Progress of truth morrowind
Or it’s a mystical memory-crystal, or the protagonist is recording their progress in their journal, or some other protestation of realism. You’re not saving the game at a savepoint, Jade is saving onto her data disc at the MDisc reader machine. Some games attempt to mask the differences between our world and the game world by creating elaborate justifications for the existence of obvious game mechanics. So, thought experiment: how might it feel to actually be a character in a game, and to exist according to the rules of a game engine? How might you formulate theories about the metaphysics of your world? If games were realistic, you’d only ever get one life. Such rules, of course, are generally dictated by the needs and demands of gameplay rather than nature. The rules of the gameworld the rules of the game. When we talk about the games we play, we can talk about game mechanics, how the game engine controls and defines space and time, perhaps how the physics engine governs the interactions of objects within the virtual space. Theories of time and space, of causality and determinism, of the nature of existence itself. This is where science meets philosophy, where we might try to identify underlying principles of reality that go beyond standard physics. We can also talk about metaphysics: meta being Greek for “beyond”.
When we talk about the world we live in, we can talk about physical laws, like gravity and the rules of thermodynamics.
This made me sad, so I thought I’d better write some! Part 1: Introduction I liked the idea, but research appeared to confirm my initial suspicions that, despite its rampant popularity, reams of fanfiction and endless debates about the lore, there is relatively little critical writing on Morrowind that has survived the vicissitudes of the internet since its release in 2002. Some time ago, I was asked by David Carlton if I was interested in assembling a Critical Compilation on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for Critical Distance.