memoir

Memories of Morrowind

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.