An Unexpected Coincidence

There's a band called The Brothers Martin. Man. That's just . . . strange. Particular as Pandora just sort of sprang it on me when I wasn't expecting it.

Why Martin Is Awesome

I threatened, a while ago, to describe why I think Martin is a cool character. And now it's late, and I'm tired, and I need to write something. So I've compiled a list. Well, the rest of the list.

He's not annoying in combat. I mostly credit his use of ranged magic attacks for this. (If only all NPCs were so skilled.) He doesn't hit me, he doesn't get in my way, and most of all . . .

He doesn't die. Except for a couple of plot critical points, he can't. Now, sure, this makes the game easier, but it also makes it a lot less annoying, because you don't have to worry about him wandering off and getting himself into trouble. Which is good, because he wanders off to fight bandits more or less constantly.

As an added bonus, his immunity to death means that, if for some reason he ends up very angry with you, you can just knock him out. When he comes to, he'll have no memory of whatever it is you did that ticked him off. There is endless entertainment value in this phenomena.

In general, though: He does things. Granted, sometimes he does annoying things. (Dammit, Martin, I just need one point of blade to level up!) But for the most of the game, he's actually kind of useful. He tells you a lot of interesting things. He's as involved in the whole "saving the world" gig as you are. But what he does, he does without upstaging you. In a major way . . .

He helps you be cool. He's constantly coming up with crazy plans that, basically, only you can pull off. Because no one else is awesome enough. And he never doubts that you can do it. Every conversation you have with the guy reaffirms your awesomeness.

And, of course: He's kind of geeky. I'm serious. There's no other way to describe someone who's constantly coming up with bizarre schemes, covers a table with books, gets another table so he can cover it with books, and responds to you showing up with an incredibly evil artifact by saying, "You should give it to me, because it's, uh, dangerous. Yeah."

Why does this make Martin cool? Because the only people who care whether he's cool are geeks. RPG geeks. The kind of people who actually watch video game cut scenes. The kind of people who combine English major style literary analysis to video games. Even if video games are going mainstream, RPGs are still played by some pretty geeky people.

I'll probably come up with some more reasons, eventually, but those are the basic reasons why I think Martin is cool. Besides the scowling, anyway.

Arbitrary Revelations: Not Cool, Man

This suggests what might be bothering me about the Oblivion main quest ending.

The reversal comes at the end.

My intuition tells me that this is unusual. Most goal based stories--most video game stories--have a fairly reliable structure. They set the stakes, the win condition, and then they don't usual mess with it too much. They might raise the stakes, through villains or other opposition, but they usually don't make that goal totally irrelevant.

When they do, it's to make a point--it sets the other events of the story into a new light, that reveals new things. I'd list an example, but even mentioning that a movie has a reverse ending can destroy the viewing experience, because in the best one's you're not even expecting it, but it still makes perfect sense. Oedipus would be a good example, except that the audience is in on the secret from the beginning. (That's what makes it ironic, ya see.)

Oblivion's ending is not like this. It comes out of left field, is not anticipated at all, and doesn't cast any kind of new light on the existing events of the tale. It just makes the goal you thought you were working towards through the whole quest totally worthless.

The details of the reversal make it even more annoying. Basically, you find out there was a time limit on your goal, and you just blew it. Trick is, because it's a video game, you know that this "time limit" nonsense is ALL LIES. If the little number hasn't been counting down, you know it's just a cheap excuse for the game to spring it's reversal on you. No matter how fast you complete the quest, or how slowly, you're always going to show up just five minutes after you were supposed to.

It doesn't help that the NPCs act like they've known about the time limit all along. And by NPCs, I mean Martin. One of the neat things about the game is that it makes him actually useful, because he knows what's going on with all the daedra stuff. (And he's satisfyingly cryptic about just how he knows about it.) If you need to know something about the rules, how this whole "Oblivion vs. Tamriel" thing works, he tells you.

So when you suddenly learn this new rule, and he acts like it's totally obvious, but somehow never bothered to tell you about it, it's kind of irritating. Especially since, if I'd known about this rule, I probably would have picked up the pace a bit. Wouldn't have done any good, but at least I'd have known I tried.

