upon this http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/martin. Find it quite interesting. Thought I'd link it before it slips my mind. I'll say no more as I've admittedly not yet read the article in its entirety. (It's rather lengthy.)

-Decrepit-

I think this is right on the money. It always bugs me that player dialogue in Oblivion is so completely limited. Multiple choices are rare, pretty much limited to a few meaningless options during character generation dungeon quest. Often the single dialogue choice you're given can mean your character has to say something that you, the player, would never invisage them saying. For example, why would my anti-heroic self-interested characters care about some NPC's safety? Is a Dark Brotherhood assassin really going to say "No, it's too dangerous! I'll go instead!".

As a RPG, this is the main area where Oblivion falls down badly IMHO. Morrowind wasn't much better here either but at least it had mostly very neutral responses. Still, I can get by in Oblivion with mental airbrushing or whatever, just ignoring what the words on the screen say, but that does cut into immersion a lot.


The author has an interesting take on how the landscape seems so awe-inspiring at first but then that fades over time. For me I never lost that sense of vastness. I know that, although they aren't in the game, there are many distant lands beyond the edge mountains - the jungles and forests of Valenwood, the tundra of Skyrim, the deserts and ports of Hammerfell, the exotic far East of Morrowind, etc. Not to mention all the crazy lore on metaphysics and stuff. Still, this is all subjective of course, so I don't argue with the author's own experience.

I agree with these passages:

"One way in which the seemingly infinite expanse of Tamriel is undermined is through the game environment’s borders. The moments when we come up against the limits of the world are jarring, running counter to the prevailing spatial aesthetic of games that strive for the illusion of boundlessness."

"On my map I see I am at the border of Tamriel and a mountain rises up before me. The fact that I cannot scale this mountain is not sublime, it is a more or less cheap way of limiting my progress, and it is easily recognized as such. It does not fill me with wonder at what lies beyond but is the sign of the game’s finitude. I know when I hit an invisible wall that beyond that mountain is - nothing. The world I am in is signalled by these mountains as a thing encompassed and finite. The restraint that this involves is, following Addison, 'hateful.'"

"Once we have put in enough hours to have reached the game’s final cut-scene we have encountered the invisible walls of the oceans and mountains - Tamriel is bounded and we have seen the boundaries. We have noted the repetitions involved in the design of dungeons. The minor cities have been comprehended as uniform content - guilds, shops, residences, cathedral and castle - with variations in arrangement and architecture. The plains of Oblivion have been understood as a set of half a dozen repeating worlds. In short, the awesome breadth of Tamriel has been transformed over the course of the game to a set of discrete, manageable spaces. Unlike in comparable epic films, in which each landscape shot presents as the sublime, once the player is allowed to walk the fields - and outside the sublimely framed shot - the sense of grandeur can no longer be sustained, or at least it can only be sustained fitfully."

While I agree with this, I have to say the author wastes many words to tell us virtually nothing we do not already know. However, I do not agree with this:

"The world stretches as far as the eye can see - and further - in all directions. The prospect, in both senses of the word, is exciting but at the same time unnerving. This unnerving feeling is not only based on the shot’s ability to point to an infinite vastness at which our imagination balks."

Dude, my imagination never "balked" at the apparent infinite vastness of Tamriel.

Overall, my opinion is this: this article is second-rate pseudo-intellectual b******t. Like most academic papers, it is not particularly well-written. Here is an example of a typical non-sequiter in this author's writing: "What is it about the landscape in Oblivion that makes it such a compelling dramatic force? A common element in most of the game’s reviews was praise of the landscape."

If the writer (not you) had bothered playing earlier ES games, they would have realized this was a shared characteristic. In fact, it's true in general of RPGs. Tree-based dialog just isn't something they choose to concentrate upon--and it may not be something the programmers, who tend to focus on "stuff" rather than people, really can relate to. Or believe their customers can relate to. I'd rather have a group of merchants who responded individually to me with many random comments and a gradually building recognition of my character-persona, but most people I'm sure would rather have 50+ new items to glory in. And the time commitment becomes much greater if you get into all sorts of content that can stretch out and affect other NPCs, as well.

Parenthetically, I once created a very elaborate merchant in an MMORPG I was employed at for a few years. He didn't have much to sell, but I wanted to make him lifelike. The sheer amount of scripting required for just a few verbal exchanges with players took several pages.

Interesting that the article says Tolkien is the closes literary reference to Tamriel, I always thought Elder Scrolls 3 and 4 were more closely comparable to Forgotten Realms/DnD as they're both a high fantasy set on another world (although those wouldn't exist without Tolkien) while Elder Scrolls 5 reminds me of a more low fantasy universe like the one cthulu/conan the barbarian co-inhabit.

I kind of liked the way dialog trees were handled in Oblivion those branching multi-ending things are such a pain for the continuation of the story like 5/6th of it would be ret-conned in the next game. Combined with how a lot of the story is presented as you can't take everything on the word of someone because what they are saying is from their perspective rather than an actual fact so you have to kind of peice together your own conclusion from stuff you witness for yourself as the story progresses, if what you see happen gets ret-conned it would be a mess trying to understand any of the finer details.

For example the Imperial/Stormcloaks thing in Skyrim eventually as story canon if the timeline advances and they don't go back in time either one side wins or neither wins, thus negating everything meaningful the player thought they did for either faction.

Not that I want to learn everything there is to know, a lot of the strings get tied up as the games advance I'd rather have lose strings than ret-conned experiences.

This is the first academic paper I have seen on any game and as such I found it both entertaining and enlightening.

The authors emphasis on landscape as a key element reflects my own thoughts about the game. What I have never before recognized was the dilemma of the pastoral setting (towns) caught between wilderness on one side and industrialization (Oblivion Gates) on the other. That dilemma played a significant part in the way each of my characters developed over time. Having this one aspect clarified has already got me seeing new possibilities for my long term character and some potential fun side characters.

Anyway, regarding the paper, I liked it.

good lord this is heady stuff.

I also found the article interesting and enlightening. I mentioned in my very first post on this forum that Oblivion was one of the few games that I felt was worthy of such an academic anolysis. My personal feeling is that it has the most robust balance of the forces of good and evil that I have experienced in a video game, for those who choose to pursue it on that level. I have never anolyzed it as granularly as comparing the levels of loot available in the planes of Oblivion versus Cyrodil, but the argument has merit. For all of the acknowledged advances in technology that Skyrim has, it is not nearly as "deep", or "well conceived" a game as Oblivion. In my mind, this article attempts to anolyze what I have always considered "deep", and "well conceived" in Oblivion.

too... much... reading

Was a good read, and I can see where hes coming from in alot of areas. Do I agree with everything in the peper? Nah, but its opionionated amd im not gonna try to devalue an interesting paper. He did a fantastic job.

Agreed, I only skimmed through it. Too heavy for me and waaaay too dissecting. C′mon bro, it′s just a game