Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

As a writing exercise, I've chosen the ten books, albums, movies, and games that were most important in defining me as a person, and challenged myself to explain why.

Some of these set my artistic tone or left huge imprints on my personality, others changed the course of my life or career. With each item I can say, "if not for this, I would be someone else right now." But why? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. A strong feeling would compel me to put something on the list, and then I'd realize I had no clue how to unpack that feeling.

I follow behind my liege while she hurtles across the landscape on a horse named Daft Wooley. Sometimes she rides over waterfalls, or along the sides of vertical cliffs. It takes me a long time to detour around these things. I keep expecting to catch up and find her mangled at the bottom of some thousand-foot drop, at the center of a big horse-colored pancake. Somehow it never happens.

Adventure in the wilderness is great - just what I wanted when I took this job - but I think the cross-country travel is my least favorite part. Usually she gallops ahead, making just enough noise to wake up every wolf, bear, highwayman, and thug in the area, and then as I come sprinting along behind her they chop at my heels. I'm almost always caught in a brawl. The worst that happens to her is a few arrows in Daft Wooley's backside, which they both ignore. Nothing slows her down short of a dragon attack. ... And those just long enough for her to kill the dragon.

On the other hand, when she's taking her time it can be even worse. She'll jump the horse over some wall I can't climb, and I'll run half a mile around to a gap in the stones, then sprint back just in time to see her turn and jump over the wall again. She'll wander off the road and spend an afternoon picking snowberries by a cave, while I get slapped around by whatever comes prowling out, then I'll haul ten pounds of berries and an animal skin back to the apothecary. I once spent an entire day, from sunrise to sunset, dog-paddling in the ocean off the northern shore, in a full set of armor. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to look at but floating ice and Daft Wooley's hairy butt, churning the water. That horse ignores cold just like he ignores arrows.



I do a lot of fighting, because my liege has got quite a reputation, and she's constantly defending it. Outside the cities, most people attack her on sight. I've lost count of the people I've helped her smash, dismember, blow up, fry, or vaporize. People must be emigrating to this country by the cartload, just to balance out our personal death toll. I'm sure we're in the thousands by now. To assist in her dirty-work, she gave me a full suit of armor, a warhammer, three staffs of lightning, an enormous thorny rose on a stick that conjures demons, and a truncheon-shaped object called the "Wabbajack" that has a terrifying or hilarious effect on any living creature I bludgeon. Once I hit a guy with it and he transformed into a sweetroll, which my liege picked up and ate. I'd worry that the gods will punish me for all this violence, but I'm pretty sure that half these weapons I'm using were gifts from the gods in the first place. So - I don't know. Theology is complicated.

A long time ago she mastered smithing and learned how to transmute iron ore into silver and gold. Now, I'm carrying around a tangled wad of jewelry. Rings, necklaces, and circlets, all festooned with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, garnets, and all of them with powerful enchantments. Every time we pass through a town, she makes more of them at the forge. They’re all squished into the bottom of my pack - a glittering wad the size of a pumpkin. I’m carrying enough loot on my back to throw the economy of Skyrim into complete turmoil.

A few days ago she walked into an herbalist's shop and bought everything in the place from roof to basement, then paid by handing over a single diamond ring that was worth more than the building and the land it was on. "Keep the change," she said.

It's a sickness. She doesn't need the money; she just can't stop making them. The wad never gets any smaller. Back at her house in Whiterun the table is heaped with raw materials, waiting to become more treasure.



I can't remember what I used to do before this. If I ever get dismissed I'm supposed to make my way home - but where was that? Did I have friends before? A family? All I remember is fighting, and mountainsides, and caverns, and running, and the glowing eyes of the undead.



Actually, maybe I'm one of the living dead. Maybe I came from one of these haunted mausoleums my liege is always blundering around inside. A soul in bondage to this madwoman, like that spectral wolf she keeps summoning.

The wolf ... What is that thing? Did a talking wolf die, or did the ghost of an ordinary wolf start talking? Either way it’s unnatural. And she has a sick attitude. She's always making puns, and then barking laughter at them, and deliberately setting off every trap we find. And her breath stinks. She's non-corporeal, so I think she chooses to have bad breath, just to be annoying. My liege calls her "Comedy Wolf" and I can't tell if she's being ironic.

Sometimes I shoot arrows into Comedy Wolf, by "accident". She laughs at me as she disappears. Then a few minutes later she’s back, fouling the air with more bad puns, and starting another fight.

