The most important decision of my life was instigated while walking through a maternity ward. I got lost in the maze of halls while trying to find the room my brand-new nephew was in. At each turn I saw new parents, new grandparents, supporters, and wellwishers. I saw the staff who keep the biological industry cranking away every day. I felt a profound, but nebulous, tug on my guts. I had stumbled upon some fellowship of individuals who were all involved with parenthood in one way or another — the f*cking, the pregnancy, the support, the birth, the gifts, the punishments, the generational joy, and eternal exhaustion. I knew they existed, but as a new uncle I was now part of it and seeing it all condensed into one floor of one building made me confront it in a way I hadn't ever needed to. A seed was planted within me at that moment, though I was consciously unaware of it.
That "Dagothwave" video was probably where it started. Was its 11 million views just because the song is fun, or because Morrowind was more popular than I thought? It had been many years since I played an Elder Scrolls game, and I had starry-eyed memories of losing whole nights in Tamriel. Maybe it was time for another? But Morrowind is part of that "older" game group, which is bucketed less by age and more by how rough the mechanics are. The pupil-dilating treadmill of loops and rewards hadn't manifested yet, and we had to make do with fun-but-flawed for the more ambitious games. It couldn't be that bad or people wouldn't love it so much, right? I was missing something, if even just closure regarding the game's quality. Would it resonate with me, or is it just a nostalgia trip for others? Well, look at that — Morrowind is on sale.
For most of my adult life I wasn't brave enough to have children. I felt like I didn't have my sh*t together, and didn't feel like I had achieved a sort of mythological peak self needed to endure parenthood. "Do you think we were ready?" my father once asked me. "We weren't. Nobody is ready, so stop waiting to be ready." No matter by evolution or God, most of us have been given all the tools necessary to keep a baby alive — It's just buried beneath job-related anxiety and trivia about TV shows. When I saw my brother successfully raising his son, I started feeling like maybe this was something I could do. That exclusive parent's club wasn't actually exclusive. Maybe I was brave enough after all.
I had always heard that Morrowind could be a bit of a slog to play. It supposedly contained a good share of "some bullsh*t". Forums are filled with people telling you to never do X and always take Y, and though I know better than to listen to drive-by comments by anonymous cage-rattlers, I was afraid of having a bad time just because I chose basket weaving as a main skill and not moose taming ("everyone knows moose taming is a broken mechanic and the final boss is LITERALLY impossible without it. You idiot."). I don't like using guides, but I told myself that I would only use one for building my character. Hell, I beat all the infinity engine games without following guides, surely I can do this. Was I underestimating how 30+ years of gaming experience could support me? It's easy to forget that most games want you to succeed, especially those lacking that arcade DNA that lingered too long in home releases.
Bringing a newborn into your home is a unique, if unsettling, experience. Your comfort is thrown into disarray. Life for today's fertile generations is a pinball table of diversions injected mainline. Introducing a child reconfigures so many of those bumpers and ramps and flashing lights. Priorities get shuffled. People get shuffled. Things you once loved get knocked down a few pegs. It's not that you can't do them, but you no longer want to as much. A mother once told me "I don't go out as often anymore, but half of that is because I'd rather spend time with my son." This isn't a mandate of total isolation, but rather a declaration of the tectonic shifts that can occur in a parent's brain.
The running speed was the first thing to make me groan in Morrowind. Running felt slower than walking in most games, and walking was glacial. Eventually I learned that jumping is faster than running, but jumping drains your endurance. Endurance is used for most of the game's mechanics. It governs hit chance, and bartering prices and a hundred other things. It regenerates automatically, but slowly. Even with a full endurance bar I was barely hitting my enemies. One small rat gave me a run for my money. Then I faced two rats at once and got demolished. It became apparent that I would have to engage Morrowind on its own level. If the game felt janky and unfair then I must play janky and unfair.
The first couple weeks of parenthood are a blur. You're forgiven for not brushing your teeth or texting someone back. After some time it begins to settle, but only slightly. Three months is right about when your routine sets in, and that routine is more of a guideline. At least you feel something finally solidifying. You take baby steps out of the cave, careful to not let the sun melt your retinas. You hit your stride. And just then you're thrown off by something. A growth spurt, a sleep regression, an intellectual leap. You have to reset and build your routine again on the fly. Things become settled again. Then, once things feel solid, there is another upheaval. A new food aversion, an obsession with a stuffed animal that borders on criminal, another sleep regression. At some point it clicks that your new normal is a river, not a pond. If your children are always changing, then so must you. Accepting this is important for everyone. These shake-ups are happening for a reason. With their growing pains comes discomfort, but also the joy of getting to watch them grow.
