Table Of ContentTodd Howard
Influential Video Game Designers
Series Editors:
Carly A. Kocurek
Jennifer deWinter
Todd Howard
Worldbuilding in Tamriel and Beyond
Wendi Sierra
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First published in the United States of America 2021
Copyright © Wendi Sierra, 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sierra, Wendi, author.
Title: Todd Howard : worldbuilding in Tamriel and beyond / Wendi Sierra.
Other titles: Influential video game designers.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. |
Series: Influential video game designers |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031432 (print) | LCCN 2020031433 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501350955 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781501350962 (Paperback) |
ISBN 9781501350979 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501350986 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Howard, Todd M. | Video game designers--Biography. |
Video games industry--History. | Elder Scrolls (Game) | Fallout (Game)
Classification: LCC GV1469.3.G37 S54 2020 (print) | LCC GV1469.3.G37
(ebook) | DDC 794.8092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031432
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031433
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5095-5
PB: 978-1-5013-5096-2
ePDF: 978-1-5013-5098-6
eBook: 978-1-5013-5097-9
Series: Influential Video Game Designers
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface from the Series Editors vii
Guest Foreword: Holly Green x
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
2 Worldbuilding as Design Perspective 29
3 Little Catastrophes 43
4 Big and Crazy and Cool: World Style in Elder Scrolls Games 75
5 In His Own Words: Transcript of Irrational
Interviews Podcast 105
6 Visions for the Future 123
Gameography 135
Bibliography 142
Index 152
List of Figures
1.1 A screenshot of Bethesda’s first game, GridIron 7
1.2 While the HUD (head-up display) was similar to other
shooters of the time, Future Shock incorporated a substantial
amount of worldbuilding in its design 9
1.3 Cyrus, the main character of Redguard 17
1.4 A comparison of action points in Fallout (bottom) and
VATS in Fallout 3 (top) 24
2.1 Silt Striders, one of a limited number of transportation
options in Morrowind 39
2.2 Post-apocalyptic world style in Fallout 4 42
3.1 Tarhiel, the ill-fated wood elf in Morrowind 49
3.2 The Prospector’s Shack is a static micronarrative in Skyrim 54
3.3 Micky the water beggar waits for players outside Megaton 60
3.4 Two Arts, and a choice for the player. Image courtesy
Brandon Dennis of Oxhorn 65
3.5 A quiet sunrise in Oblivion 68
4.1 Ald’ruhn, shadowed by the haze of an ash storm from Red
Mountain 84
4.2 City Map of Ald’ruhn, with the Under-Skar at its center 85
4.3 Shameer, a minor NPC in Oblivion 92
4.4 A transcription of the dragon alphabet 98
4.5 The Pip-Boy in Fallout 3 picking up a radio station 102
6.1 Shelter draws on Fallout’s aesthetic, but takes the franchise
in a new direction 127
6.2 Blades is Bethesda’s ambitious attempt to bring the
Elder Scrolls series to modern phones 129
6.3 A comparison of Base Building from Skyrim (bottom),
through Fallout 4 (middle), to Fallout 76 (top) 131
Preface from the Series Editors
While some may beg to differ, we would argue games have profound
capacity as a storytelling medium. And, indeed, two of the designers
featured in this series so far have landed in games from work as
storytellers—in theater in the case of Brenda Laurel, and as a writer,
in the case of Jane Jensen. In this fourth installation in the Influential
Video Game Designers series, Wendi Sierra explores the work of a
third, different type of storyteller. Todd Howard comes to game design
largely from other roles in the game industry. But the titles he’s shaped,
too, are notable for their distinct approach to storytelling.
The worlds of Howard’s games are built for epic tales, but they’re built
in part through a careful attention to the tiny details that enrich and
enliven. Seemingly inconsequential moments in the game often reveal
complex backstories that have shaped the characters and the world they
move through. To scratch the surface is to find not more surface, but an
entire other world. “There is another world, and it is this one” is a line
apocryphally attributed to either Rainer Maria Rilke or W. B. Yeats, but
which MacKenzie Wark suggests is most likely a détournement by the
novelist Patrick White based on White’s reading of the poet Paul Éluard,
who may or may not have been building from the work of someone else
entirely. Regardless of its provenance, the line suggests something of
how varied and complex individuals’ experiences can be even in what
appear to be shared contexts.
The seemingly superfluous specificity of the world of games like
Morrowind enables players to experience them with a high level of
individuality, providing experiences that feel personalized, unique.
In Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, Eleanor West manages
an unusual boarding school. Miss West sells the experience to her
students’ guardians as a therapeutic environment, but in reality Eleanor
West’s School for Wayward Children is a secret sanctuary for children
who have traveled through wardrobes or trunks or doorways into other
viii Preface from the Series Editors
worlds and now, having come home, are desperate to go home to the
worlds they’ve found. Eleanor has spent an adult lifetime mapping
the worlds her pupils long for—dark and light, chaotic and orderly,
beautiful and bizarre. No two worlds are the same, because no two
children are the same. As Sierra demonstrates, no two playthroughs
of one of Howard’s most expansive games are the same because no two
players are the same. Sometimes, video games give the right stories to
the right people.
Perhaps this is the true beauty of any creative form, that there is no
single, prescriptive way to create nor a single, correct way to experience.
Video games have always provided alternative worlds, inviting
players to engage with designed spaces. In large narrative role-playing
worlds, players are asked to literally go to another world, inhabit
a different space. These games, in other words, have always been
an escape. However, as we write this at a moment of tremendous
uncertainty, a global pandemic has reshaped our daily lives in ways we
could not have anticipated. Millions have become sick and thousands
have died. As this heartbreak unfolds, the world has shifted around us.
Regardless of the individual fates of beloved coffee shops or favorite
arcades, however, this is a moment after which we know the world will
look quite different. Victor Turner speaks of a liminal state—a process
of becoming—during which “normal” is upended and transformation
is in process toward something new. There is another world, and it’s
unfolding around us, for better or worse.
This is a moment of reckoning and of reimagining. In it, video
games have come to fill a particular niche, enabling us to travel to other
worlds, to play together, to explore and imagine. This book represents
a new approach of game designer vision—a world representation that
focuses on fidelity, on tiny details that might go unmissed. Howard
is the game designer of the quotidian, of the everyday. His worlds
represent a type of normal that is environmentally constructed, from
tiny ants on walls to complex NPC relationships. This design vision
seems to harken more to the architect rather than the novelist. And
indeed, Howard’s own approach to academic engagement with his
Preface from the Series Editors ix
work might be part of a design vision that asks the work and the
environment to speak for themselves. The scaffold is there for multiple
experiences to unfold.
As we pensively write this during the spring of 2020, we are
reminded that the worlds of video games are what designers make of
them, but the world we all live in is what we make of it. We’ll see you
on the other side.
Jennifer deWinter
Carly Kocurek