One day I cornered her in an alcove, while my liege was busy interrogating a priest a few rooms away. "Hey! Wolf!" I said, with my voice low, and turned on her. "Why are you always making trouble? You’re a summoned spirit. You’re a familiar. You’re bound by magic to help us, but instead you make a complete mess, all the time! Why?"

It was the first time I’d ever seen the wolf look surprised. She cocked her head to one side, and stared up at me.

"I’m helping the master," she growled.

"No you’re not!" I hissed back. "How is it helping, to cause chaos everywhere we go?"

She stared at me for a few more drawn-out seconds, then glanced around the room.

"Well?" I said, exasperated. I considered stabbing the wolf, just to get her to fade away for a while and leave me in peace. I reached for my sword.

Comedy Wolf grinned a huge glowing smile.

"I’m keeping things ... interesting!"

"That is not help," I said.

"It helps all of us. Things have to be interesting for the master."

She lowered her nose, staring more fully into my eyes with her own.

"If the master loses interest... We all die."

I found her serious tone even more disturbing than her usual irreverent one. "The master - like some demigod? A big dragon somewhere? What are you talking about?"

She looked meaningfully out of the alcove, up the hallway behind me, where my liege had gone. Then she trotted around me and disappeared in that direction. A few seconds later I heard the priest scream in rage as she bit him on the leg, followed by a clatter of weaponry and some confused shouting from farther away. When I wandered into the room it was on fire, and my liege was shooting arrows at a pair of guards who were hunkered down behind the altar. The priest was hopping on one foot, backwards, and waving a truncheon at Comedy Wolf, who was playing tug-of-war with the hem of his robe. The wolf’s eerie laughter echoed off the walls, mixed with the sound of rising flames.

Even though it was probably just another example of her bizarre sense of humor, that conversation lingered with me. What did she mean by "the master?" I tried to think of the most powerful creature I knew of - and there were many to choose from, since I’d been criss-crossing all over Skyrim, climbing mountains and plundering catacombs behind my liege. I’ve met kings and dragons and demons and vampires. Most of those meetings ended violently.

And then, a few days later, I was running like mad, trying to get some distance from an enormous bear. It had been upset by Daft Wooley’s thunderous passage, and as I rounded the corner and caught up with the horse, my liege turned around in the saddle and absent-mindedly shot a bolt of lightning from her hand, which killed the bear instantly, and struck with such power that the beast was fully cooked when it hit the ground. I could hear it sizzling twenty yards away. At first the sound didn’t register - because after all, this was just a typical encounter. Yep, just another typical ...

And suddenly it came to me. Who is the most badass creature in all of Skyrim?

I’ve started picking fights with clergymen and making bad puns. Anything to keep it interesting...

Bumming around in Skyrim, to unwind after a complicated work week. I had no idea where I left off, but I knew I could pick up a random quest if I just talked to someone important. There was a town nearby, visible through the trees. Markarth, says the map icon. I headed there.

I found the mayor of Markarth. Not too hard -- just eyeballed the largest house in the town and kicked my way into it. Picked the lock to his bedroom and woke him up. From a standing position on his bed, he gave me a ceremonial axe and appointed one of his guards as my personal slave. Yeah, okay. Stole a few of his things on my way out of the room.

Pickpocketed a drunk guy in the town square, on a lark. Somehow he didn't notice the bottle had gone missing from his hand. Swiped a statue of some bare-breasted goddess from a temple, and accepted a quest to do penance for my thievery. The priestess wanted me to go up north to a frozen little hamlet and fetch a young girl who has been chosen as the temple's new figurehead. That seemed boring. But wait; she's been kidnapped by rebels and hidden in a dungeon nearby, adding the requisite killing spree to my itinerary. There we go!

Ran past a guy trying to sell me "moon sugar" and he started fisticuffs, and my follower shot lightning into his guts and he fell off the bridge. Splash!

Parked my horse out of the way of the Forsworn tower, then blitzed through the building until I found a girl in a cage. Rather than go back to her parents, she wanted to go directly to the temple. Pff. Teenagers.

On the way back I killed more Forsworn. The girl stayed out of the way but my horse didn't. Proves which one is smarter.

