What is Winning?

In most games you follow the traditional story arc: introduction to gameplay/basics, multiple quests in ascending order of difficulty, reaching a tragic low point quickly followed by a final fight against the source of all evil (followed by credits). A game like Skyrim (and most of the Elder Scrolls games), however, has multiple avenues for "success." You can jump into the main quest and perform all of the actions desired of you--or you can ignore it entirely. You can explore the world and take quests as they come to you. Winning becomes leveling up to a certain point, defeating a Daedric god you would have no idea existed if you stuck to the main quest--you have an open world sandbox where winning isn't a one-path-solves-all. Morrowind (the third game in the series) can even be beaten in 11 minutes (you can find a playthrough on youtube) simply because you have the freedom to go wherever you want and create almost anything within the world.

Now, this argument leaves out sports games, racers, etc., but the gaming industry as a whole has adopted the Hollywood structure when it comes to constructing a majority of their games. As Joey said in class, it has become THE industry for storytelling. And yet, what is Skyrim in terms of film comparison? Does it have one?