I suppose the reason you're not informed of this secret time limit is because if you knew about it, it'd be totally obvious that it was going to come up. That's just how video games work.

However, if a plot twist is that obvious, the solution is not to withhold information from the player for no good reason. Make it some weird new thing that the bad guy's done, at the very least. Make the reason that the player doesn't have the information make sense.

Or, just don't mess with the twist ending. This is a personal quirk. I don't tend to appreciate twist endings, if they're done just for their own sake. They're usually either really obvious, or really stupid. Often, both. (Atlantis, I'm looking at you. First time I watched that movie, my brother had already seen it, so when I turned to him and said, "That guy totally goes evil and betrays them," about two minutes after the character was introduced, he got kind of weirded out.)

I'm also not sure if video games support twist endings all that well. That's another topic, though.

Bottom line: Don't totally change the rules of success for the protagonist at the last minute. Especially in a video game. It's irritating, and frustrating, and generally not a good idea. Like all "rules," in storytelling, you can break it, but only if you know what you're doing, and you have a good reason. Trying to trick the audience does not count as a good reason.

Stupid Plot Tricks

Hey, 100th post. Not bad. Naturally, it's about Oblivion.

One of my favorite little things about the Oblivion main quest is this structural switcheroo it pulls right at the beginning.

Traditionally, a story starts with some kind of setback. The protagonist starts out in some kind of minor trouble, so they can have some kind of minor achievement, which then makes you care when they experience a major setback, so then they can emerge victorious from the crushing doom. Down, up, double down, double up.

Most stories don't follow that pattern exactly, because it's a hideous oversimplification. But, generally speaking, the move out of status quo is a move downward. That lets the early part of the story be about the protagonist trying to restore the status quo, until they figure out what it is that they're actually supposed to be doing.

Following this principle, in Oblivion, things start to go bad quickly. Jauffre sends you to Kvatch to find Martin; when you arrive, Kvatch is a smoking ruin. (Which is how it will stay, nigh unto eternity. On fire. Forever.) You bring Martin safely to Jauffre; you find that Jauffre's lost the damn amulet.

Getting the amulet back drives most of the rest of the game. The funny thing is, though, is that it's not all gloom and doom. In a way, you're actually better off at that point, right after the enemy steals the amulet, than you were when you gave the amulet to Jauffre.

Because at that point, you've got Martin, and you're fairly sure that he's not going to get killed. Not without you getting killed first, anyway, and since you're a video game character (in a video game that's not Nethack) you're functionally immune to death. So you've still got one of the two dinguses you need to win the game. You have, essentially, traded the Amulet for Martin, and that means you've come out ahead.

(Assuming that the amulet is a proper artifact, in the D&D sense, and can't be destroyed. Mankar Camaron's behavior establishes this as more than idle fancy--he doesn't destroy it, even though it'd be really smart for him to do so. Thus: he can't destroy it. It does end up being destroyed, at the end, but I have a theory that it could only be destroyed in that specific way.)

For a video game, this is incredibly clever. There's an early setback to drive the rest of the action (find the dingus!) but you also have a sense of accomplishment. You've done something useful.

Information Themes

At the end of Oblivion, the Empire no longer has an Emperor, and it probably won't be getting one any time soon. There aren't even any possible heirs, so far as your character knows. They're going to have to come up with some kind of new system.

Note, however, why this is. It's not because there aren't any dragonborn. No one knows of any, but all that means is that there aren't any officially. In 433 years, no way is Martin the only illegitimate heir. There have got to be at least a handful of other people who fulfill the technical--if not the legal--requirements to be Emperor.

The significant thing is: there's no way to tell. No more Amulet of Kings, no more dragonfires, no way to be sure that someone's dragonborn. It has exactly the same effect as extinguishing the line, and it's more interesting.

It ties into the basic ideas of the Elder Scrolls world. History--reality--isn't defined by what actually happened. It's defined by what people know. It's defined by what's written down. It's defined by how you interpret it.

Just Like Batman!

So, Robin D. Laws wrote this review type thing on Casino Royale. He says that it treats Bond as a dramatic character rather than an iconic character. This is a concept that I've never formally considered; I was always sort of vaguely aware of it, but not in any specific way.

