by Seth Powell
Context
As a child, my primary form of entertainment was through video games; I grew up with the medium. As I became a preteen, then a teenager, and finally an adult, the target audience of the medium increased as my critical appreciation of the medium grew and technology expanded what games were capable of. When I was a teenager, I sought out games released for adult audiences in the 1990s and early 2000s, due to the design sensibilities that differed from modern video game experiences. The narratives in these older games operated under a different set of standards, focusing more on evocative text descriptions as opposed to complex graphics. One of the masterpieces of this style is a game called The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It’s a cult classic in part because of how it combines the ambition and excellent writing of earlier works with the technological capacity to depict what is written. This makes it a fascinating specimen of a game, and certainly contributes to the utterly unique visual style that still stands out to this day.
Shown here is the entrance to a town and a “Silt Strider.” Initially imposing, their whale calls haunt the landscape presented. One of the most important early lessons a player can learn is that these creatures are used as public transport.
The Premise of Morrowind
Morrowind starts rather simply: the player is a recent immigrant to the titular fantasy nation, starting with nothing other than the clothes on your back. The player wanders throughout the world of Morrowind, guided only by an unfilled map, a journal, and in-universe descriptive directions from characters who tell you how to orient yourself in the world and travel to specific destinations. This feeling of exploration—of being lost somewhere wondrous and slowly learning how to orient yourself in the space, and then charting expeditions through it—is thrilling in part because of the difficulty and mundanity of the challenge. In most modern design, leaving a user feeling lost and overwhelmed is often considered a major flaw. Even within modern web design, a search and the right link can bring you literally anywhere on the internet. It is within Morrowind that I first learned to enjoy being lost. The navigational puzzles of using directions and working on past experience are simple, yet incredibly satisfying to master.
Reading the Elf Bible
Morrowind is a game about navigation. The game encourages you to navigate not just through the physical world, but through the philosophies that govern the factions and characters. On a whim, I decided to enter a building just outside one of the early towns that a player can visit.
Walking into the building, I recognized from the architecture that this was one of the various temples arranged throughout the land; although, this one was for the living rather than the dead. Through examining tombs, I had discovered that this was built by the native people of this land (Elves referred to as Dunmer), but this temple was built for a different purpose than the ancestral tombs found previously across the island. Speaking to the head cleric, it was here that I began to explore the dialogue system.
As shown here, the dialogue system is arranged in a relatively novel way. The speaker’s dialogue is presented as a computer query, and you can either select blue text in their response or ask about any topic you have heard before, which is listed at the right side of the dialogue. It also shows special options, including asking for training and accessing the persuasion menu, where one can use a variety of measures to influence the character you are speaking to.
In this specific instance, I had my character ask about joining their temple and their religion’s doctrine. The religion worships three living gods you can meet throughout the game, referred to collectively as The Tribunal, or as ALMSIVI in the Dunmers’ native language. Each instance of learning the meaning of Dunmer words is an evocative moment in worldbuilding. And then, when I clicked accept, something that had never happened to me in a video game occurred.
I was given a book and asked to read it. It was a catalogue of shrines that pilgrims of this fantasy religion travel to, with textual descriptions explaining the scriptural reason why they are considered holy and how to properly pay respects to that specific shrine. The book also had contextual information on some of the major conflicts facing the church, such as the battle between spiritual tradition and commercialization of their faith in the face of cultural imperialism.
It was quite a unique experience, and one that will always stick with me as something that made this game special. Additionally, this book is only one of many by the faith. If the player diligently seeks them out, one can find the thirty-six* volume bible of the Tribunal, which at first is nothing but a series of increasingly absurd events, but as you progress through the game, you learn the vocabulary of the setting and the grand conflicts that left the world in the place it is when you, the player, enter it. You can piece together the metaphors, revealing a dramatic tale of betrayal, a confession to a grisly murder, and asking what it even means to be a divine figure.
*One of the head writers later made a short story that was a spiritual successor to the themes talked upon in Morrowind, and hid a link to that short story in a Thirty-Seventh Sermon, which was included into the canon in a future release in the same game series.
Retrospective
The experience of exploring Morrowind was both physically and culturally fundamental to how I see the internet today, as those kinds of exploration and navigation were remarkably reflective of my early experience navigating virtual spaces. Being dumped into a landscape with no context, and slowly building up the skills to navigate the space physically, only to learn that one must learn to navigate the space ideologically and eventually philosophically remains one of the most fundamental moments of exploring virtual worlds for me personally. While I learned how to explore the internet in a surface way, the experience of playing Morrowind (alongside playing Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition by searching online guides and esoteric books that only exist through fan preservation sites) taught me how to explore the internet, how to get lost and enjoy the experience, and how to process and understand the information sent my way. It also presented an interesting world and fascinating characters that stood above other examples of writing in the medium at the time—not in spite of its eccentricities in presentation, but because of them. When I recommend Morrowind to others now, people usually find it impenetrable, since they are unfamiliar with the nonstandard design by which players interact with the world. To some degree this is understandable; it’s an old game known for being weird at the time of its release, with much more standardized sequels. But the value of playing Morrowind lies precisely in these design decisions, and these designs are partly why the game has aged so well. A weird and esoteric design for controls and dialogue strengthens the game’s weird atmosphere and esoteric setting. As you come to understand how to navigate these spaces, you come to understand the game’s world.