No! I wanna play dolly!

One of my favorite Simpsons moments comes during the hearing in which the family is suing the Sea Captain’s “all-you-can-eat” seafood restaurant for false advertising. Pressed to tell the court what they did when they couldn’t find another all-you-can-eat fish place to satisfy Homer’s cravings, Marge breaks down and sobs: “We went fishing!”

I’m right there, sobbing along with her. That’s what can happen when you get a taste of something and it simply isn’t enough; you take whatever you can find that might sate that hunger, desperately cast your line. But even the finest line-caught trout, shining silvery in your bucket, isn’t the same as a restaurant-poached salmon, or even a manky plastic basket of deep-fried shrimp, unless you can go all Gollum-style and dig in right there on the pier. Still, you’re so hungry for fish you’ll take whatever the water puts on your hook…

Extended metaphors aside (I’m not really hungry for fish; apparently, I have to cut down if I want future generations to know the joys of sushi), it has been a hard few weeks of craving, ever since those schoolyard pushers over at BioWare gave me my “first one’s free” taste of Mass Effect. But it’s not so much the sci-fi RPG gameplay itself I’m jonesing for – though, you know, duh -- it’s the primary, adventure-starting act of character generation itself. Those few sweet minutes of tweaking an avatar’s face, facts and stats have had me itching.

Any – or maybe just many – old-time Dungeons and Dragons players will tell you the same thing: the purest joy in role-playing gaming is the making of your character, the process of turning rules, points, dice rolls and wish-fulfillment power fantasies into a brand-new, never-before-seen spellcaster, karate man, mutant laser-eye dude or hired killer. A new character, all pristine on a fresh sheet unmarked by grimy eraser-scars and pop-stains, represents a pure product of imagination and fantasy, a clean idea not yet grimed up by the frustration, compromise, disappointment and tedium of actually playing the game along with four or five other nerds and their own (clearly inferior) little dream-puppets.

Role-playing video games – especially single-player games – don’t have the same limited-only-by-the-imagination quality of the tabletop, though, even when they offer as much freedom of characterization, or a convincing simulation thereof, as Mass Effect. The options for your character’s profession and background are relatively few, and choosing from a handful of dialogue choices isn’t the same as extemporizing your character’s words, but let’s be honest; in practice, imagination can be quite limiting. Ninety per cent of characters’ backgrounds are plucked straight off the stockshelf, and a similar portion of players’ improvised dialogue comprises hackneyed threats and other tough-guy inanities. More important than character itself is external detail: “Yeah, I guess my dad was killed and I swore revenge, whatever; anyway, I’ve got these glowing red eyes, right, and these two wicked swords that…”

The magic of character creation in a game like Mass Effect is exactly in these externals, starting with the hours spent tweaking your character’s appearance in the face-building tool. This can be obsession at its best, fiddling with the scores of little sliders that adjust your Space Marine’s skin tone, the length of the bridge of the nose, eye shape and size, chin strength, lip poutiness, brow thickness, cheekbone height, haistyle, makeup…

Makeup? Yeah, makeup; given the choice – in videogames, not on the tabletop -- my characters will always be girls. Maybe there’s some sort of theory-level psychological reason why this is so, something about being able to use a play environment to safely experiment with gender roles or something, but it really boils down to simple aesthetics: in a dialogue-heavy game like ME, the camera’s either right up in your character’s yammering face or following obediently behind, and if I’m going to spend 100-plus hours in this virtual world I’d rather have my field of vision filled with the face and backside of a simulated pretty girl.

But it’s not all Weird Science wank fantasy, a digital Pygmalion trip. Building a character at the facial-detail level creates a deep investment in the game world, a bond of significant power. My cravings right now are not so much for the opportunity to whip up some kind of fantasy asskicker – I’ve been desperately downloading freeware and shareware RPGs, the role-playing addict’s cheap fix, and they haven’t cut the jones – but for making that investment, feeling that bond… and then playing hundreds of hours of action-packed, sci-fi dress-up-dolly. I’d felt that connection forming at BioWare’s press day, and having my bonding time with “Irene Shepherd” cut abruptly short gives these pangs their special bite.