Back in town I barged into a mansion, looking for loot or someone to talk to, and lying on the carpet in front of me was a valuable enchanted hammer. With a start I realized that I'd bought this mansion. It was mine, and I'd forgotten about it. It had weapons on the walls that I didn't remember putting there, acquired during adventures I'd also forgotten. I've been playing Skyrim for a long, long time. A bookshelf filled with pricey books I'd dredged up from various ruins, then stacked in neat rows, then abandoned. Must have been years ago. Plenty of eerie things have happened to me in this game, but this was in the top ten for sure. I bought and furnished a whole house -- and then just spaced on it.

"I'm not allowed to stand on furniture," said the girl I'd rescued, who was still trailing me around the house while I used the forge, cooked some food, and drank all 15 bottles of mead and 8 bottles of wine from the pantry I'd inherited with the house. I'm just cleaning up, since food never rots. The only way to get it out from underfoot is to eat it. Apparently the girl had a handful of standard child-appropriate phrases that she would just blurt randomly. Charming.

Eventually I led the girl to the temple as promised. Quest accomplished, yada yada. Sold a bunch of crap at the blacksmith along the way.

Rescued a guy named Thorald in the dungeons. Pandemonium with Comedy Wolf biting everyone.

Ran up to a fort. Drew all the guards out of their hiding places, and held up my shield to gain defense points as they pinged arrows at me. I could have set up a little camp stove and had lunch behind that shield, with skill points going up all the while. Bit of a hack. Meanwhile, my sherpa Illia shot people full of ice and paralyzed them and pitched lightning bolts at them and summoned a demon and a storm elemental and generally made a complete nuisance of herself. Bodies fell in the snow all around me and eventually it was quiet. Next time I want skill points I'm going to have to snatch all those magical weapons away from her first.

"Pull the chain over there but watch out for the spikes," said my guide, the master of the Thieves' Guild. So I walked carefully over to the chain, around the edge of the room, set myself way off to the side, and pulled the chain from a distance. With a loud clank, a huge grid of spikes detached from one wall and swung out into the room on a squeal of hinges. Behind me I heard "AUUGH!" as it plowed into the Master Thief and slapped him against the far wall. He got slowly to his feet, and without another word, we proceeded into the next room.

The Master Thief escorted me all the way to the bottom of the nasty dungeon, obligating me to kill all the tough monsters, and then when I got poisoned and fell down nearly unconscious, he left me there to die, even stabbing me in the gut to accelerate my end. So typical. Then the allegedly treacherous lady we were hunting found me and dragged me outside, treated my wounds, and explained that the Master Thief had been lying to me, and he was actually an usurper who should be brought to justice! Well how was I supposed to know? He was certainly behaving in character for a Master Thief.

I find it hilarious that there is no way to verify who is telling the truth in either situation, and the best you can do in the available dialogue is act skeptical and then agree to follow orders anyway. You're the baddest badass dragon-killer in the whole country, bar none, but when it comes to politics, you just roll with whatever the last person said to you. And why not? It's all corpses and loot at the end of the day. Just cooorpses and loot.

Some guy outside a dwarven ruin called the "afflicted" puked green crap on my horse. Any other horse and I would have been concerned. Not Daft Wooley.

Went skipping through the snow to the College of Winterhold to get a book translated, and the guy referred me to another guy all the way over on the other side of the map. How do they even know each other? So much magic in Skyrim, and messages still have to be delivered on paper, by hand. Some entrepreneur could make a fortune -- big semaphore towers perhaps. Pratchett would be amused. Before I left town I got training from the assistant archmage, paying him ten thousand gold, and then sold him 23 potions of "fortify two-handed" that I'd cooked up months ago, which got me all my gold back plus everything in his pockets, and his boots, and the clothes off his back. That's business.

I still have 57 more potions to unload. Past a certain skill level, you can turn reagents worth a few bucks into a fortune, and money loses all meaning to you. Once that happens, about three quarters of everything you can do in Skyrim stops being meaningful as well. You go blundering through fabulous ruins full of treasure, murder everything that moves, and just leave the treasure sitting there. Because when it stops being about the loot ... it's all about the corpses.

Now it's time to check out some random ruin on a snowy island just off the coast, even though it has nothing to do with the plot! Because I can! Because it's there! And because my horse can swim through icewater. Daft Wooley is a wonder of the animal world; a living creature that is not just too dumb to suffer, but actually too stupid to be affected by physical processes. I've tripped over rocks that are smarter than Daft Wooley. He just gallops through them.

With the shops drained of gold, it was time to find more adventure, so I leapt onto Daft Wooley and galloped in a random direction. Wheeee! Open-world adventure!