It got me to thinking. Maybe the distinction that the Oblivion main quest makes is not between main character and non-main character, as I had previously surmised, but between dramatic character and iconic character. You are an iconic character in that you embody the theme; you express it through your actions. You don't have to learn it, because you already know it.

It works in Oblivion because of the particular nature of the theme: it is not the intentions of gods but the actions of mortals that shape the world and its fate. (At least, that's the theme I picked out of it.) In a video game, that works pretty well, since as the player character you're automatically the only character with any real control over your destiny. It might not work so well if you had to embody some other principle.

NPC Design Basics

Have I mentioned that Martin is a really cool character? I could go into my reasons for this, at length, and probably will at some point. For now all I'll say is this: I was terrified that he was going to be Deckard Cain.

I swear. I was expecting some old guy, constantly giving me history lessons that I neither needed nor cared about. Instead, I got a guy who was (a) less annoying in combat than the town guard I'd just had to babysit and (b) inexplicably angry at me.

At first I thought it was just because I wasn't very good at aiming. Then I played through the scenario with a couple of characters, and discovered that, no, he's just constantly scowling through that first section.

So, I guess that's actually two basic reasons why I like Martin: Not Deckard Cain, and constant scowling. Two qualities you really can't go wrong with.

Protagonistic

If you've played through the main quest of Oblivion, and were paying very close attention, you may have noticed something odd: You aren't the main character.

Oh, sure. You look like the main character. You're the hero, right? But that's not what the main character is. The main character, roughly speaking, is the character who drives the conflict, whose evolution reveals the theme. The character whose qualities define the story.

That's not you. That's Martin.

He's the character with an arc. He's the character who figures out what the theme is. He's the character you have to pay attention to, if you want to know what the theme is. Without him, there's no story; and if he were a different kind of person, the story would be different.

It's actually a really elegant technique. If a game has you controlling the main character, it either has to take some control of that character away from you, or it has to have a really basic story. Shift the thematic focus to an NPC, and you can be whatever wacky person you want, have whatever motivation suits you, and the game can still have a coherent thematic conflict.

Plot Twists and Foreshadowing

If you've played Oblivion, or are even remotely interested in the idea, and haven't finished the main quest, you need to do that now. Then you can come back so I can annoy you by obsessing over it.

Another issue that occurred to me, as I was thinking about the main quest ending in a general way, is the foreshadowing.

Because there's this big twist. Short version: Your goal on the main quest is to reforge the boundary between Tamriel, where mortals live, and Oblivion, where Daedra live. To do that, you need the Amulet of Kings, and you need a "dragonborn," in this case Martin Septim, the illegitimate son of the Emperor. So everything you do revolves around keeping Martin from getting killed, and getting the Amulet back, because Jauffre let it get stolen.

Only it turns out, at the very end of the game, that it was all useless, nothing you did mattered, because it was too late, and now the daedra have gotten enough Oblivion portals open that Mehrunes Dagon is here and there's no way to stop him. No one ever says anything that indicates that this would even be possible. There's no mention of any kind of time limit. Sure, there's urgency, because the longer you wait the more likely it is that the bad guys will figure out some way to kill Martin, and then you're all doomed.

But there's no mention of any other kind of time limit. It's logical enough--daedra have to open a number of smaller gates before than can open a big gate, so it makes sense that if they get enough gates open, their leader can get through. However, no one tells you that if Mehrunes Dagon gets through, there's no hope of getting the barrier back in place.

The game did do a pretty good job of telegraphing that something bad was going to happen. Mostly because minor NPCs kept saying that there was no way anything could possibly go wrong. And any mention of the Mehrunes Dagon thing would have made it clear that this was going to happen, so it's understandable that the designers wouldn't mention it. On the other hand, it's not like that was the only twist, because there's still the, "Wait! We're not doomed after all!" moment that comes right after that.

Game Endings

If you're playing Oblivion, or think you ever might in the future, and haven't finished the main quest, shouldn't be reading this. You should be finishing the main quest, because it's AWESOME.

As I said yesterday, once I'd gotten over the sheer, awesome brilliance of the Oblivion ending, I started really thinking about it. It was awesome, sure, but did it really work? Could it have been better?