So, it’s back to Oblivion, I guess; I’ve got to do something before I go crazy and start searching craigslist for a local LARP chapter. Gronking again through that played-out world, trying to find bits of unplayed game, doesn’t really appeal to me, but that’s a secondary problem which can be smoothed over with gallons of Gallo; the character customization is there, the face-creation is there and the dress-up dolly is there, even if the novelty’s gone. It’ll be another couple of weeks before I’ll be served fresh fish, so for now I’m going fishing.

"No amount of piling up skulls thrills any more"

I breathe in still. The music grows calm. I breathe out.

Ragbag Buntara creeps towards me from her bed in the dirt of Imperial City. My will wobbles a tightrope of death. Yet like her, I stare up breathlessly through my whiskers at the fuming ruins, the shattered shell of the Church of the One. Smoking in its crumbled midst, an enormous stone dragon: moments ago paralyzing and golden and alive, a righteousness-spewing manifestation of Akatosh himself! Need I stress he’s one of the great Nine Divines, the very gods who cement this world of unmatched beauty and evil, our teeming Cyrodill? Without winged Akatosh’s summoning, all on it would have been smothered methodically from above by the four hands of the axe-wielding titan, Mehrunes Dagon. For the last 357 sunsets, the Daedric Prince has hatefully stabbed holes into the stretched skin of the land, mountains to deserts to oceans, pushing through his gates of blood and bone countless abominations! Thousands have died in his name, from penned horses to an entire city: that infamous pile of rubble, Kvatch. Today, Sun’s Height 13, he materialized in the great city and was exiled by Akatosh in a storm of flame. Perhaps he’s even dead. Or both are dead.

Yet even now, Buntara begs me for a coin, my smashed and enchanted weapons still vibrating from the battle moments ago that would end the world. There is a Daedric arrow shafted through my groin, one of several souvenirs of erupted demon war. She looks directly at me, an armoured Khajit catman named Grandpa, my fur as bright as the sun. Then asks, “Tell me again how you and Martin defeated Mehrunes Dagon.”

To be honest, it’s a long fucking story. Thanks to Emperor Martin summoning Akatosh at the cost of his existence, the Line of Kings is broken, the world without a leader. But I soon learn walking the lonely land - now free of Dagon’s prehistoric fiends and buxom spider queens - that’s all anyone wants to talk about any more, from the Black Horse Courier office outward. The battle legend pours even to the extradimensional Shivering Isles, once domain of Mehrunes’ cousin Sheogorath, another Daedric Prince, Lord of Madness instead of hate. Sheogorath has a special place in my grit teeth. After his queer gate showed up on the lake outside of Bravil it took an extensive penance.

There I was trapped for weeks, kept from my artistic heart: my hand-decorated wizard’s tower Frostcrag Spire, where so much of my passion lies in this life of mindless killing and errand-running. There: every skull I’ve ever liberated is piled. It’s home to my massive library and sycophant servant boy, cruelly commanded to remain in the bedroom conservatory, a little herb-garden gnome. Though I have no taste for his praise, he reminds of me the price of engaging the corrupt cities of men. In the tower’s rooms below, an unmatched collection of weapons and armour, trinkets; but also an easel-framed painting traded for keeping quiet about a certain royal infidelity; also, the head of a sick wizard’s mother; best of all, a handmade spiral staircase made of inexplicably floating paintbrushes carefully arranged upward, hanging there as if life were some mere game with cool graphic glitches.

But with both Daedra regals snuffed, I admit I’m not quite sure what to do with my life any more. To circumvent their disruptive ambitions, I’ve thrown myself into Felldew addiction, salivating and scrambling desperately through the hollows of a giant tree for the right kind of man-sized bug to juice – soon after, a battle with a dark mirror of myself; I’ve ripped the keystone hearts out of 15 Oblivion planes – hewing others’ reality; I’ve even leaped into a book, the secret Paradise of Mankar Camoran, destroying yet another dreamworld.

So now, the idea of lackey-fetching singing Ninroot for a wine-burping chemist or finding some fool woman’s debt-ridden husband in an orc dungeon seems positively … janitorial.

