Slightly OT: I think the 'simulation' aspect of TES goes even further than content- it is formal. I find myself thinking a lot about the use of narrative in games, and one of the things that has occured to me is that TES, because of its mechanics (open and increasingly 'radiant' world), has a strong streak of something like realism or naturalism, in a literary sense- meaning that there are chains of causality which the player can discover, which are not arbitrary, and which help to define the world. So for example, so-and-so is a skooma smuggler because he can be seen to smuggle skooma, if one cares to follow him around, and not because he occupies some formal or metaphysical category- and he exists and smuggles skooma regardless of whether anyone decides he is relevant. Or even: Dagoth Ur is the result of a complex series of historical events, whose meaning and veracity are up to you to decide, and his cultists are out there if you care to look. In other words, at a very basic level, the game tends (increasingly, if 'radiant story' is half of what it could be) to encourage the view that its world is a system that operates according to laws which can be understood.

[edit: I should have added: I agree there is also some poesy stuff, though it seems to operate on a different level. Though they may not always be contradictory tendencies: Nirn is indeed a 'thou', in its dream-like mythical moments, but I think it is useful imagine it as some kind of quasi-gnostic dialectic, ala Hegel or the theologian Boehme: if reality is the dream of the enantiomorph or what-have-you, the contradictions inherhent in that primal unity have multiplied and become ever more realised, to the point that they have become a complex, objective reality whose inhabitants/aspects can only dimly grasp its previous nature by way of metaphor.]

Compare this to the fomalism that seems to inform, say, a Bioware game, where the player is basically told 'so-and-so is a villain and he killed your dog, go get him', and literally every character and event is a plot device, in the formal sense that they exist to steer the story. Bethesda's worlds seem to contain their own stories (though not entirely, obviously), while Bioware's worlds are often quite arbitrary.


Back on-topic: I think the suggestion that the lack of verbalised spells was probably due to constraints on voice-acting or not wanting to annoy the player (or perhaps even because no-one thought of it) is probably correct. However, from a lore perspecitve, I think an explanation that conforms to our experience of non-verbal spellcasing and non-silencing 'silence' is preferable.

Your comparison of Bethesda's games and Bioware's really hit the nail on the head with regards to giving a concise reason that justifies Bethesda's approach to world building as a whole. Radiant AI as an example providing multiple parallel story telling of every npc within their worlds. And yeah I got you the first time :thumbsup: , I think some of the people didn't get you the first time because it's probably something that they've taken as a given subconsciously but that they hadn't really examined on a conscious level.

I'm sorry my post was difficult to understand. What I was trying to get at, was this: If Nirn is only subjective, the dream of some kind of original deity (the thing before Anuiel and Sithis, who were before Akatosh and Lorkhan- I am not the best person to explain this argument, so let's take this as given for now), how do we reconcile this with our experience of Tamriel as an objective reality? When my CoC wandered the world, he seemed to experience a reality that was quite coherent and ordered, regardless of what some of the lore books might suggest.

My explanation is: instead of thinking of reality as a 'dream' in the sense of projection from some hidden mind, imagine that it _is_ the mind. If you read the http://www.imperial-library.info/content/morrowind-monomyth, you'll see that mythical universe prior to creation was a little bit restless and disordered- the dreamer's mind couldn't make itself up, and was starting to fragment into ideas that disaggreed. So: the original mind, the dreamer, contained contradictions from the very beginning. Now, imagine that this dreamer is thinking in at least four dimensions, all the time, and can think an unlimited amount of complexity, over an unlimited amount of time. What happens when the thoughts of the mind conflict with each other is that they change or fragment, until, over time, you have an incredibly diverse universe which functions according to its own logic- there _is_ an objective reality, with its own physical laws, but these are by-products of the dreamer's attempt to work itself out.

Hopefully this doesn't make things worse.

To get back to the original question (:P), I think the book is pretty clear that Silence stops people from speaking. As far as the devs of Morrowind were probably concerned, that's how that spell worked.

As for being able to speak to NPCs, like others have said, you're also able to talk to NPCs whilst on fire, or inundated with Noise. It's not a meaningful thing.

But for the purposes of a fanfic, you can really take it however you want - the world's playing by your rules for the timebeing. But if you're playing by the official Morrowind rulebook, then it means 'you can't talk', although the exact mechanics are clearly somewhat obscure.

I don't think any of us are entirely certain until one of the devs from Bethesda comes right out and blatantly says "Silence functions by doing this, this and this only." That's why I cannot wait for an Ask the Devs thread to begin in the Skyrim section.