Baldur's Gate Three

On Monday, I got out my lifelike doll named Jenevelle. She looks a bit emo, with a black pixie haircut, and a light scar across her face. She’s gorgeous, though. I paid a writer to script out some conversations for us, and an actor to record some voice lines. Jenevelle’s got a slight british accent, which makes her aloofness all the more attractive.

I know she’s not real, per se, but I still feel attached to her. On monday, I pretended we were at a party being thrown in my honor. I tried to make a move, but she shot me down. I’ve got some hope, though. She hinted I might have a chance someday.

I’m just kidding, of course. That would be deranged! Instead, I spent Monday playing Baldur’s Gate Three. I’m at the part where the tieflings throw a party for you for saving them from the goblins. You can romance pretty much everyone in the game, and this party’s sort of the first chance you have to make a move. I thought about hitting on Karlach, who seems to like me, but eventually decided on Shadowheart. There’s something about the pixie haircut that does it for me. She turned me down, but I think I’ve still got a shot. I just need to raise her approval meter a little bit.

Unfortunately, the second story is real. I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 recently, and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played. It also feels like one of the more shameful things I’ve done sober.

I’ve been struggling to figure out why. After all, I’ve been playing RPGs since I was a kid, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is nothing new: it’s a power fantasy where you (the chosen one) save the world, accompanied by a group of zany NPCs. If anything, it’s simply the newest, best entry in a long-established genre. But maybe that’s the problem. When I was sixteen, constrained by school and parents, video games liberated me. As a powerless teenager, titles like Fallout: New Vegas or Mass Effect 2 gave me an ability to play at being important. I could explore the world, meet interesting new people, and have real impact. Of course, I was going to do all of these things in real life, too–just not yet.

Now, though, I’m 29, and free. I have disposable income, and an interesting job. I live in a major metropolitan area, with more going on each weekend than I could possibly explore. Frankly, I have no excuse for not going out and doing these things in real life, and the unearned power of Baldur’s Gate only reminds me of the experiences I could (and do) have when I step outside and explore the world. As it happens, saving a virtual noble from a burning building feels quite a bit less satisfying than making a real person laugh.

That’s probably all there is to it. But this wouldn’t be a proper internet essay if I didn’t engage in some pretentious intellectual wankery about a harmless, low art cultural property. So:

I’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity recently. It’s tight, compelling philosophy, and worth reading the Wikipedia summary, if nothing else. Essentially, though, her thesis is that the human condition is defined by the tension between one’s freedom of action, and the constraints imposed by the world and other humans. Her ideal person is one who vigorously embraces their freedom while respecting others’. The greatest sin is to treat other humans as things instead of people.

Of course, Baldur’s Gate is all about treating people as things. Everything in the game exists to serve you. Here, perhaps, the game’s fidelity works against it. It’s unsettling to see a well-rendered, powerful human submit themselves to your will without even appearing to consider it.

Lae-zel is the perfect example of this. Early in the game, she treats you like an NPC in her epic quest. Unlike most other video game “companions,” she assumes she’s the main character and orders you around.

Of course, because this is a video game, you can simply ignore her wishes, and she always submits. She serves a sort of jester’s role: her “resistance” affirms your power, because you can tell her to heel, and she always will.

You become a sort of tyrant playing Baldur’s Gate. Does your friend feel uneasy about putting brain eating slugs into their ear? No matter. After all, it wouldn’t be a game if you didn’t have to overcome a little resistance now and then.

I’m confused as to why video games are viewed as an acceptable use of leisure time when playing with action figures or writing Mary Sue fan fiction aren’t. Both are adolescent pursuits in which the point is to be the only one who matters–probably because one feels that in real life, one does not matter.

Amusingly, it’s probably the fact that a video game requires no creativity that it provides a fig leaf of respectability. The player in that case does not have to take ownership of the fantasy–the fact that you’re experiencing something someone else made lets you accept the main character mentality without having to feel responsible for desiring it. Writing bad fiction, in contrast, lays bare your psyche in an important way. It shows that you would, indeed, desire to have the sort of experience that the video game provides, as opposed to being able to claim that you have no other option than to engage in the way the game offers.

I will note that there are games that do not set up an implicit frame whereby the player is all important. Suzerain is one of the best games I’ve ever played, in part because it puts you into a position of immense power, and shows how little you can actually accomplish without careful strategizing and effort. The interactivity of games provides wonderful potential to illustrate the mess and complexity of human dynamics without placing undue emphasis on the player. But gamers have to ask for it. I wonder if we will.