May 27, 2007
Morrowind
For nearly a month now, I’ve been playing Morrowind at almost every available minute. I just finished it for the first time a couple of days ago. I’ve never before encountered a game that scale: if you started your character walking from one end of the continent of Vvardelfell where the action takes place, I imagine it could take a literal hour before he wound up on the far side. It has dozens of cities, dungeons, hundreds of little “holes in the wall”, and probably thousands of individual people to talk to. As I said, I’ve never played a video game so big before.
Nor one as ethically nebulous. One of the key ingredients of the game is “enchanted” items, which you can find and (much more importantly) create for yourself, using a spell. There are probably 50 different varieties of spells and a near-infinite variety of ones of varying strength, duration, and area of effect. For example, I created an enchanted belt that allowed me to “Levitate” or fly continuously, which I used to get over cliffs and up to high ledges. I created another enchanted belt (which I used most of the time once I’d made it) which continuously renewed my fatigue, making me able to run and fight continuously without growing tired. I created an enchanted shield to make me stronger, so I could carry more stuff. I created an enchanted ring to make me invisible, so I could travel the land in peace and not be attacked by every minor monster wandering around. Another one to make me able to walk on water. Another one to make me able to breathe water, allowing me to stay underwater indefinitely. And a few dozen others. I hope you get the idea of how useful these items can be ... and how intoxicating it could be to be able to make your own.
The most ethically interesting issue with these enchanted items is the source of the enchantment—captured souls. You cast a spell called “Soultrap” (of course, I had a ring for this :) ) on a target monster (I don’t believe it’s possible to capture the souls of people, but I didn’t try much). If the monster is killed during the duration of the spell (not usually a problem), the monster’s soul is captured in a gem you carry. This gem can be used in combination with something else (a belt, ring, robe, sword, etc.) to create an enchanted item. In the world of the game, you are imprisoning the soul of a creature in a gem (where it will most likely go insane, as one of the books on the subject you can read in the game describes), where it will reside and do your bidding for all eternity (unless, I suppose, the item is destroyed; I’m not clear as to whether it’s possible to disenchant an item). An interesting ethical issue.
Of course, there are more interesting things. You can “summon” monsters from “Oblivion” (sort of a nebulous heaven/hell spiritual world beyond the mortal plane) to do your bidding (or, if you’re cold-blooded enough, you can summon them up with the intention of killing them for their souls). There’s the usual mix of “spells” that allow you to blast your enemies with fire, frost, electricity, or poison. Or you can harm them directly by magic, possibly stealing their life-force and using it to heal yourself. Lots of things. Did I mention the rampant grave-robbing one can engage in, plundering old tombs guarded by skeletons and wraiths for the treasures inside?
The game wraps up with a confrontation with “the devil” and a temptation to use a legendary artifact to become a god oneself or to destroy it to save the world. As I said, lots of interesting stuff.
The game was a lot of fun. There was so much to do! I had to keep a separate list of the tasks for various people I was engaged in; at any one time, I knew of ten to twenty quests, ranging from hunting down outlaws, finding lost husbands, freeing slaves, assassinating people, protecting people ... lots of things. Some were good, a lot were indifferent, a few were bad. I don’t think that I was forced to do anything particularly ethically evil in order to finish the main quest, but I did assassinate around a dozen people in the course of another series of quests. And a few things were ethically repugnant enough that I didn’t touch them—tracking down escaped slaves, for instance (though I had a short, sharp way with slavers when I met them).
All this to bring up my own wrestling with a question that’s become more and more relevant to the Western world in the past twenty years: how much is too much? On one level, none of my deeds, heroic or infamous, were really “real”—I was manipulating a computer. My imagination brought the game to life ... but not quite. Not even close, really. But more than enough to give me pause ... particularly right now, as I’ve put it down into words for this entry. My wife and I talked about it, wrestling with the issues. For her, the killer point was the soul-stealing. Once she heard of that, she was dead set against the game. Which is why, having finished it, I will not buy it, but will rather return it to the friend who lent it to me. As for me ... I don’t know. It’s a sticky issue. But, in retrospect, I’m inclined to believe that I went too far, that this game was over the line of what I ought to engage in. It’s a pity—to the best of my knowledge, there’s not another game like it. It’s not as if there’s another game I could play that’s just as good without any of the queasy stuff in it. I dunno.
