[HN Gopher] The Metaphysics of Morrowind (2010)
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The Metaphysics of Morrowind (2010)
Author : kqr
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-06-05 07:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fallingawkwardly.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fallingawkwardly.wordpress.com)
| ArtRichards wrote:
| I really appreciated this deep dive into how the writers of the
| game wove an exploration of the meaning of gaming into the lore
| and story of their games.
|
| >CHIM is the realisation that your entire world, everything you
| experience, does not really exist. It exists as the dream of a
| power, which, since it must be called something, is called God.
| Everything that exists is just part of the dream of God,
| including yourself. You are just a tiny fraction of the Godhead,
| that has managed to gain a modicum of self-awareness.
| Lapsa wrote:
| recently installed (and can't stop modding). read 'Dance in fire'
| in-game book series - genuinely one of the best gaming
| experiences I've ever had in my life
| causi wrote:
| As someone whose first Elder Scrolls experience was Oblivion, I
| can't get used to the combat. Having to worry about stats,
| skills, and hit percentages AND having to make sure you're
| accurately aiming at the enemy feels like the worst of both
| worlds. Morrowind could've benefitted greatly from a VATS
| system.
| burnished wrote:
| Yes, the combat mechanics did not age well. I think there are
| mods that overhaul it nicely, or like a sibling comment
| mentions once you get some skill then it stops feeling so
| ridiculous (what do you mean I failed to kill this stationary
| rat with a warhammer that I swung ten times?). If I remember
| correctly at around 50 skill is when your misses stop feeling
| so arbitrary.
| gigaflop wrote:
| Morrowind's combat is likened to dice rolls, until you get to
| a high enough skill to reliably hit. Ranged combat is the
| worst, since you can see an arrow physically connect but not
| have effect.
|
| Once I got my axe skill boosted to high hell and used a Bound
| Battleaxe (+10 Axe skill while holding), it felt like I could
| bring almost anything to its knees. Even better, the axe was
| tied to a constant-effect enchant on a piece of jewelry, so I
| could resummon in 0.1s by taking the ring off/on if I needed
| to.
| Melatonic wrote:
| If they had no had those damn dinosaur bird things
| attacking you constantly the shitty combat system also
| would have been a LOT less annoying - especially early on!
| Arrath wrote:
| Then you have the brilliant idea to craft up a bigass
| fireball spell that will murder those stupid birds, and
| all the others around them just to be safe.
|
| And it works wonders! Even if it eats your full magicka
| bar to cast.
|
| Until you use it a hair too close to a town, and have
| every NPC out for blood.
| sharpneli wrote:
| Morrowind is all about cheesing the system. It's one of the
| few games that allow you to go full singularity.
|
| How it works: You make a potion of intelligence. Drink it.
| Now you're more intelligent and would you look at that, the
| potency of said potion depends on your intelligence. So you
| make another one that boosts it even higher. Rinse and repeat
| until you have astronomical intelligence and then you brew a
| potion of strength that will last essentially forever and
| allows you to one punch a god.
|
| Or you can make a potion of paralysis, drink it, and be stuck
| for years.
|
| It's hilarious and I love it.
| Arrath wrote:
| Other stats also allow you to break physics over your knee:
|
| Titanic strength will, yes, allow you to kill any enemy in
| a single attack. It will also, however, deplete your
| weapon's entire durability bar to do so.
|
| Incredible, mind bending speed will allow you to break the
| speed force (most problematically on stairs or inclines),
| moving so fast that you blast through the world geometry
| and into the void beyond. (Playing on console with an
| analog controller that gave you more control over your
| movement speed was a godsend, here)
| idontpost wrote:
| You can actually overflow the signed integers they used for
| stats and end up with negative intelligence doing that.
|
| Don't ask me how I know.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| It was this way in oblivion to an extent too. I remember
| modding a frenzy spell to be on touch, for the quickest
| duration, but so I could maximize the AOE range. So I ended
| up with a spell that would cause massive riots and kill off
| basically all the NPCs in a give town. So I would just go
| town to town, decimating everyone who lived there, until
| basically all the quests are gone and the game becomes
| unplayable
| leeter wrote:
| 100% one of the first things I'd do was make some shoes
| that had a permanent flight enchant... then use them
| extensively. Also learn the mark, recall, and the various
| intervention spells. Too much to carry? Mark, intervention,
| sell, recall, carry on.
| broast wrote:
| The absolute first thing to do is get a resist magicka
| spell, and the boots of blinding speed!
| sharpneli wrote:
| For a new player the absolute first thing to do is walk
| north from the starting city -> investigate the falling
| wizard -> read the scroll because What Could Possibly Go
| Wrong -> Jump
|
| And then reload the save or start a new game.
