Elder Scrolls III:Morrowind

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Elder Scrolls III:Morrowind

In the video game Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Softworks 2002), you control a character that initially has no identity. You fill out a questionnaire that decides your character’s class; thus, you are responsible for creating the foundation for your character’s role in the game. As you maneuver your character through this world, you continue to shape his/her identity through new experiences. Your actions and interactions with other characters in this virtual world influence and are influenced by your character’s role. There are repercussions for negative behavior. Your game play—the narrative possibilities available to you, and the ones you actually take—changes and evolves depending on how your character acts, and other characters’ expectations about how s/he will act.

In Morrowind, our character’s role in the game, and thus, the narrative paths that s/he can take, is shaped by us, his/her interactions with others in the virtual world of Morrowind, and their expectations of him/her based on the role s/he inhabits. To properly create or critique simulations like Morrowind, we must first understand the relationship between player and character, and decide the extent to which the player or the characters in the virtual world should prescribe a character’s role.

To unpack this we need to look at how literary precedents express the relationship between player and character—creator and creation—and the extent to which a creator and the society in which s/he lives prescribes the creation’s role. We also need to investigate how one’s role—and concomitantly, one’s creator and one’s society—limit our opportunities, or to put it in other terms, our personal plotlines and narrative possibi...

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