Futurismic have my forty-sixth Blasphemous Geometries column entitled ‘Skyrim and the Quest for Meaning’.

This column took me quite a while to write as I struggled to put my finger on precisely what it was that annoyed me about Skyrim. Initially, I thought it might be the bleak nature of the setting that reduces life to a series of to-do lists and selfish ambitions with easily quantifiable outcomes. However, while I am no Randian and tend to think that this vision of life is to be rejected rather than embraced, I simply could not fault it. I mean… life is ultimately about jumping through hoops until we die, right? Then I began to reflect upon the game’s lack of narrative and how playing it felt a lot like playing World of Warcraft without engaging with the social realities of guilds and pick-up groups. This was more promising as Skyrim is indeed a nightmare of pointless grind hidden by the tiniest narrative fig leaf imaginable. Then it occurred to me: if life really is nothing more than grind, why should we seek to immerse ourselves in fantasy realms that are similarly bleak and mechanistic? Skyrim‘s real problem is that it is an escapist fantasy that denies the possibility of escape:

While all video games ultimately reduce down to mechanical feedback loops and branching decision trees, most game designers soften the impact of their mechanical reductionism by hiding it behind a series of dramatic conceits that place the events of the game within a particular context which, though meaningless in mechanical terms, will provide the players with a context through which to understand their in-game actions, a context that will allow them to connect on an emotional level with the plots and characters of the game.

As usual, when faced with the bleakness of the world, I turned to Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic for advice. The great sage’s advice to me was clear and unambiguous, when confronted by the horrors of existence and the feeling of bottomless dread that can only come from the realisation that we are truly and hopelessly free, the only possible solution is to laugh and launch into a nice little musical number as searching for the meaning of life is really nothing more than a quest for the most psychologically convenient form of self-delusion available.