| Lapsa wrote:
| 100 Jump for a second or two is my favorite (+ Slowfall
| ofc)
| Lapsa wrote:
| also - posted article feels too spoiler-y. marking for laters
| moron4hire wrote:
| There is another aspect of metaphysics in the Elder Scrolls games
| that I find incredibly interesting, and that is the propensity
| for TES engine games to be buggy and susceptible to game- and
| narrative-breaking exploits. Things like item-dupes and locked-
| door-phasing and crafting potions while quaffing potion-making-
| buff potions in ever increasing sequences to create massively
| overpowered potions that make you a literal god capable of nuking
| an entire dungeon in a single spell.
|
| To me, when you start discussing "what is the gameworld like for
| the NPCs", this gameworld that already includes a concept of
| magic as _de rigueur_ , these sorts of exploits become the "real"
| magic, the actually mystical arts that are surprising and
| terrifying to the denizens of the game.
|
| I don't usually have the patience to perform most of the exploits
| myself, but they definitely make for some very entertaining
| YouTube videos.
| lidavidm wrote:
| Anime/manga have been exploring this with various fantasy
| worlds with explicit game-like mechanics. I've always
| considered them lazy attempts at power fantasies/wish
| fulfillment stories, but in light of this comment maybe there's
| an interesting story about "player character as God" in there.
|
| Actually now I can think of one that fits that bill exactly:
| https://j-novel.club/series/endo-and-kobayashi-live-the-late...
| It's not high literature, but it's a fun read, especially if
| you're aware of the genre tropes it riffs off of
| (villainess/isekai).
| psyc wrote:
| Oh dear god I can't afford an Elder Scrolls lore rabbit hole
| today
|
| Fortunately this thread will just be bike shedding about the
| definition of metaphysics so [close tab]
| kizer wrote:
| I love open world games. Game developers, please make more, more,
| more.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| At one time I felt the same way, but the deluge of Ubisoft and
| their like games, where it's not so much "something new to
| explore" but instead "here's task 1 of 100 that's the exact
| same you'll need to do for map completion" has caused me to
| appreciate tight, well crafted games just as much. The AAA game
| industry turned "go around and explore the world" into
| something really boring.
| Archelaos wrote:
| > We can also talk about metaphysics: meta being Greek for
| "beyond". This is where science meets philosophy, where we might
| try to identify underlying principles of reality that go beyond
| standard physics. Theories of time and space, of causality and
| determinism, of the nature of existence itself.
|
| The etymology of the word "metaphysics" is more complex. The word
| was at first only a simple bibliographical ordering term denoting
| those works of Aristotle which were sorted into the Aristotelian
| corpus "after" ("meta") his works on physics (propably two
| centuries after they had been written). Aristotle himself never
| used the word metaphysics (his term was "first philosophy"). It
| had then been later philosophers who assigned a deeper meaning to
| "metaphysics". However, theories of time and space, and to some
| extent[1] also of causality and determinism are still part of
| "phsics", not of "metaphysics".
|
| But leaving etymology aside, I have a deeper discomfort of the
| article's use of "metaphysics". Except from a few remarks, the
| article is primarily concerned with game lore. That is something
| that is much closer to (religious?) mythology than to
| philosophical metaphysics.[2]
|
| [1] Causality, for example, is discussed primarily in Aristotle's
| "physics", not so much in his metaphysical writings.
|
| [2] Not that religion and philosophy are complete antagonists,
| but when it comes to literary genre mythology and philosophy are
| quite distinct.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The etymology is lots of fun when it comes to programming. As
| one of my friends used to say " _meta_ is greek for after,
| which is why metaprograms run before programs "
| hbn wrote:
| "After" could also be interpreted as "beyond" in a way. From
| a baseline point, the meta of it is "beyond" or "comes after"
| that point.
|
| Alternatively, after programming comes metaprogramming. You
| couldn't have a metaprogram if there wasn't a program in the
| first place.
| barrysteve wrote:
| There's not much metaphysics being explored in the articles. The
| game gives the player a world where you could make more
| interesting and fantastical experiments into the nature of time,
| space, and knowing with the magic system and altered physical
| rules.
|
| The author describes the game's plot and has one or two minor
| points in how the game world differs from our natural world. The
| dragon's death has the ability to affect time, but exploring the
| metaphysical implications are dropped in favour of furthering
| narrative implications.
|
| It would be cool to delve into the theology of Morrowind, it has
| strong Gnostic influences which was a historical dead-end in
| theology and yet drives a lot of the enjoyable 'power trip'
| hero's journey.
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