I'm a fantasy nerd. I prefer settings where the bow is favored over the gun and walking is still considered a valid way to get between locations. I particularly like them because thanks to grandpappy Tolkien, fantasy settings are under no obligation to be set in our universe. Things aren't quite the same over in Sci-Fi land, where you almost never see the story set in anything other than a hypothetical future (or past, if you want to get screwy) of our own civilization. I think that's part of the draw of Star Wars. Despite the classic line of "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," Star Wars isn't a sci-fi so much as it is a fantasy story set in space.

However, when I do feel like drinking from the sci-fi well, this grounded nature is actually appealing to me. It's a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine, introduce a new concept to our world and observe how things are forced to shift to adapt to it. Usually the first element is of course "practical space travel." But the closer we get back to our world, the more we recognize it and distance ourselves from space fantasy, the more careful you need to be with it. Once you reach Next Sunday A.D., any sci-fi element pretty much needs to be directly tied to the plot or it's just a distraction.

Let's take the Godzilla franchise, for example. Apart from maybe two movies (Monster Zero and Destroy All Monsters, which both take place decades in the future), these movies are implied to be taking place in the year they come out. And in my personal opinion, the quality of each one can basically be traced to how close they stick to the real world apart from where the plot required it. The original Gojira had precisely two unreal elements: the King himself, and the Oxygen Destroyer used to kill him. Both of which are of course essential to the plot. Godzilla 1985 is one of my favorites, and to me the weakest element is the Super X hovertank thing, specifically because its existence wasn't necessary to the story, especially in the otherwise serious, grounded plot of a walking nuclear holocaust returning to terrorize a country after thirty years. And the weakest part of the Heisei era was the psychic subplot that ran along the entire series, which had no real purpose but to tase the plot back into action whenever it wrote itself into a corner.

Oddly enough though, the sillier things got the less you noticed it. By the second half of the Heisei era you had hovertanks, time travel, mecha, psychics, and magical insect gods running around. But by that point everything had been introduced and suspension of disbelief was simply far more lenient. Perhaps the easiest thing to add a Toho movie are the Maser tanks, which either shoot lightning or a freeze ray depending on which movie you're watching, but basically existed for no reason but to be an anti-kaiju weapon that never, ever worked. But in almost every incarnation their existence could pretty much be rolled with as a logical side effect of trying to do damage control on walking disaster areas, especially since it looked like a variation on what we already had.

The same trend applies to the MCU. In the first Iron Man the only sci-fi elements are the armor itself, a bunch of hologram interfaces, and Jarvis the AI. And while the AI was a bit weird at first it showed off Stark's genius and by the time Avengers 2 rolls around it'll be a central plot point. In Captain America the only Sci-Fi bits were HYDRA, supersoldiers, and the Tesseract. All three were central to the plot, and the last one directly set up the Avengers. Thor was Norse Narnia and can basically be excused from this comparison because it's a fantasy story that uses the real world for context. But by Captain America 2 we have winged jetpacks, robot arms, flying aircraft carriers and an offhanded mention of a sorceror, but we can get away with it this time because we've gone through so much in the series that it can be taken with a straight face. If you had tried throwing all that into Iron Man 1 it'd've been too silly.

Do I have an overall point to this? Sort of, I'm mostly thinking out loud. I think my point is that while weirdness can snowball, the closer you start to reality the slower you need to introduce unreal elements. The thing that kicked all this rambling off was recently watching Godzilla X Megaguirus, which was set in an alternate universe Japan where the capital had been moved to Osaka after Godzilla's original attack, a second attack prompting them to totally abandon nuclear power. It was all pretty interesting to watch as every sci-fi element - even the black hole launching killsat - existed as a direct response to the central element, Godzilla. All but one: a hoverjet used by the story's central organization. It wasn't a big thing, but its presence was so unnecessary to the plot that it was just distracting, like if you were watching a gritty crime drama where one of the detectives had a laser gun that nobody ever called attention to.