The first question is: does it work as a game? That's the presentation, and if the presentation doesn't work, none of it's going to work. If the game itself is bad, nothing else matters, because no one's going to play it long enough to experience the story.

Oblivion itself is a really great game, but endings have some special considerations. One is participation. Games often do the cut scene thing when they're getting across vital story-related information. This is bad. No matter how awesome a ten minute cut scene may be, it's not a game, and it shouldn't be in a game. If a story can't be explained without a ten minute cut scene, it should be a movie, not a game.

Oblivion does pretty well here. There is a cut scene, but it's really awesome, really short, and it makes sense that your character can't really do anything. It wouldn't have been nearly so awesome if it had been on a scale you could interact with. Mostly, though, what makes this work is that you're too caught up in the "wow" to be frustrated.

It's not enough to just have game play in the ending. The quality matters, too. It shouldn't be just another level. It should really feel like it meant something--and generally, that means that it should be a bit harder than the rest of the game, for the right sense of achievement. However, this can be taken too far. It shouldn't be so hard to get to the ending that the players quit caring, because they're too busy taking an ax to their controllers.

On this point, Oblivion is a bit troublesome. The final mission is to keep Martin, the other main character, alive, and this is supposed to be hard because there are Daedra invading the Imperial City, which you're currently in. However, when I played it, I basically just followed him around and let him do his thing. We were never bothered. I've heard tell from people who finished the game at a higher level that, eventually, the Daedra do become a problem, but that they're mostly attacking you, not Martin.

This isn't a huge problem, because my main focus was on the plot, and Oblivion is an easy enough game that people who really care about difficulty will have modded their games to the point where it is a challenge. But it does produce some odd thoughts, especially in the aftermath of the quest, because now whenever I meet someone their first words are usually on how awesome I was in the final battle. And I'm thinking, "I did all my saving way before that. Final battle? I mostly just watched."

It doesn't bother me that everyone's really impressed, because I did a lot of stuff before that, and it was all really awesome. It just annoys me, because I shouldn't be getting credit for all the awesome that was in the final battle. I sort of wonder if they didn't quite test that sequence properly. They may have been expecting that players would actually fight, even if they didn't have to, or that they wouldn't realize they didn't have to. I literally just ran through, and ignored the bad guys completely.

In a general way, though, the ending works. Oblivion handles its ending better than many games I've played, (if the number of games I've played qualifies as "many") and the problems didn't become obvious until I'd really started thinking about them. They're nowhere near serious enough to mar the story itself. Which I'm going to talk about tomorrow, because this foolishness has gone on long enough.

Flashbacks

How do I describe Oblivion?

It's fun. It's really, really pretty. It has just the right amount of wackiness. It's fairly accepting of my complete lack of skill. The voice acting is good. It has the Best. Road Trip. Ever.

And then there's the main quest.

I freaked out when I finished it. Kept having these flashbacks. Eyes glazed over, zoning out, thinking about that last cut-scene. My friends thought that I was crazy. Or that I'd started dating. (Which ought to give you an idea of how weird I was acting. Any wacky theory started to sound good.)

It's not like this hadn't happened before. I still have to be careful about DragonballZ stuff. But that's because it reminds me of being twelve, and how I spent the first two days of the California-Virginia move in a fugue state. Oblivion flashbacks at least make sense. The Oblivion ending is awesome.

How awesome, you say? Two hundred foot tall dragon awesome, you should say. And it's ON FIRE. Which is pretty awesome.

What I haven't decided is if it's actually good. As in, is this the best possible ending? Was it the right ending? I've been thinking about it a lot. Sure, it's awesome, but there are other issues to consider. Thematic relevance. Plausibility compared to other possible endings. Emotional resonance. Game play experience. Set up and foreshadowing.

All of which I'd like to expand on, but it's late. And this way, I have material for at least a week. So, I'm going to discuss all those things, and probably a few more I think up along the way, in future posts.

Oblivion Voices

One thing I don't like about Oblivion is the Dark Elf male voice. (Provided by Craig Sechler, who is brilliantly creepy and annoying in a good way as the Adoring Fan.) The voice acting itself is good; it just lacks the dark, grating quality that really made Dark Elves for me in Morrowind.