While on an early quest that I was too weak to beat, I figured out that enemies don't chase you through loading screens. So I would go through a door, smack on the enemy for a while (missing 95% of the time), and then head back out the door when my health got low. After regaining my strength I'd go back in to do it all over again. Sure, the enemy heals too, but this let me train up my weapon skill enough that, eventually, I was able to actually kill the guy. I also cheesed out my first chunk of speechcraft levels. Then, I spotted a weapon that was way, way better than anything else I could buy or receive from a quest. It was watched over by a guard, but I was able to cram myself between a shelf and some other furniture and steal it (after many attempts) without getting caught. In the Morrowind manual, it says "The essence of any Elder Scrolls role-playing game has always been simple: let you do what you want, and make sure you have fun doing it." This gave me a license to play as I wished, not how I thought it "should" be. Morrowind can feel unforgiving in those early hours, but if you milk the game's many broken mechanics, you will become an unforgiving player. Through this philosophy, I eventually annihilated all foes in my path, ran at top speed, and sweet talked my way out of a few quests.
Toddler's are difficult. There's a lot of big, inexplicable emotions. Exponential intelligence spikes ensure that every safeguard you make will be tested, and often overcome. She learned to climb on the table? You remove the chair. She pulls a container of brown rice from the pantry, drags it over, and climbs on it to climb on the table. You put a child lock on the pantry. She figures out the child lock. And so it goes, on and on. The desire to appease them is so high, because you are so physically and emotionally exhausted. We don't like to show her screens. Maybe put a TV show on so I can empty the dishwasher? We don't like to give her junk food. I'll give you two M&Ms if you eat some of that avocado on your plate. There are times and places to compromise your parenting beliefs, but when and how often? I vowed to never be the parent who wheels their kid around a store while they stare at YouTube slop at max volume. Can I guarantee I'll never be that parent? Not ever? Just this one time, we’re on vacation, we just need to pick up the toothbrush I forgot, just in and out. My willpower must match my convictions if I'm to be the parent I believe my children need.
Playing on PC, I have access to the command console, allowing me to enter commands that can do nearly anything. At first I used it only to get myself out of broken situations. NPCs in Morrowind love to block small doorways. I had to start using the command "ResetActors" to reset them to their default position so my path was clear. Then I saw another command, "ToggleCollision" which lets you move through NPCs - and everything else. The floor, the walls, and all objects have no collision with you, allowing you to infinitely float through the game without the use of a Levitate spell. I really disliked the layout of the biggest city in Morrowind, Vivec. It's a cool concept, but a slog to actually traverse. I started using "ToggleCollision" to move between simple quest tasks. I never used it in a dungeon, or to avoid a combat encounter. I was technically cheating, which is funny because I played with minimal mods to keep the experience as "pure" as possible. I started to wonder who I was trying to impress. What was I trying to accomplish? Morrowind has so many unintended shortcuts and exploits. I grunted through enough bad combat and traveled with a snail's walking speed. Would a few more hours of it really matter? That line from the manual comes to mind again "...and have fun doing it." I was having fun. Does anything else matter?
You can be vigilant and fastidious, but your kids' footprints will encroach most (all?) rooms of your home. Toys and books and damage. Though, there is a profound feeling of rightness in those quiet, post-bedtime moments when you tip-toe about the place picking up toys and socks and chunks of strawberry. It makes me feel like I have control, that I can reset the place as I want. "On the eighth day he cleaned up after his kids, for they did not have the dexterity to put the stupid little parts back on a battle-ravaged toy." The sounds can't be escaped, either. The crying, the yelling, the repetition of a book quote, the words you accidentally say, the words they make up, the nauseating kids music, the slightly more tolerable kids music. A lot of it becomes background noise. Some of it becomes really specal no matter how many times you hear it. When, from my office, I hear "Go upstairs. See daddy," my heart flutters. I often come out to see her then, and in that moment all of the unhinged howling from a refused nap is forgiven.
There is something endearing about early 2000's graphics. The triangles began to smooth out, but not too much. The novelty of 3D graphics and CD audio had worn off by then, and more effort had to be made. The tools were so new, the techniques so rough, and the disc space so limited, that characters and landscapes exhibit a unique, impressionist style. They can't get this to look real, but can they get it to feel real? Morrowind's cohesive, if drab, style feels real within its own logic. It's a world of claustrophobia. Most buildings are small, but even the large buildings have cramped, labyrinthine interiors. The outdoors feel suffocating, with the world covered in fog. The game's draw distance is lower than you'd imagine, even at its max setting. This is likely a way to increase performance, but it works so well to increase the mystery. Your character is an "outlander" and this alien world is not your home. Vvardenfel, where the game takes place, is stranger than most fantasy worlds. Even we the players feel like outlanders. You don't travel by horse, but on a gargantuan flea with a hollowed out back. My eyes see the low fidelity texture maps and weird looking faces, but when taken together as one, my brain interprets it all as unequivocally Morrowind.
