Or: what happened to Bethesda Softworks?  A mystery adventure!

When I was eleven or twelve, my best friend who still plays paintball and Left 4 Dead with me installed a DOS game on my aging 486 because—get this, dude—it has literally thousands of towns and dungeons and shit.  My first experience playing Daggerfall almost resulted in a glorious Fatality as dozens of quarts of blood fled my loins and shot straight into my cerebral cortex, or whichever part of the brain it is in sullen preteen boys who are really too intelligent to like Isaac Asmiov as much as their parents that’s responsible for really, truly believing that they’d like more than anything in the world to live in Middle Earth.

I am paralyzed by this game's ineffable charm.

Mostly this was because the first dungeon is so labyrinthine and confusing: a big mess of practically unmappable 3D space, it looks like two octopi mating from a bird’s-eye view, and represents a gleeful disregard of 2D norms and an ecstatic, if haphazard, exploration and exploitation of space that characterizes a lot of early 3D games, from Tomb Raider to Warhawk.  No tutorial popups here, and many a Daggerfall neophyte has quit the game in frustration, never to return—defeated by the legendary Privateer’s Hold.  What’s more fantastic?  There really are thousands (or maybe just hundreds, or just a couple hundred, though who am I to count?) of towns and dungeons and shit, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable, aside from the three big capital cities of the game’s twenty or so provinces.  And more fantastic than that?  Every dungeon is more mind-bogglingly complex than the first—and each is unique, though you’d never be able to tell.

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Although we typically refer to media such as books and film as passive inasmuch as their audiences do not directly impact the work, it has long been recognized that reading a story or watching a movie is to some variable extent an active engagement.  Nonetheless, truly interactive media such as videogames clearly involve a more collaborative form of participation; one might describe a packaged title as an incomplete work of art waiting for a player to come along and dynamically cocreate its final release, not unlike a written play yet in need of an acting troupe.  Appropriate language for discussing videogames is experiential—because videogames happen.  We must speak of texture and flow and tactile feedback just as often as we elaborate upon mood or symbolism, for these constitute the very form of the performance.  Unlike in a play, the basic nature of performing in one videogame is different from that in any other because each has a unique set of bodies for the actors, ways in which those bodies can move, rules about how those movements interact with the environment, and so on; each literally takes place within its own world, however great or small.

But what is the experience of playing a videogame?  Well, in Mario games, we feel momentum and its effects upon our joyful leaps, contrasted with the tight, deadly circumstances of perilous floating platforms and a veritable zoo of odd creatures that all share the common ability to end our fun with the slightest touch.  Shadow of the Colossus is at bottom about lacking control as we rely upon the navigational intelligence of our stead and clumsily flail about landscapes or up giant beasts, tripping over our feet or desperately holding on as we are tossed about.  Bionic Commando is simply defined by the inability to jump.  And when we play a role-playing or real-time strategy game, we feel the physical push and pull of navigating the user interface and menu systems while developing an indirect aesthetic awareness of the crunch of a sword blow, the indistinct bubble of a water attack, or the way in which our units interact (or don’t) with the playing field.  These visceral experiences actually take on the qualities of what would in other media be called theme, as they are both pervasive and often mirrored or paralleled by the wider game structure or narrative.

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