Nerding Day: Skyrim Personality Flaws

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Whatever else Skyrim is -- a broken mess, a Freshman C- allegory about nationalism, an unending cash grab that will somehow still be tricking our grandchildren out of $20 even after the collapse, when all games are played on a water bandit and all controllers are knives -- you have to admit that Skyrim is an incredibly dense world. It kind of sucks to play, but it’s a pretty solid fantasy life simulator. And hey, you know what’s better than a shitty, non-fantasy life? Yeah. You can get very lost in it for a very long time, and it is very bad news for those of us who might be terrible assholes and still kind of in denial about it. Because Skyrim has forced me to face some dark truths about myself.

After watching me play Skyrim for a few minutes my wife asked one simple and damning question: "What must the computer think of you?"

This is my playstyle: "Cave! Wait, path? Path! Oh my god, house?! Wait - fuck - butterfly! That is it. Oh that is it. That’s my afternoon: Let’s see where that butterfly goes!”

I play Skyrim like one of those Family Circus cartoon maps, if every once in a while little Billy fired an arrow into the back of somebody's head to steal their boots. The only consistent theme linking my actions together is that none of them, not a one, are the least bit exciting.

If you’d come up to me fifteen years ago and said, “I’ve designed a game about butterfly catching and leatherwork, would you mind playing a bit and giving me some feedback? I can of course compensate for your ti-”

I would have spat in your eye and thrown it in the sewer, then harvested your tears to sell to a Chinese herbalist.

And now that’s every game! Skyrim didn’t invent crafting systems, but fuckin’ everything in the world had them afterward. And while I hate them now and will not touch them, I’m not too proud to admit I lost years of my life green-sourcing frog eyes before I got to this point.

Skyrim wants me to go to the city and talk to the mayor about dragons.

OK.

That's kind of the point of the game: Let's get to the bottom of this dragon business.

And yet as soon as I'm told to go somewhere, it becomes direly important that I do not. Like all shitty children, I'm mostly just doing it to see where the limits are. Are you going to let me walk all the way to that mountain in the distance, Skyrim, or force me back to the quest with some bullshit invisible walls?

Am I supposed to save this beautiful maiden, Skyrim? All right. Is it cool if I just ... don't?

Oh, you want me to fight the usurper, Skyrim? Sure thing, but can I buy a house and spend hours arranging the books first?

Unfortunately, Skyrim's answer to every one of those questions is, "Yeah. Absolutely. Go ahead and do all of those things for as long as you want."

And it sucks.

Listen: I want to go save that damsel, fight that usurper and murder the shit out of that dragon. Like even if it’s nice and tries to talk to me -- I’ll kill that fucking dragon and sell its bones for coins I’ll spend on iron to forge 840 daggers that I’ll throw in the trash.

I want to do that major game shit. It looks way more fun than introducing the Dewey Decimal system to Whiterun. But you need to force me over there first, because I'm just not going to do it otherwise. This terrible compulsion to scout out every single other option before the main one is probably a leftover impulse from older RPGs, where areas and inactivities became inaccessible after you left them. That's no longer the case with modern games -- most let you visit and revisit any area at any point, explore at your leisure. But I was taught wrong too young, and now I'll harvest every fucking cabbage in this field before I so much as glance at the dragon burning down the village and every therapist thinks I’m mocking them when I call about it.

Skyrim, like all Bethesda games, has its fair share of glitches. Also its unfair share of glitches. And like six other games’ shares of glitches. Listen: When you're programming a virtual world where thousands of individual elements interact under a potentially infinite variety of scenarios, some problems will pop up. And when you’re doing all that while also being Bethesda, those problems will pop up at the wagon scene and expand your face to the horizon before bricking your console, your TV, and an entire room of your house. Not kidding. I once lost a den to Oblivion because I dropped too many cheese wheels.

And you know what? I kind of love it. Glitches are hilarious. I’ve never had a better time with a game than when a women ran up to me like a mountain lion in Red Dead Redemption, or when a giant slammed me in Skyrim and sent me rocketing into the sky so I could explain to the moon people what happens when you get too close to his fuckin’ mammoth.

Look how magnanimous I’m being about the quality of my games!

That shit ends the second a glitch stops being funny.

On my very first playthrough I lost my very first companion and could never get another. I don’t mean he died - I mean he was lost. Like, to reality. I know Sven sucks and all, but he deserved to go out better than he did: Clipping through the floor of a mountain cave in the middle of a fight with a giant spider. He just slipped through the cracks of the game and I guess went all Tron, crawling around my motherboard and shit. I hope that useless Swedish doofus became the savior of the Programs because he did nothing while I had him and then I never had another.

I didn’t even know that was broken! I mean, I knew Sven wasn’t programmed to floop through a mountain and fuck off into Neverland, but I did not know I was supposed to get other companions. I thought it was Sven or bust. I couldn’t recruit the others. There were a lot of awkward moments where it seemed like somebody was supposed to do something aside from standing there looking at me like an asshole, but to be fair, I just assumed I was being an asshole and left.

I didn’t do a single thing in Skyrim in the proper order. I was constantly showing up to some dude's castle that I've never seen before, only to hand over a mystical item that I'd mentally scratched off as garbage hours ago, and then sit and listen to the story be retroactively explained to me.

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