Todd Howard: Worldbuilding Through Micronarrative PDF
Preview Todd Howard: Worldbuilding Through Micronarrative
Todd Howard Influential Video Game Designers Series Editors: Carly A. Kocurek Jennifer deWinter Todd Howard Worldbuilding in Tamriel and Beyond Wendi Sierra BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Wendi Sierra, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Alice Marwick Photographs © iStock.com; Shutterstock.com, Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sierra, Wendi, author. Title: Todd Howard : worldbuilding in Tamriel and beyond / Wendi Sierra. Other titles: Influential video game designers. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Influential video game designers | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031432 (print) | LCCN 2020031433 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501350955 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781501350962 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781501350979 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501350986 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Howard, Todd M. | Video game designers--Biography. | Video games industry--History. | Elder Scrolls (Game) | Fallout (Game) Classification: LCC GV1469.3.G37 S54 2020 (print) | LCC GV1469.3.G37 (ebook) | DDC 794.8092 [B]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031432 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031433 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5095-5 PB: 978-1-5013-5096-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5098-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-5097-9 Series: Influential Video Game Designers Typeset by Integra Software Services Private Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents List of Figures vi Preface from the Series Editors vii Guest Foreword: Holly Green x Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Worldbuilding as Design Perspective 29 3 Little Catastrophes 43 4 Big and Crazy and Cool: World Style in Elder Scrolls Games 75 5 In His Own Words: Transcript of Irrational Interviews Podcast 105 6 Visions for the Future 123 Gameography 135 Bibliography 142 Index 152 List of Figures 1.1 A screenshot of Bethesda’s first game, GridIron 7 1.2 While the HUD (head-up display) was similar to other shooters of the time, Future Shock incorporated a substantial amount of worldbuilding in its design 9 1.3 Cyrus, the main character of Redguard 17 1.4 A comparison of action points in Fallout (bottom) and VATS in Fallout 3 (top) 24 2.1 Silt Striders, one of a limited number of transportation options in Morrowind 39 2.2 Post-apocalyptic world style in Fallout 4 42 3.1 Tarhiel, the ill-fated wood elf in Morrowind 49 3.2 The Prospector’s Shack is a static micronarrative in Skyrim 54 3.3 Micky the water beggar waits for players outside Megaton 60 3.4 Two Arts, and a choice for the player. Image courtesy Brandon Dennis of Oxhorn 65 3.5 A quiet sunrise in Oblivion 68 4.1 Ald’ruhn, shadowed by the haze of an ash storm from Red Mountain 84 4.2 City Map of Ald’ruhn, with the Under-Skar at its center 85 4.3 Shameer, a minor NPC in Oblivion 92 4.4 A transcription of the dragon alphabet 98 4.5 The Pip-Boy in Fallout 3 picking up a radio station 102 6.1 Shelter draws on Fallout’s aesthetic, but takes the franchise in a new direction 127 6.2 Blades is Bethesda’s ambitious attempt to bring the Elder Scrolls series to modern phones 129 6.3 A comparison of Base Building from Skyrim (bottom), through Fallout 4 (middle), to Fallout 76 (top) 131 Preface from the Series Editors While some may beg to differ, we would argue games have profound capacity as a storytelling medium. And, indeed, two of the designers featured in this series so far have landed in games from work as storytellers—in theater in the case of Brenda Laurel, and as a writer, in the case of Jane Jensen. In this fourth installation in the Influential Video Game Designers series, Wendi Sierra explores the work of a third, different type of storyteller. Todd Howard comes to game design largely from other roles in the game industry. But the titles he’s shaped, too, are notable for their distinct approach to storytelling. The worlds of Howard’s games are built for epic tales, but they’re built in part through a careful attention to the tiny details that enrich and enliven. Seemingly inconsequential moments in the game often reveal complex backstories that have shaped the characters and the world they move through. To scratch the surface is to find not more surface, but an entire other world. “There is another world, and it is this one” is a line apocryphally attributed to either Rainer Maria Rilke or W. B. Yeats, but which MacKenzie Wark suggests is most likely a détournement by the novelist Patrick White based on White’s reading of the poet Paul Éluard, who may or may not have been building from the work of someone else entirely. Regardless of its provenance, the line suggests something of how varied and complex individuals’ experiences can be even in what appear to be shared contexts. The seemingly superfluous specificity of the world of games like Morrowind enables players to experience them with a high level of individuality, providing experiences that feel personalized, unique. In Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, Eleanor West manages an unusual boarding school. Miss West sells the experience to her students’ guardians as a therapeutic environment, but in reality Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children is a secret sanctuary for children who have traveled through wardrobes or trunks or doorways into other viii Preface from the Series Editors worlds and now, having come home, are desperate to go home to the worlds they’ve found. Eleanor has spent an adult lifetime mapping the worlds her pupils long for—dark and light, chaotic and orderly, beautiful and bizarre. No two worlds are the same, because no two children are the same. As Sierra demonstrates, no two playthroughs of one of Howard’s most expansive games are the same because no two players are the same. Sometimes, video games give the right stories to the right people. Perhaps this is the true beauty of any creative form, that there is no single, prescriptive way to create nor a single, correct way to experience. Video games have always provided alternative worlds, inviting players to engage with designed spaces. In large narrative role-playing worlds, players are asked to literally go to another world, inhabit a different space. These games, in other words, have always been an escape. However, as we write this at a moment of tremendous uncertainty, a global pandemic has reshaped our daily lives in ways we could not have anticipated. Millions have become sick and thousands have died. As this heartbreak unfolds, the world has shifted around us. Regardless of the individual fates of beloved coffee shops or favorite arcades, however, this is a moment after which we know the world will look quite different. Victor Turner speaks of a liminal state—a process of becoming—during which “normal” is upended and transformation is in process toward something new. There is another world, and it’s unfolding around us, for better or worse. This is a moment of reckoning and of reimagining. In it, video games have come to fill a particular niche, enabling us to travel to other worlds, to play together, to explore and imagine. This book represents a new approach of game designer vision—a world representation that focuses on fidelity, on tiny details that might go unmissed. Howard is the game designer of the quotidian, of the everyday. His worlds represent a type of normal that is environmentally constructed, from tiny ants on walls to complex NPC relationships. This design vision seems to harken more to the architect rather than the novelist. And indeed, Howard’s own approach to academic engagement with his Preface from the Series Editors ix work might be part of a design vision that asks the work and the environment to speak for themselves. The scaffold is there for multiple experiences to unfold. As we pensively write this during the spring of 2020, we are reminded that the worlds of video games are what designers make of them, but the world we all live in is what we make of it. We’ll see you on the other side. Jennifer deWinter Carly Kocurek
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