I don’t think it’s any great secret that I am absolutely terrible at finishing things. To be honest it’s often a wonder that I get anything, including these posts, done at all. This failing of mine is present not only in my real life, but also in how I play video games. I have a huge backlog of games that I never seem to get around to finishing. This backlog is only outnumbered by the pile of games I haven’t even gotten around to playing at all. I often tell myself that the next game I pick up will be one of these unfinished gems, but it never seems to work out that way. For various reasons I am wont to believe that this is all Steam’s fault, but I digress. Chief among the games that I have started and have yet to finish is Skyrim.
The fact that I have yet to finish Skyrim is in no way a slight against the game itself. In some ways I think it’s probably a compliment. Thanks to procedurally generated content the game is never really over, so really, not being able to finish seems to be a feature. The world of Skyrim is massive and engrossing, populated with all manner of different creatures living in all manner of different places. It is so large that it takes quite a lot of work to fully explore the whole of it. I am slightly embarrassed to say that I have now spent some 150 hours, across two playthroughs in the world of Skyrim. I’m not embarrassed because I’ve spent so much time, but rather because in all that time I never seem to have found my way to the end. Even if I were to take say, completing the main storyline, as an arbitrary end point, I wouldn’t be able to say that I’ve made it that far. In fact, probably not even close.
This isn’t to say that I haven’t tried. Even on the second playthrough, which I started deliberately with the goal of “finishing” in mind, I have failed miserably. In these Elder Scrolls games (Skyrim is the 5th) it always unfolds in about the same way. I load up the game, generate a character, fight my way through the opening sequence, pick a side, and head off to the first town down the road. It is at this early juncture that everything then goes irrevocably awry. The first time it was a rabbit. He zipped across the road in front of me and off into the woods so of course I followed. I thought maybe I could catch him and cook him into something yummy. I lost the rabbit, but found a hut with a crazy witch in it. After that I saw a half submerged ruin, then some town with a weird talking dog, and the next thing I know it was hours later and I’m halfway across the world. My quest log began to fill faster than I could empty it and I never seemed to make it back on track. Digressions piled upon digressions and soon the fate one angry young orphan boy became more important than the fate of nations, or the rampaging of fire breathing uber lizards. The second time played I at least made it to the second town before wanderlust overwhelmed me and that modicum of discipline took pretty much everything I had.
I saw an interview with one of the developers once when the game was still being made and he was talking about how they designed much of this digression inducing content deliberately. He talked about creating vistas in the distance to draw a player in, a half seen ruined tower silhouetted against the night sky, or a shipwreck just poking up out of the ice. New content always lingering at the edge of the player’s vision. Exploration is such that the first time you travel to a place you must do so on foot across open country. In the journey from point a to point b for one quest, you may stumble across a dozen more. Not to mention at least as many points of interest, useful resources, or fierce beasts. There is even the odd drunken minstrel or mead salesman.
Part of the reason that games like Skyrim are so successful is that they offer a world that is much like our own, except with dragons. Characters have stories (even if the rate of career ending knee injuries seems rather high), places have depth, and the unexpected is always around the corner. You begin the game with an idea, whether it be the faction you want to join or the “class” you want to play, but often the adventure winds up changing everything you had planned. Digressions become more important than the main quests, and the journey more important than the end goal. It’s just like all that hokey (because it’s true) stuff they tell you every time you graduate from school.
Part of the reason I think I may have trouble finishing these kinds of games is that they do start to become a little like real life. My Skyrim character spends half his time either decorating his house(s) or searching up and down for that last damn <insert crafting ingredient>. After that there is all the shopping to be done and the literally tons of loot to be sorted and sold. Sometime before lunch he has to get to the crafting, in this case blacksmithing and at some point he also has to check up on his adopted child. Not the psycho orphan boy, but another war torn refugee. Then it’s off to work. The first 10 abandoned ruins are alright, but after that it can become a bit of a routine and the local Lord (your boss) is always breathing down your neck. To make matters worse, if you don’t get out there and learn some new dragon shouts, the creepy cult you joined won’t let you get ahead. Don’t even get me started on the companions. They’re supposed to be helpful but they just fall down the mountainside if you don’t keep an eye on them. When you finally do get home for some R&R either your wife starts going on about how you never spend time with her anymore or some fracking dragon comes by and lights the town on fire. And of course you have to go and take care of that. The whole time you’re just praying for an arrow to the knee so you can retire. I find that the stress starts to get to me and I need another game to distract me from the rigours of Skyrim.
Or maybe it’s just that I never seem to finish things. I guess I’m naturally restless and I always have been. They used to blame it on that ever present bogeyman of ADHD (do not get me started) but I think its probably just a mild case of the humans. One of my favourite novels is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne and if you ever find yourself with some free time I highly reccomend it. In it, Tristam Shandy attepmts to tell the reader of his life, but spends so much time being distracted by digressions that he doesn’t get much past the age of six. In doing so he somewho manages to explain everything that is important. This, to me, is a lot like playing Skyrim. I’m not sure the end is all that important really and besides I think for a lot of us it’s normal to like the beginnings of things more than the endings anyway. Skyrim is a good enough game and it’s world is engrossing enough that I don’t feel at all short changed not having made it to “the end.” I’m having enough fun with the talking dogs and drunken minstrels. It also gives me something to do should I ever need it and something to brag about it when I fell like being a hipster douche-bag.
D.
