“Interesting blend of fantasy role-playing and fiction classes taught by Gordon Lish. Worlds collide here. My big piece of advice, if you are setting out to read this one having never played Baldur’s Gate, read a little plot synopsis and character bios first. My big struggle was keeping track of the characters and what was going on.
Okay, this isn’t my favorite of the Boss Fight Books, but that has a lot to do with me and not the book.
Confession, I played about an hour of Skyrim last night. I wouldn’t say I loved it.
Bethesda made Baldur’s Gate and then Bioware later went on to make Skyrim, which I understand to be the pinnacle of the sandbox-y, swords and sorcery games. And in a lot of ways, it was pretty cool. Of course it looks good. The only games that don’t look amazing anymore are the ones going for a cheaper look on purpose. The controls are fine, and you’re able to slide between a first and third person perspective, which I liked a lot.
But it had all these aspects I just don’t care for.
First off, these new-fangled RPG’s are in love with customizing characters. I experienced this in Mass Effect, where I decided to make the ugliest possible ugmo of all time as my main character.
If I’m being really open and honest about it, I started trying to make the guy look like me. And then it was kind of hideous, and I went with it, ending up with what I’d describe as a real-life version of Popeye after a couple decades of drinking so hard that the only thing keeping him alive was the futuristic medicine of the Mass Effect universe.
It was distracting. I didn’t realize how jarring it would be to see an ugly protagonist.
Anyway, the next thing I didn’t like so much in Skyrim, man is there a lot of picking up shit and rearranging armor and weapons and stuff.
I had this buddy who was really into World of Warcraft. He’s actually a real person, not a stand-in for me. I’m reading books about video games on the regular. I don’t have anything to hide as far as being cool.
This buddy, when I went to his (mom’s (sorry, but it’s true)) house, he was always showing me his new WoW armor. And then he would ask me questions like, “This one is slightly more powerful. But THIS one looks cooler. Which one do you think I should pick.”
Admittedly, I was worthless on that front. I just figured you’d use whatever was best. Sort of like how everyone was shitting on Marty McFly’s Barbie hoverboard. I always thought, “Fuck that! If I had a hoverboard, it could be imprinted with a picture of my naked grandmother, I’d still ride that thing around.” But I wasn’t all the way invested in the world of Warcraft, so a decision that was easy for me was difficult in the context of the game.
This buddy also described to me, in detail, a “date” he had in-game where he and another person watched the sunrise on horseback and chatted.
I don’t say these things to embarrass this buddy. What I’m saying is I understand that these games, with their dragons and their loot and their questing, they appeal to a lot of people, and appeal on a deep level I don’t always reach.
For me, I just don’t get into it. I find the characters boring, usually one of a few, stock fantasy types. The idea of a dragon isn’t all that thrilling to me. Swordfights are sort of unexciting too.
I really WISH I enjoyed it because there’s such a depth of stuff you can experience if you’re into fantasy. But I’m just not.
Oh, there’s one other thing too, which makes Skyrim and this book less fun, to be completely honest.
You make the storyline.
It’s a thing lots of games were doing for a while, and Bethesda and Bioware are both really into it. You, as the player, can kind of do whatever the hell you want within the game. The advantage, you can end up feeling a lot of player agency. The disadvantage, a lot of that agency is kind of cast off in order to zip things up at the end so that most players experience one of a few different scenarios. Also, it takes away an element of gaming I really enjoy, which is the light touch you feel from a game designer here and there.
In a game like Super Mario Bros., you can see it. You can feel the places where a designer really looked at what the game could do and said, “If Mario can jump this high, a player who is running at this spot would hit a hidden block if running at full speed. Then that block would knock the player into a pit.” It’s a cool way for a dialogue to happen between the designer and player. The player wants to sprint through the game, the designer wants to slow her down.
It’s something that happens in writing too. For example, you can use a long, complicated word to slow a reader down. You can make paragraph and line breaks to set the pace. You can vary your sentence length. Repetition. All ways that you can turn your work into a back and forth.
When a game is a total open world sandbox, I don’t get that feeling in the same way. The designers do cool things, but it’s up to you as the player to make sure you’re experiencing them.
It feels like an epic novel, but one where there’s no room for interpretation within the text. There’s no back and forth. It’s the creator’s world, you’re just walking through it.
The best parts of Skyrim, for me, would be the parts where I felt like it was a game meant to be played. That’s what I like. I don’t mind the feel of something being a game.
The best parts of this book were not the video game parts, but the parts where Bell talks about his fiction writing and the shame of writing a Dungeons & Dragons novel. I won’t elaborate because that’s the best part, and why ruin the best part?
Baldur’s Gate, like Skyrim, is so open and free, and there are so many narrative possibilities that it’s not all that interesting to hear about the story. Every turn comes with a big fat, “Now, if you didn’t do X, you won’t experience this.”
I figure this book took a couple hours to read, so I can give Skyrim the same amount of time. See what happens. But overall, just not for me.”