I can’t remember when I first played Morrowind. I think I was living in the UK at the time, and I was thrilled that I had managed to hack my work laptop to play something that I was actually interested in. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the right way to go about things – certainly not something I’d tell young teachers to do.
Having said that, the thing that immediately struck me was the sheer scale and scope of the game. For me, the notion of an open world game was not exactly new – I had played many of the UItima games as a kid – but somehow Morrison seemed to be much bigger even than that. I think perhaps the first person nature of the game made it seem like that. And, of course, there was the crafting elements that were involved – collecting materials and making things – where you could turn things from your environment into new items, and so much of the world was harvestable – was revelatory.
And then, of course, there were the myriad different groups to join – guilds and secret societies, and the random encounters, all the while there’s a main quest lurking along in the background. I think it was the size and scale – the possibility of the game that defeated me in the end. I didn’t finish it the first time I played it – not because I couldn’t – but because I guess I lost interest.
Recently, I picked up Morrowind again, and running Windows 10 on an old MacBook Pro (don’t ask – but it worked quite well) – I played it all the way through. And then I picked up Oblivion and played that too, as well as Skyrim. Well, why not? For a long time, I’ve been a believer that video games are worth considering as cultural artifacts and even works of art, in much the same way we might argue literature or films are. Perhaps more like films, because there are often dozens of people working on each game like Skyrim. But they’re also ongoing cultural artifacts: long after the game has been released, people are hard at work modifying or ‘modding’ the game – providing new elements and ideas, changing the look, feel and playability of the game – often in creative and inspiring ways.