So, I've been trekking through the completion of Skyrim over the past few weeks, doing a little here and a little there. I like the game, though I have some fundamental problems with it. One of the problems that I have with the mechanics of the game is a problem that crops up fairly consistently throughout modern games (and some media) depicting fantasy and that is this: there's a total lack of triggers for any kind of magic.
What the hell does that mean? Well, I believe that in the interest of not having to come up with a fake language or translate everything into joke Latin (and where video games are concerned to not force the player to wait through a short phrase or possibly get killed while reciting a spell) or maybe even out of a fear of Jack Chick-like satanist proportions, spells don't exist anymore in video games or even many fantasy films. They have simply faded away.
What do we have in their place? Something that appears to be psychically summoned magic, a force that obeys the beck and call of whoever is concentrating really hard right now. You see, for me, part of the thing that makes magic magic is the inherent linking of ritual, particularly the word. The Shouts of Skyrim seem more like magic than what wizards do in the setting. After all, magic is the working of the will upon the world through speech and gesture—isn't the working of the will on the world through concentration just psychic manifestation?
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the so-called "spells" of Skyrim (and many other games that share this fault) look like they just think about what they want to do and then point? That seems rather anticlimactic and un-magical to me. Where's the ritual? The mystery? The secret occulted lore? I suppose you could make the argument that preparing your mind to walk the paths that allow these things to manifest is hard and requires study... but I can't see anything that looks like an intrusion of the spell-structure into the physical world. What the hell exactly is written in those spellbooks you can buy in Skyrim? Thought-patterns?
I'm not sure why magic became a casualty in modern fantasy. Is it because them kids want faster gameplay? Maybe something that looks and feels and sounds like guns but with fancy projectiles? Its it because of the Satanism scare and the shying away from anything that could be classified as "actual magic" (what a stupid phrase, it makes me sick to type it), or because the developers of games and writers of films are just too lazy to consider what magic should look and feel like?
I can't answer that question to my satisfaction, but I feel as though my observations can be borne out in any one of a hundred examples. Maybe I'll think up some more later and share them with you, if anyone wants to discuss the issue further.
I think it harkens back to some of the Playstation-era RPGs, where spells had lengthy animations, featuring shouting the spell's name, an assortment of gestures, and then the effects of the spell itself. Star Ocean 2, for instance, had fairly fast-paced real-time combat, but higher level spells would take 10-20 seconds or so to run through all of the animations and do about as much damage as one of a high level fighter's special attack, which would go off instantly. Lots of people used to complain about lengthy and repetitive spell animations in games. The instant silent spell in games could be the result of this backlash.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting point, and I can definitely see where it might have caused backlash, and perhaps rightly so.
DeleteSpells aren't the only way to work magic. Think about the mythology and supernatural traditions of different historical cultures. Incantations and ritual aren't a universal requirement for magic. If psychic manifestations aren't magic, what are they?
ReplyDeleteThat's also a fair point—and there's all kinds of magic, of course, but I feel like ritualistic magic (what we would recognize in ancient Roman, Egyptian, etc.) has been given the short shrift lately.
DeleteAnd since the systems that DO have a sort of channeling magic (like literature such as The Wheel of Time or Amber) don't explain it at all. They still call things "spells" (when they clearly aren't) and still have a lot of the trappings of ritual magic. It just looks like laziness from here.
I think you've answered your own question in the second to last paragraph. Magic is just used as fast paced gun equivalent to make a fantasy game play more like an action game (a first person shooter in the case of Skyrim).
ReplyDeletePersonally my favorite kind of magic is the extremely weird, and dangerous kind, sort of like in Warhammer Fantasy where it's all the power of chaos and it has the potential to mutate the caster or drive them crazy, however I don't think this sort of magic would lend itself well to a fantasy game like this.
In Skyrim the character is a one-man-army that plays as a simplified fighter/thief/wizard. In Oblivion, if you wanted to play as a wizard, it's not like being a magic user in AD&D, you can't have your party protecting you after you've used your spells; for the sake of the game's pace you have to cast your spells at will.
I'm not quite sure what this lost 'magic' you're lamenting really IS. I don't claim to be an occultist or expert of any sort, but I did take a semester or two in Arabian Magic at university, and I can tell you that 'D&D magic' is almost as ridiculously far from 'real magic' (meaning 'whatever some people used to do in various real-life historical cultures') as Skyrim's. Well, it might be very slightly closer because the rules acknowledge the existence of logos (verbal component) and praxis (somatic & material components), but then again... one might argue that Skyrim does the same, only it's not represented. It's a matter of game scaling: just as it's safe to assume that the towns in the 'real' Skyrim have more buildings and residents than what you see in the game (which is restricted by memory, rendering and CPU limitations), and how the combatants probably know a larger number of different attacks than the game has animations for, so do spellcasters actually recite quick magical incantations, only they're not actually represented by separate sound files. In fact, the game sort of supports this interpretation: unless you have a specific perk, casting spells DOES make a noise that others will notice.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a valid interpretation of the way in which Skyrim deals with magic—and perhaps the way it has been dealt with as a whole lately. A sort of "pared down version" that still makes reference to the more complex ritual system that classical fantasy has come to expect.
DeleteAlso, I don't mean to suggest that D&D magic is really LIKE historical practices of "magic" except in the way it draws upon a certain set of ritualized elements, particularly those which are physically expressed and seem to have gained traction and cultural cache—namely, "spellbooks," ritual, and vocalization.