Hi guys!!! Welcome to blog post #2 and if you haven’t
already guessed it, this will mainly be centered around the exploring aspect
found within many RPGs (Role-Playing Games) and for this post I’ll be using Skyrim as a prime example.
For those who are not familiar with Skyrim, here’s a quick overview of the
game. It’s an action (also fantasy) RPG that allows the player to play in
first-person or third person, and essentially provides a virtual world where
the player can freely roam and encounter/explore a number of different locations,
such as dungeons, cities, towns, homesteads (lands that can be purchased to
build a house), settlements, shrines, standing stones (magical stones that
allow a player to give their character special abilities), landmarks
(crossings, temples, etc.), camps (camps containing only giants or bandits or guards
or settlers), caves, docks, clearings (ponds, forest clearings, etc.), dragon
lairs, farms, ruins, forts, tombs, mines, lighthouses, ships and shipwrecks, watchtowers,
rivers, mills (lumber mills, wheat mills) inns and taverns, castles, and guild
headquarters (small societies that player can take membership in, such as the
Thieves Guild, Assassins Guild, etc.).
Skyrim was one of my first RPGs, and I had never before
played a game that allowed an almost open-world map layout, so when I was
exploring the vast virtual land, I spent hours upon hours exploring every nook
and cranny of the land that the game had to offer.
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| Photo courtesy by Mottis86 |
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| Photo courtesy of GameBanshee |
The world of Skyrim
is so large that the map of the land (in-game) is considered to have “an area
of about 37.1 km² (14.3 square miles).” The sheer size of the world is so huge
that they game developers decided to add mounts (ways to travel; horseback) to
make it easier and faster to travel throughout Skyrim.
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| Photo courtesy of Bethesda Softworks |
The best part about being able to explore in a game is that
where ever you go, you’ll most likely run into or acquire a side-quest. Side-quests
are quests that aren’t part of the main story/quest line, and have their own
little background stories and objectives needed to complete the quest. And
since the world of Skyrim is so large and vast, the game developers also
decided to make the number of side-quests infinite, but there has been some
speculation that there are about 100 or more side-quests, and if someone were
to complete all of them (which would consist about almost a hundred hours of game
play), certain side-quests (like collecting a bounty after killing a group of
bandits) will regenerate.
There’s a quote that I found very compelling in a book
called Everything Bad Is Good For You
(by Steven Johnson) that relates to exploration in video games, “You’re more in
control of the narrative now, but your supply of information about the
narrative-whom you should talk to next, where that mysterious package has been
hidden-is only partial, and so playing one of these games is ultimately all
about filling in that information gap.”[1]
Games much like Skyrim won’t tell you
precisely where to go or who you must talk to, but you must figure it out on
your own by simply running around and investigate anything that may seem
interesting or out of the ordinary. This allows players to have a sense of
freedom to explore wherever they want and do as they please, which encourages gamers
to explore every part of the game to discover the limitless possibilities that
could be found.
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| Photo courtesy of aegyoing.tumblr.com |
[1] Johnson, S. (2005). Games. In Everything bad is good
for you: How today's popular culture is actually making us smarter (p. 30).
New York: Riverhead Books.