In conclusion, sort of, reality and fantasy exist on a sort of spectrum. The closer you get to reality, the more carefully you need to tie each fictional element into the plot, and then you're allowed to snowball from there, and by the time you reach a fantasy story the only things you need to leave "normal" are the things that separate fantasy from surrealism. I'm all for gun-toting cyborg raccoons hanging out with talking trees, but if you want to put them in modern-day New York you need to have a good reason for it.

I Ignore The Elevator Because I'm An Idiot.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is my favorite game of all time. Obviously this biases my views, but it doesn't invalidate them. Those being that desiring a challange is a good thing, but needing to self-flagrate oneself to do so is not.

To elaborate; one of the primary counterarguements to my belief that Skyrim is a vastly inferior (though still decent on its own merits) game to Morrowind is that many of the features that I feel inhibit its ability to be a truely immersive game can simply be ignored. One doesn't NEED to fast travel, one doesn't NEED to use the compass, and so on. I find this notion entirely foolish. As the title to this entry implies, this is much like saying one doesn't NEED to use the elevator, they could climb up the side of the mountain if they really wanted to. While technically true, it's also an idiotic proposition, as doing so would be nothing more than self-injury out of pride, and the presence of the elevator will nag the climber the entire way up, saying "you could stop being an idiot any time you wanted."

To me, it's an insult. That the part of the game I find so beloved should be considered 'purely optional,' but other parts of the game are unskippable essentials. It's piss in my stew. Why do you get to skip the beautifully immersive game world and the hours of getting lost in the wild, but I can't skip the poorly written, linear questlines, or the excessive combat against bandits for the umpteen millionth time? What makes those aspects of the game more worthy than the ones I love? To be made an unavoidable tenant of the game, while the part I came for merely an 'option'?

It's a trend I've seen plenty in modern gaming. Too often are games eager to rush you to the end and show you everything, making the very idea of hard work a laughable, backwards notion. In both World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 (though far more the former than the latter), crafting is put on the sideline, an inherently inferior option to simply blundering in and getting violent at everything downrange until you're given something shiny. Guild Wars attempts to amend this by making some of the best endgame items only obtainable through crafting, while in World of Warcraft the products of crafting are inevitably inferior to those found on the corpse of the biggest, angriest monster of the day.

But even with what Guild Wars does right, it still is entirely too eager to rush players to the endgame, making anything but violence and XP grinding a waste of energy until you hit the level cap. This is mitigated by the fact that you're automatically leveled down to the area you're in, but this rings of the same arguement given for Skyrim. "You don't NEED to head to the endgame content, you can stay in the low-level zones for as long as you'd like!" Again, an idiot notion that one is free to cripple themselves out of pride all they want, ignorant of how foolish they make themselves feel by doing so.

I feel that modern games are too eager to babysit their players. Gone are the days of having to discover the solution for themselves. If the game isn't entirely linear to begin with, then the correct path with be brightly highlighted all the way down, with everything else left 'optional.' I'm reminded of Thief 2, where you're thrown into a sprawling, nonlinear area with a goal to accomplish, maybe a few hints, and nothing more to guide you than your wits. Any modern 'stealth' game I've played recently would make the level entirely linear and put a big glowing arrow over your target, leaving you with no more work to do than to move forward and be violent at anything that gets in the way.

I find it no surprise that the further I move forward in gaming, the more I find myself looking back. I'm not trying to be nostalgic here; I truly hope this is merely a 'phase', like the obsession with CGI in movies. I suppose one could blame the increasing popularity of games for the issue, as more and more casual games flood the market. Videogames are popular enough now to be widely known, but new enough to be 'newfangled' and full of fans who couldn't navigate their way out of a paper bag without a flashlight and a map.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, once this newness wears off developers will begin to respect the average gamer's intelligence again, and maybe I can walk through the wilderness without it constantly trying to tell me how to get back to the plot.