Return to Oblivion?
Hello! I had a great time at the Popular Culture Association annual meeting last week and saw some great talks. I hope to share some thoughts about that soon, but I fell ill on the way home and I've been dealing with that. I was a little worried I would not write at all this week, but then I played a little bit of the newly released remastered Oblivion and here we are.
I tend to put together some draft comments while I'm playing a game, either for this newsletter or just my own notes, and somewhat amusingly my first note on Oblivion is "I find myself asking: why?"
I think I got somewhere close to answering that question, at least for me. Or maybe I just created more questions. My memory of this game is that it was an important step in reviving a type of "western RPG"; in particular it brought the concept to consoles in a way that had not really happened yet. The game was a big deal for the Xbox 360, I remember that. In 2006 we were making some pretty big leaps. Oblivion just looked so much more impressive than its predecessor, Morrowind. And look! Look at all the menus!
If it sounds like I am being facetious, well, I am. But not entirely disingenuous. For whatever reason I do have a vivid memory of being impressed by all the stuff in the game, including in the menus. The ability to just pick basically everything up? It felt new. The Elder Scrolls series was one of those game series that, for people familiar with it, was obviously huge and well known, but beyond those circles - the world where I lived - the series was utterly arcane, if you had much knowledge of it at all.
This is true of basically everything humans create, I suppose; what I mean is that first becoming familiar with Elder Scrolls, as I did when Oblivion came out on Xbox, meant entering a fully realized world that already had its adherents living their lives with Elder Scrolls as a clearly incorporated part. You were either entirely new to the game, metaphorically and practically, or you had spent what felt like most of your time on earth playing Morrowind.
Playing the remastered version, I am struck by how hokey it is. I don't mean that in a bad way... just that Patrick Stewart voicing the emperor feels less impressive now than it did at the time. Oblivion felt like such a big deal, and it did elevate the genre (and the series) quite a bit, even if it might seem a little quaint now as we march through the second decade of the post-Skyrim era.
The remaster looks great, it really does. It looks, mostly, like a modern game, helped by the fact that so much of the appeal of Oblivion was in its world, or rather the freedom to move around it. I toiled through the sewer intro/character generation part (I hate that stuff so much these days) and have since completely ignored my quest marker. My current save has me skulking around a bandit-infested mini-dungeon, vaguely aware of what I'm doing or what the benefits of such skulking might be.
We're clearly past the point of debating whether historical representation in games and the history of the medium should be in the same field. They're clearly completely distinct. Not that I'm sure that debate has really been had, to be fair. But I do find myself wondering how to think about a medium that has become so thoroughly self-referential. I know it's hardly new, but when the twenty year anniversary remasters are for games I played as an adult it feels a lot more real!
It is also subtly more impressive that the remasters of Mega Man and the rest. I'm sure that if I loaded the original Oblivion up on a screen next to the remaster I'd be astonished. But just playing the remaster at all feels very natural. Is that because the tech leaps are not quite as vast? Or is it my memory?
My stubborn memory, clinging on to the idea that my 20s and 30s represent the baseline for all meaningful cultural civilization, regardless of how much I strive to consciously avoid that outcome. Playing the remaster of Oblivion is... weird. I remember absolutely nothing but somehow the landscape feels familiar. A kind of immersive deja vu, at least in terms of game environment, that I don't really get from revisiting old Mario or Zelda games.
I am also not being asked to stretch my aesthetic tolerances terribly far, if at all. That kind of thing matters much more to me than I usually like to admit. Like, I could play the original System Shock. But I'm very glad they touched it up. This is a major reason I have never quite got around to Morrowind despite it sounding like completely, utterly my jam. According to the Internet.
But what does it look like to someone who was very young or - gasp - not yet born when the original Oblivion came out in 2006? Like the student who, when I mentioned I liked to play Destiny 2, said "I remember playing that game when I was a kid"? Who does this all belong to anyway?
Don't answer that, it doesn't deserve a response. Even answering "everyone" isn't quite sufficient. I guess I never thought about it, this games world where the old must live amongst the young. The young, they keep coming. And I am getting old as a biological, philosophical, inevitable fact. I don't mind it really. As long as we remember who is in charge.
Young people, I mean. Obviously. But is that true either? Who gets to rule the roost? In so many aspects of popular culture the young, younger, youngest rule. I think games are the same if no more pronounced in this regard than other cultural forms. The Oblivion remaster isn't for younger players really, it's for the old hands. And in my old hands it astonishes, just a little, just enough. Imagine if I had actually finished the game in the first place.
I was at the Popular Cultural Association annual meeting last week. It was fun! I'll write about it soon. One of the best things about that conference is that it is impossible to avoid young scholars. Not that anyone would try. And they still let us get up and share ideas alongside them, which I appreciate.