Prolific comics blogger Chris Sims recently posted his thoughts on my current video game obsession, Skyrim, and finds it wanting. He admits that it’s fun to play, but unfocused; he finds the choices presented to the player, choices that should really define the way the sprawling story plays out, have very little impact.

For example, much of the game’s main quest involves ending the scourge of dragons who have mysteriously returned from legend after many centuries. Sims is right that this seems odd, given the way the game starts:

I mean, the very first thing that happens in the game is that a dragon showed up and kept me from getting my head cut off, so as far as I’m concerned, me and dragons are 100% cool with each other.

So yeah, there’s a little bit of mental disconnect required there.

On some level, I agree with his thesis; as great as the threats to the land of Skyrim are, these cataclysmic events that the player alone is destined to resolve have relatively little impact on the day-to-day life of the average citizen of the Nine holds, beyond the inconvenience of the occasional dragon attack. It’s hard, in a “wide open world” game, to generate a sense of urgency.

So far, I’ve been able to live with that. Part of that, I think, is the fact that I chose to pretty much sprint through the main questline involving the time travelling dragon god out to destroy the world, so the lack of fear in the populace regarding the coming apocalypse makes more sense. There are still occasional dragon attacks, but in this sort of fantasy world, I can believe that the outside chance of a giant winged reptile swooping down and setting his thatched roof on fire is something to which a farmer will eventually become desensitized.

At the point I’m at in the game, I’ve already saved the world from the supernatural threat of not-Ragnarok, and am taking some time to get to know the people of Skyrim and build up some more influence (apart from, you know, having just saved the world) before I move to address the more human threat: a looming civil war between the waning, distant Empire and a bunch of upstart “Skyrim First” rebels. This aspect of the quest makes more sense to leave alone for a while, because even as the game starts, the people of Skyrim mostly talk about the machinations of distant political conflicts as background, which requires much less suspension of disbelief. Sure, you run into die-hards on both sides, but most people are content to run their shops or chop their firewood, dismissing the affairs of government with a detached, sometimes amused cynicism. It’s a minor annoyance to people, but who’s in charge doesn’t make much difference to the average person who’s trying to scrape out a living in a world where trolls, necromancers, and demonic trickster demi-gods are a fact of life.

For me, this is where the fun of these sorts of games really kicks in – where the point is exploration, because around every turn is some interesting bit of scenery to marvel at or a new and novel situation to resolve or get involved in. Sure, a lot of them are fetch quests or “go slay the monster” tasks, but they’re fun because of the way the situations are crafted, each one a neat little short story to be told in the larger world, ranging from a bard missing her musical instrument to a talking dog who’s hit a bit of a snag in his relationship with his master.

So yeah, it’s kind of unfocused (and yeah, Fallout 3, which is mechanically almost the same game, is better at tying things together thematically), but my way of dealing with that was to knock the threat out early and then settle into the life of the freelance adventurer, doing odd jobs, crafting masterwork weapons and armor from ores I’ve mined myself, and generally finding my place in a well-crafed world no longer threatened by a looming apocalypse, but that still has hundreds of stories to tell.