Except for that one minor point, though, I like the voice acting. It's good, it's interesting to listen to, the writing's good. My favorite voice in the game (excluding characters with specific voices) is the Redguard male voice, by Michael Mack. He does some of my favorite main-ish characters, Owyn and Baurus. Owyn's just cool, and Baurus is the only main quest secondary character who doesn't at some point become irritating. (I'm looking at you, Jauffre.) And I just generally find it the most interesting voice; whenever multiple races have the same rumor script, I'll typically like the Redguard version best.

Also a plus: after you finish the main quest, Redguards don't sing at you.

Fun With the TES Construction Set

The Elder Scrolls Construction set is fun to play with. I haven't actually done anything with it, but I've found some interesting things.

I went through all of Martin's dialog, and all of Jauffre's dialog, and I read the script notes. Most of it is only interesting if you're as obsessive about character motivation as I am, but some of it is just funny. Like how all of Martin's early notes include the word "bitter."

I looked through all the scripts for the main quest. Again, only really interesting to me, because I'm compulsive, but there's some entertaining stuff. Like "Mankar has left the building." And "CloudRulerMartinStudyClutterMaster.enable." Finding these is left as an exercise for the reader.

"Open Ended"

I mentioned a few days ago (in the long, rambling post that I don't expect anyone to have read) that I didn't really like Morrowind. Not when I first played it.

I plan on going back to it. Not right now, maybe not even for a while, since I'm currently playing Oblivion when I'm not busy with homework or Game Mastering. But eventually, because I keep thinking that I'd probably really like it.

My reaction to Morrowind was mostly a matter of timing. I'd just started playing Dungeons and Dragons, a game that had struck me with this overwhelming sense of rightness. I'd always wanted to play a game like D&D, even if I hadn't known about it. It was awesome.

Now, a couple of my D&D friends were serious gamers. They played Morrowind, and they talked about it a lot. It sounded cool, so I borrowed it from one of them. And I played it. And honestly, I wasn't that impressed.

Yeah, it was cool. And it was fun. But I was focusing on what it wasn't. It wasn't open-ended. You couldn't "do anything." Everyone was talking about how it was totally free-form, and you could play it however you wanted, but I was a newly converted tabletop gamer, and there is no mere computer game that can touch a tabletop game for open-endedness.

The thing is, "open ended" really isn't the point. I don't play video games because they're open ended. I don't play D&D because it's open ended. It's nice when games are somewhat open ended, when there are a lots of things to see and explore and do. But it's not a requirement, and it's not the main reason I play games.

I play games for their stories. I play games for the hero kick. I play games to be someone else. I play games because they're fun.

I don't play them because I can do anything I could think of, or even everything I can do in the real world. Because that's not the point. The point is that I can do things I normally can't, and that they're fun and interesting things.

Finish the Main Quest Now!

So . . . yesterday's post doesn't really make much sense, now that I re-read it. Ah, well. Such is the internet, the immediacy of the medium. The points are all there, it's just that I didn't string them together very well.

Today, I'd like to write about why I think the main quest in Oblivion is so cool, because I've said it is three times now, without explaining why. Unfortunately, certain persons I associate with haven't finished it, so I can't write about the ending. And I can't explain why Oblivion is so awesome without mentioning the ending, because it features heavily in the awesome quotient.

By ending, I do mean the literal ending, the last thing that happens in the quest. The entire "end" is awesome, because basically what happens is that two thirds of the way through the game it goes all epic, and it just keeps getting better. Heck--as I was digging around in the editor, I half-expected there to be a script along the lines of "begin.awesome." Wasn't there, but I did find a few other neat things, like the exact mechanism for Martin's name changes, and exactly when it happens and what triggers it.

However. The ending is Truly Awesome. I haven't decided whether or not it's a good ending or not, story wise, but it's certainly cool.

And I really can't say any more, until certain persons finish the main quest.

Writing Oblivion

Hey, 50th post. Neatness.

Okay, so I promised yesterday, that I'd explain that long, rambling, not entirely rambling post, and what it has to do with The Artful Writer.

