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Why Morrowind?

One could argue that Morrowind is among the greatest games ever made. I won't argue that here, at least not in ths post, but its greatness does inspire me. And that's helpful when your goal is write publicly for the first time. As they saying goes, write what your know.

Writing What I Know

When I was young my dad had a computer repair side hustle. A by-product of this side hustle was a lot of junk, and occasionally that junk would coalesce into something useful. Eventually we had so much useful in our house that after school my dad, brother, and I were having Warcraft I LANs, while during the day my classmates and I were learning our way around Cross Country Canada on Board-procured Unisys machines.

My dad speaks fondly about the days when computers occupied whole rooms and consumed instructions on punch cards. My dad was one of the first people in my life I remember demonstrating that you can "just do things". My dad was the guy I begged to bail me out with a new¹ 32MB Direct3D compatible graphics card when I managed to acquire a copy of Morrowind shortly after release to then discover our coalesced junk heap was only almost capable of running the game. In many ways the sandbox and roadmap that my dad's side hustle unlocked for me was responsible for not just my Morrowind obsession, but for many of the behaviours and drives that define my life and work today as an adult.

Nostalgia Then And Now

I played a lot of games as a kid, many of the usual titles for kids from my generation like Pokémon, Goldeneye, and Super Mario. But also some less likely titles: Dune 2000, Microsoft Flight Simulator v5, Nascar Racing, Pharaoh to name a few. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament, which was my first introduction to the concept of mods and games that shipped with dev tools.

Even though I played a lot of games as a kid, playing Morrowind for the first time was a revelation. Playing Morrowind for the first time involved laying out a physical map next to my keyboard and reckoning with a sense of scale that seemed impossible. Playing Morrowind for the first time involved trying to reason about skills, attributes, formulae and game mechanics that, while part of a common table-top RPG design language, were not something I had ever been confronted with in my life up to that point.

Playing Morrowind for the first time wasn't just about playing the game, it was also my introduction to modding communities, open source software, wanting to make and consume fan art, and talking to other people that were also enthralled by this game on strange and obscure phpBB forums. It was the first time I can recall caring about the launch and post-launch marketing activities around a piece of software, or consuming content made by other people playing the same game.

Morrowind continues to be a revelation for me 23 years later, this is in large part thanks to an active and prolific modding community and a group of talented and generous open source maintainers that make it possible to introduce this ancient magic to new or returning players in a modern, approachable format. Beyond the technical enhancements, or unlocking new formats, new discoveries in the orbit of this game continue to this day thanks in large part to the ongoing engagement from the amazing folks that crafted and birthed the thing into the world. And it's this on-going discovery that free's Morrowind from simply being a benefactor of nostalgia. Despite all this it isn't necessarily a genre-defying innovation in RPG's either - it's something in between.

The In-between

Morrowind's in-between-edness is partly a product of it's relationship to it's own universe. In the same way that Neuromancer was the archetypal cyberpunk work despite not being the first of it's kind, Morrowind is the archetypal Scrolls-like adventure despite being the 3rd major entry in the Elder Scrolls series. Unlike Neuromancer which went on to inspire direct sequels, copy-cats, and arguably more important works with even broader reach, Morrowind never really got a true sequel as later entries in the Elder Scrolls series are markedly different from it in the same way that Morrowind was markedly different from it's predecessors.

Morrowind lives in a messy middle that hasn't really been replicated before or since. Appreciating this game, it's systems, and the kind of experiences it offers is worthwhile to this day for this reason. I know that I and many others will continue to revisit this game over and over for years to come not because it's comfortable or familiar, but because it exists as an alien experience, a stranger in a strange land, a perpetual but significant outsider. In the case of Morrowind's narrative and it's broader impact this other-ness is the scaffolding for greatness and an enduring recipe for adventure.

Wealth beyond measure, outlander.

Footnotes

1. As a dad myself now it's hard not to reflect on simpler times when I didn't have to worry about where the next Graphics Card Upgrade was coming from. ↩