The winery - a cluster of barn-shaped buildings behind a low stone wall - floated up on my right, and since I'd never gone barging inside before, I decided to do it now. Skyrim follows a long tradition of adventure games where if you are not allowed to barge in to a place, that place has no reason to exist. The reverse also holds: If a place exists, it is so you can barge into it. Therefore you can measure the quality of a role-playing game by a ratio called the Barge Factor. A game with a high Barge Factor will let you plunge through any number of randomly chosen doors, without ever actually blocking your path. Instead, you will encounter increasingly dangerous things until one of them kills you. It's a design philosophy that simultaneously invites and punishes exploration.

Inside the winery I found a bunch of rude people on opposite sides of a countertop, serving and drinking wine. Standard stuff, so I kept on barging, into the storage room. There I found a locked door that required a key. My barging was stopped cold! Infuriating! And yet, the door must have a reason to exist. Probably some quest I hadn't started yet - the thieves or assassins guild maybe. That could wait for later. As soon as I've saved the world and become the ultimate hero of the land, I'll turn evil and start terrorizing it. Moo haa haaa!

I made a note to ransack and destroy the winery later on during my reign of terror. Locked doors are an affront to decency.

Back on my horse, I paused for a while, going over my stats. My skill points for heavy armor and two-handed weapons had been maxed out. There was no point to using my hammer, The Smooshinator, if I couldn't get any better at the skill and gain levels, and I really liked using that hammer... So I decided to move those skill points over to lesser things, like item enchantment and potion mixing, so I could re-earn the points by bashing skulls in. Boop beep!

Time to test this out. I rode north, to an encampment of giants, so I could kill one of them and claim a bounty. I had to park Daft Wooley quite a ways off to keep him from bickering with the mammoths that the giants were keeping as pets. Then: Whack! Thump! Heeyaaarrgh! The giant went down but it was a surprisingly close battle. Those skill points had really made a difference. On the other hand, I re-earned a few of them just in that one fight.

My mission was clear: Get into more fights. Yeah, that's a change-up, right?

I wandered off the trail and into Silverdrift Lair. Dead bandits and empty wine bottles were strewn around the place. The bandits had been ambushed and slaughtered by the undead, who apparently have nothing better to do after committing murder than stand around over their victims, drooling and clutching their weapons, until a new invader arrives. I wound my way through the tunnels, fighting harder than usual because my armor and weapon skills were weak. My assistant was a great help, swapping between various weapons as if to add maximum chaos to each encounter.

One in particular was memorable. I ran into a huge room to find a dragon priest - a spectral zombie creature with a skull for a head and rusty armor, and its legs ripped off. It was floating around the room, muttering and doing whatever it is the undead do with all their spare time (sudoku perhaps) and when it spotted me it shouted an explosive burst of air, making a sound like a cannon and blasting my body up towards the ceiling as though I'd been drop-kicked. Ooof! I hit the wall over the doorway and landed on my head, but in a few seconds I was up, staggering a bit, and I drew my hammer and charged straight for the priest. I'm all finesse.

As I raised the hammer, a bolt of lightning shot in from the side and lit the dragon priest on fire. My assistant was using the lightning staff. Good for her! I swung down and gave the priest a good whack on the head, but he didn't seem to notice, and clawed back at me so severely that I lost half my hitpoints. I backed up and fumbled for a healing spell, and as the priest moved forward to finish emptying his can of whoop-ass, a big armored demon came barreling in and collided with him. Summoned by my assistant, who had immediately switched weapons. As they bounced off each other the demon's stupidly long sword came down and chopped the priest in the shoulder. "THERE CAN BE NO OTHER END!" he bellowed in his death-metal voice. It was a mere distraction to the priest, but it was enough to get me back and healed up, and from a safe distance I hurled explosive fireballs at the pair. My assistant added more lightning bolts, and used a staff of 'conjure familiar' to summon Comedy Wolf, who dashed up and attempted to bite the priest on a leg, then after a moment of confusion, leapt for an arm instead.

Eventually the priest hit the floor, and dissolved into a pile of ash with a chunk of armor on top, but the battle wasn't over yet because my fireballs had turned the demon against me. "FEEL THE PAIN!" he wailed, waving his huge sword overhead in a way that was supposed to look threatening, but was spoiled by how he had to prance underneath it to avoid falling over. My assistant just stood back and watched, since it was her own summoned creature. I could understand, in a way. Attacking it would be like attacking your pet. If your pet got into a fight with your boss, would you help either side win? In this case, the question was moot, since I just ran around in circles until the demon's magical timer expired and it unsummoned itself.