Basically, The Artful Writer has this post on Writing Oblivion. Found it while googling Kurt Kuhlmann, who I found while I was trying to find out who wrote the main quest for Oblivion. (Short answer: he did, but probably had some committee help.) It took entirely too long, because none of the writers are credited as writers. Instead, they're credited as follows:

Quest Design was done by Brian Chapin, Kurt Kuhlmann, Alan Nanes, Mark E. Nelson, Bruce Nesmith and Emil Pagliarulo.

Additional Design was done by Erik J. Caponi and Jon Paul Duvall.

Additional Writing was done by Ted Peterson and Michael Kirkbride.

That's a direct quote from the post, and I include it here because these people need to have their names in the ether, permanently attached to their work. The more websites that mention them along with the words "Oblivion" and "writer," the better. Because their work is really, really good.

The main quest kind of floored me, in terms of how good it was, and how fun, and how interesting. It's a good story, and it works much better as a game than it ever would as a movie or a novel, just from how it's set up. It has themes. Themes! In a video game. Have I mentioned just how awesome this game is?

That's what interests me about gaming: its application as a storytelling medium. It's hard to find games that have really good stories, because that's not where the focus is, right now. It's on the graphics and the simulation and the underlying doodads that make it all work. But I think that better storytelling, that really takes advantage of what you can do in a video game, is an area where the industry really could grow.

There's a Point, But I'm Not Going to Tell You What It Is

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting. There are several things that I could blame this on: lack of things to write about, homework, rediscovering the wonders of social interaction. I should blame it on general apathy, because there's no reason why I can't just StumbleUpon something and pretend it's relevant, like I always do.

What I'm going to blame it on is Oblivion, because it's the Best. Game. Ever.

I mean that. I really do. Normally, I'm not much of a CRPG fan. They tend to compare poorly with the tabletop experience. Wasn't impressed by Neverwinter Nights, wasn't even particularly impressed by Morrowind. (The Morrowind thing may have been a matter of perception and timing, a theory I plan to test this weekend by re-experiencing it.)

I'm not even much of a gamer. I've played Sim games, but those don't really count. Diablo 2, Jak and Daxter. SSX. That's about it. I dabble, mostly because I have friends who are gamers. I tend to be bad at them, so it takes real effort for me to get into one. (You ever hear the Jak 2 MISSION FAILED screen? Every five seconds? For twenty minutes? My gaming experience in a nutshell.)

And then I played Oblivion.

I've actually wanted it, badly, since I first heard about it, way before it came out. It just sounded cool. It was going to have erosion, for crying out loud. (Don't think it actually does, in the release, but this was pre-game buzz.) Then it actually came out, and it turned out that my video card was about a million years too old to play it, and then it turned out that to get a decent video card I'd need to get a new motherboard, and if I was going to get a new motherboard . . . well . . . my computer was really okay for everything I already did, and I wasn't much of a gamer, anyway.

So then, I got the laptop, and one of my first thoughts was: must have Oblivion now. (My actual first thought was: I never need be away from the internet ever again.)

So now I'm finally playing it. And it's awesome. On so many levels. I've spent the entire weekend playing it, I've got several friends who are playing it, and anytime my brain has thirty seconds of downtime I'm thinking about it.

I spent a few weeks playing it semi-casually, fiddling with it when I had a bit of spare time. Then I started doing the main quest, and that really grabbed me, in a way that I've only been grabbed by a few things in my entire life. (One of those things was DragonballZ, but we're not going to talk about that.) And now that I'm out of that, I'm playing the game "as it was meant to be played," by wandering around at random, doing things, and I'm having an unbelievably good time doing that.

Now, I had a point to all this. I found me a new blog. Yes, indeed. And I really should explain why all that was relevant, and link to the part of that blog that I'm actually interested in, and talk about why Oblivion is so awesome, and what's so cool about the main quest, but, y'know, it's late. And this post is long enough as it is.

So instead of writing about all that now, I'm going to do something incredibly lame. I'm going to promise to post about that, tomorrow. Or quite possibly the next day. Because, really, what this blog needs is a few good cliffhangers.

Rube Goldberg Domino Video

This guy has an absolutely absurd amount of time on his hands. If I ever feel the need to learn the Oblivion editor, something like this would be close to the top of my to do list.