I’ve said it then. I believe I’m suffering post-Oblivion depression, healer. The mountains have been claimed and flattened. And no amount of piling up skulls or climbing floating paintbrushes over walls I’m not physically supposed to thrills any more. And I’m thinking about Ragbag Buntara. I’m thinking the next time she asks me for a coin … I’m going to have to hurt her. You know. Just for something to do as the guards rush to their deaths.

Better a debauched canary than a pious housecat, after all.

In the Mad God's maze

The tale of the adventure of the journey through the realms of extradimensional madness begins, as all these tales begin, in a moodily-lit prison cell furnished with only a low stool, some fetters, and a skeleton. The lifer across the hall hisses the taunts he always hisses through the bars, and presently the doomed Emperor and his bodyguard arrive to make their usual secret-door passage through the dank chamber en route to an inevitable assassination. The cell’s occupant is freed, charged with a terrible trust, and sent off into a world of magic, mystery and drug-addicted cat people.

Another day, another character launched into Oblivion. This time around, it’s a sneaky little Dark Elf swamp witch who’s had the sacred Amulet of Kings pressed into her manacled hands by the Patrick Stewart-voiced sovereign. Tasked to find his blood heir, deliver the Amulet and “close shut the jaws of Oblivion” – the demonic realm threatening to overrun the world of life and love – our heroine will do as every heroine before her has done: dick around endlessly on other, more interesting quests. Maybe buy a mansion and a pony.

But first, the aforementioned journey into the domain of Sheogorath, Lord of Madness! These lands are known as the Shivering Isles, and they’ve just been loaded, at great expense in time and cash money, onto my XBox’s hard drive. I’d been a long time away from Oblivion, beloved time-devouring masterpiece of electronic swords n’ sorcery, and the release of this new expansion, with its promise of “30 hours of additional gameplay!”, had long been a red-letter date on my mental calendar. Fantastic frolics in a twisted land of insanity! New weapons, armor and enemies! Terrain and architecture that’s not wholly Western European! You can imagine my excitement.

Fact forgotten in the fever: I have a full-time job, now. Last time I’d done much diving into the ‘Bliv, I was a “full-time” (hyuk) freelancer with a side gig power-washing the seats of an outdoor theatre, and taking eight hours out of an inclement Tuesday to fireball goblins weren’t no big thing. Now, between the oatmeal-grey requirements of my cubicle, the necessities of house- and life-keeping and the responsibilities of love, I can maybe slip an hour or two in edgewise, here and there. Back when playing videogames was the closest thing I had to a job, nine-to-fivers used to kind of sniff and say, “Must be nice.” I took it as jealousy; I should have taken it as a command, answered “Yes! It must be!” and moved up to that “next level” I keep hearing about.

That’s not what happened, though, and as much as I may mourn the passing of a time where I could (usually) pay the rent and eat (poorly) while spending 20-plus hours a week with a controller in my hand I can’t, as the hay-farmers say, wish for a different field. For now, I’m on the other side of the must-be-nice equation, and my dark-elven vixen (Pilsne; a name of great evocative power) will have to be content with incremental progress over the months, exploring the Shivering Isles in hour-long sorties while I read in my cubicle excited emails from my colleague still living The Life about mighty deeds, twisted ruins, Golden Saints, obliterated villages and magic mud puddles.

I wonder, though: how do the WoWers manage it? If I can barely gather the moments for an hour or two of solo Oblivion, how do World of Warcraft’s millions of multi-players manage to find the time for the days of grind that fantasy game requires and still keep a roof over their computers. It’s not all students, kids and shut-ins on assistance – my own office is filled with guys who work longer hours than I do, and still they’re coffee-talking about their Level 60 whatevers, their electronic indicators of hundreds of hours of devoted service in the cause of online good/evil. Is there a secret to being a job-having power gamer?

It’s easy to see now where the standard dismissive “no social life” and “no sex life” jibes come from; these are certainly the most obvious means by which a dedicated digital fantasist might make room for the hobby. Are there other, less pathetic, ways? My girl insists regular yoga practice has the effect of adding hours to one’s day; could I perhaps harness the dharmic power of the asanas to squeeze more Oblivion into my life?

More on that in a future column. Until then, here’s my review of the Shivering Isles expansion:

[SPOILER WARNING]

There’s a crazy guy named Shelden who wears this purple plate mail I totally want to steal.

[END SPOILERS]