Uncertainty, choices, ‘Skyrim’ and you

Skyrim's full map, with all locations listed, as scanned by gaming blog Codamon and published by Prima Games.

A curious thing has happened to me and some of the people I know best.

We’re about the same age. We grew up with modest means, pursued good educations, fiercely asserted our independence, landed solid jobs and, now in our late 20s, are in a position to write books and become spies and fly to Mars and stuff.

But no one’s making any moves. As “Jordan Jesse Go” co-host Jordan Morris (who is not among the people I know best, but whose Internet activity I follow with some interest) observed recently, we’re at a point in our development when we believe making a choice — any choice — means eliminating alternatives, perhaps for good.

That’s a terrifying prospect when you’re trying to decide what you ought to do with the rest of your life, and it’s a weird, uniquely stupid flaw among people who’ve been taught to expect everything.

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM, released last month to deserved and nearly universal adulation, isn’t helping matters.

I’m not the first person to say this, but my thesis doesn’t work unless I make it clear: SKYRIM is almost inconceivably big. You begin the game as a medieval warrior of your own making, mere moments before you’re to be executed for allegedly participating in an assassination plot. Just as you’re about to be beheaded, a dragon attacks; 20 minutes and one dungeon crawl later, you’re free to do as you choose.

And choose you must, because the game won’t do it for you. The main narrative thrust in SKYRIM concerns the sudden appearance of a dragon destined to bring about the end of the world; as the last of the Dragonborn, or “Dovahkiin,” it’s your job to slay that dragon.

Or not. The people, dragons, giants, witches, mammoths and elves of Skyrim will wait. In fact, you can put off the end of the world for as long as you’d like, and you might as well, because there are hundreds of hours of other stuff to do.

You can spend your time in Skyrim’s hyper-detailed cities, rubbing shoulders with societies of thieves, warriors, assassins and magic-wielding scholars and unraveling the mysteries plaguing each of these groups. You could take to the game’s truly great outdoors to chop wood, mine ore or hunt bears, wolves and saber-tooth cats for their pelts, the better to level up your armor-smithing skills with. You could plumb the depths of the many, many dungeons, most of them beautiful in some surprising way, to find powerful artifacts, which you can choose to equip or simply sell off for some extra coin.

Or you could dabble, as I have. With nearly 40 hours logged, I’m a third of the way through everything and all the way through nothing. So many doors have opened to me — so many promising narratives and quest lines; so many opportunities to change the contours of this world; so many ways to customize my thieving Khajiit (a cat man, basically, complete with tails, talons and earrings) — that I’m hard-pressed to choose any of them, for fear of occluding the other ones.

Of course, this is a game. You can rewind or replay or rethink again and again and again. If you lock out one method of play, it’ll be waiting for you in your next go ‘round, should you choose to begin one.

But that’s cold comfort to somebody who already has extraordinary difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. What if all of my save files become corrupted? What if I get all the way down one of the quest lines and discover that the rewards aren’t as superlative as I imagined? What if I simply run out of time and interest, and I shelve the game before I experience its best moments?

I’m seized by what-ifs, in SKYRIM and elsewhere, and I’m worried about the way gaming has grown to prey on that. Credible, open-ended magnificence has been the hobby’s holy grail since the earliest text adventures on the most primitive computers, and SKYRIM is the absolute closest we’ve come to realizing it. Go anywhere, do anything. Or, if you’re like me, go everywhere, do nothing. Because what if, right?

Not everyone is seized by this sort of indecision. My roommate, who has spent considerably more time in SKYRIM than I have and has much more to show for it, flourishes when allowed to make his own choices. Within a few days of the game’s release, he had dominated the assassins’ guild, here called the Dark Brotherhood, and crafted some incredibly savage-looking armor and weaponry. He chose what he wanted to do and executed.

But for the rest of us, there’s an argument to be made for letting smarter people call the shots. In a year stuffed with incredible open-world titles, it’s nice to march through games that lock you into a specific sequence — PORTAL 2, UNCHARTED 3, SKYWARD SWORD and even relatively rigid iOS puzzle games and platformers, like Halfbrick’s sublime JETPACK JOYRIDE.

What does that say about me? Am I a sheep? Or am I suffering from the same complex gripping every first-world grocery store shopper? After choosing from 90 different varieties of toothpaste and dozens of kinds of soap, I’m looking for some direction in my downtime.

In a recent TED talk, Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia professor who studies choice, cited a number of studies of human decision-making behavior. In each instance, the person who was confronted with fewer or no choices — whether between kinds of jam or life-support options for a sick infant — felt better about the outcome.

“Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it,” Iyengar said. “Choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints.“

And yet westerners, especially Americans, insist that they be afforded as many choices as possible, even when they know it’s not in their best interest.

To be clear, I love SKYRIM. The breadth, quality and fun of the thing are astonishing.

I just wish the game would tell me what to do. Not how to do it, or how I should prepare, but to literally push me in one direction or another. Because right now, I’m afraid to take the first step.