It's tough work, more so than I could have possibly imagined. The only reason parenting works is because each point of frustration is exceeded with a larger point of something greater. I hesitate to say love, or joy, or fulfillment (though all of those are present), because those are terms my pre-dad self had defined. The feeling I get from parenting is something different. Similar to doing a drug for the first time and thinking "I didn't know the human mind was capable of this." It's like that, and I don't have a word for it. Maybe I don't want a word for it. I just know that every time my toddler throws a fit at bedtime and I feel at the end of my rope, the frustration is so temporary. Because once she inevitably settles down and falls asleep, I take a look at her in the baby monitor and her sleeping face makes my heart fill with whatever-this-feeling-is. It's a good feeling. Real good.
My Morrowind experience was one of extremes. Difficulty and ease. Excitement and tedium. Too much story and too little story. Like the manual suggests, you are allowed to experience the game however you'd like. As a consequence, it bends to you. Are you rushing through the story? Nobody is going to stop you and make you read that book. Did you choose the best weapon in the game? The combat won't be challenging. Will you ignore the towns that the main campaign doesn't bring you to? The world will feel small. This isn't unique to Morrowind, but it feels magnified by the game's hands-off approach to your experience. The game gives you a rare amount of control, but with that comes the burden of making the most of it.
I've struggled with various mild-to-medium mental issues since my late teens. I seem to have a little bit of everything, but none enough to interfere with my duty as a taxpaying cog. Vague depression, occasional anxiety, and some form of mild ADHD. With age, some of these have gotten worse, and some better. Therapy helped, but never got me totally where I wanted to be (I still strongly endorse therapy and still go, just less). I had a moment this past summer where all the facets of my mental glitch co*cktail bloomed. It came to a head when I yelled at the Roomba. Moments later, I told my wife I was going to call a psychiatrist and talk about medication. "This guy has got to go," I said, referring to the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. I hated the idea of medication, even though my therapist had gently prodded me about it for so many years. It felt like giving up, like falling into the herd of sheep who medicate instead of tackling the core issues. Then I thought about my daughter, and the kind of father I want her to have. What's better, a medicated "sheep" of a father who can devote himself to his family, or an unmedicated guy who yells at the Roomba? For our kids we give up so much time, energy, and money. You expect all of that, and any parent will gladly tell you about it. What I didn't expect to sacrifice was part of my identity. When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, I decided to get in shape. I wanted my family to know a strong, capable father. I've been consistently exercising and eating better ever since. Trying medication for some of my mental issues has been eye-opening, and nothing like the horrors I was warned about years ago. My identity as some kind of independent, grumpy, gatekeeping outsider was juvenile. I'm "Dad" now, and shaking off the cocoon of my old identities is growth, not concession. My daughter is reconfiguring me into a better person, even if she doesn't know it yet.
I have played just about 90 hours of Morrowind, which makes me uncomfortable. Bethesda RPGs have this insidious trap of getting you to do just one more quest. There never feels like a great stopping point. After a long dungeon you want to head to town and call it quits. Well, let me sell my junk first. Oh, wait, this guy has a cool helmet on display. Can I steal it? OK, OK I'll just go get my next quest from the Mage's Guild and then I'll log off, I mean it. There comes a time in games like this where I decide to just crank out the main story, because completing that usually dulls the drive to explore the whole world. So that's what I did. I left the guilds behind, never got the best gear, and never made that game-breaking Chameleon spell I wanted. Morrowind was draining my very limited free time. I like to paint, I want to learn Dio's Don't Talk to Strangers on the guitar, and I want to get started on my second book. I put my in-game aspirations to the side and did the right thing. I obliterated Dagoth Ur, claimed my title as Nerevarine, saved the game, and Alt+F4'd.
My wife and I talked about having a second kid, but never came to a final conclusion. "Maybe in a few months we can think about it," we said. We were still confined to a crappy apartment and the thought of cramming another body in there was scary. So we decided to hold off "for now" with the understanding that both of us might one day want another kid. My wife got pregnant about a month after that conversation. After the initial grumbling discomfort there came a sense of relief. We both feel that we waited too long to have our first child, and here we were almost doing it again. It wasn't perfect timing, but I think back to my father's advice. There is never a perfect time. There is no perfect anything. There is only the story you're living/creating in this particular play-through. Ours would include a second child. Though, the instant he popped out I got a vasectomy.
I still have an itch to create a new character in Morrowind since my first playthrough was so bumbling and exploratory. I took skills I never used, and didn't know about the Mark and Recall spells until ¾ through the main campaign (maybe a guide would have been nice after all). I would have a blast now, knowing how I'd like to play and what I would want to achieve. There is also such a wonderful modding scene, I would install so many QoL mods, and texture mods, and whatever else looked cool. Maybe one day. No two play-throughs of Morrowind are the same, and that's part of the beauty of these games. When given free rein in this strange world, will you battle for justice as the Nerevarine? Or will you collect every single bottle of skooma, drink them all, and then try to kill Vivec wearing only Boots of Blinding Speed?
So just rejoice in the suffering, because tribulations are both a burden and a building block. Make something.