So it went, through Silverdrift Lair and beyond.

I entered Bronze Water Cave out of curiosity and was tackled by a couple of angry bears. I didn't want to chop them up, but my assistant couldn't help herself.

I plundered Yorgrim Overlook and bashed the skeletons hiding around it. It was no more than an alcove in the rock, covered in snow, really.

I cleared out Fort Kastav, which turned out to be brimming with necromancers and elemental mages and was a tough job. I had to park Daft Wooley half a mile away behind a rock to keep him out of it.

I visited a mine called Whistling Mine - a depressing place, with nothing inside but a vein of iron ore and a few starving miners. That's another neat thing about this game ... some of the locations are about mood, instead of plot. The only point of Whistling Mine seemed to be, "Yep, sometimes life just sucks, out here in the frozen wastes."

I visited the college of Winterhold, and returned some books, then got zapped green by a students' practice spell gone wrong, then recovered a missing amulet, and picked up a quest to collect dwarven cogs for a teacher's experiment which was sure to go embarrassingly wrong and release some ancient evil and someone would lose an eye, yadda yadda.

I went into the college atrium and found a big glowing orb floating in it, over the central fountain. It was something I'd found in a dungeon some time ago, and the college faculty moved it here, apparently. A nearby instructor informed me it was called the Eye of Magnus, and that conversation led to another, and another, which led me into the caverns below the college. There I encountered the Augur of Dunlaim, a glowing cloud of blue mist, like a rave caught in a vortex. He told me to do a bunch of stuff and I nodded and said "yeah, yeah" and then ran outside, jumped on my horse, and rode over a cliff into the ocean. Because this is Skyrim, and you can do whatever you want.

Single-player open-world games are becoming a lost art, and that's a shame. The great thing about being the only real person in a world is that you're the only one who's "in on the joke". Things mean what you personally decide they mean. It also immerses you completely in a different culture, assuming the game has one. And I'm not talking about the jargon-laden multiplayer culture of online gaming either, which is defined more by mechanics and celebrity than anything else.

Also, why won't those damn kids stay off my lawn?!

Down by the coast I plundered a wrecked ship and found a crown, which I returned to the mayor of Winterhold. From there I zig-zagged west along the icy shoreline, peeking into dwarven ruins to collect any cogs or loot laying around. After a while I ran across the Frostflow Lighthouse, on a steep oceanside cliff. One of my dead horses was still outside the door, frozen in the snow where I'd left it months before. Daft Wooley was not alarmed. "I see you have previously ridden some chump-ass inferior horse," he seemed to say.

The interior of the lighthouse was a grisly murder scene. A mangled corpse lay face-down in the center of the room on the first floor, next to a deceased invader - some kind of goblin thing - among broken furniture and food and cookware and spattered blood. I found a few oh-so-convenient journals laying around, wherein the deceased tenants had written endless complaints about mysterious scratching noises coming from the walls and the basement. A stroll down the stairs to the basement revealed a huge hole in the wall, with cold wind blowing out, and a trail of blood and scratches leading in.

I'd been here before, and everything was the same as I'd left it. The first time, I'd gone jogging gamely through the hole in the wall, and somewhere in the depths of the icy tunnels below I'd found a severed head, and upon picking it up I was vexed to find that I could not drop it - it was a quest item and would not leave my inventory. "Habd's Remains", it proclaimed itself in the inventory box, and what gory remains they were: A head with the skin clawed away, no jawbone, and one blind eyeball remaining. Gross.

I carried that thing around for months, all across the map. A reeking albatross of an unfinished quest. But what the hell was the quest? What was I supposed to do with a semi-anonymous gory severed head? Standing around in the lighthouse now, I guessed that there was some room or document that I hadn't seen the first time. Ransacking the lower floors gave me some cooked fish, a few loose coins, and yet another journal complaining about the noises in the walls, this time from a little girl. At least I never found her corpse. Maybe she got away.

Finally I found it: A ladder on the upper story leading to the roof, and the gigantic lighthouse lamp. On a whim I climbed up to the lamp and lit it. Poof! Habd's stinking Remains vanished from my inventory, and instead I got some kind of blessing called "Sailors Repose" which amplifies all my healing spells. Well, that was pretty random. Rest in pieces, Mr Habd. At least now I don't have to smell like festering brains all the time. Oh wait! That's just my usual smell!

Heh heh heh.