Trying to describe something intangible is like attempting to tie a perfect double-windsor while bombarding a moving target with a barrage of bullets from your mother's favorite uzi after being thrown from a passenger jet at 37 000 feet.
It's not impossible, it's just really frikken' hard to do.
(But it should be stressed that one should always look their best, especially when falling from the sky).
The 'intangible' I speak of is the thing that keeps us playing. That strange and elusive quality that keeps us coming back for more. And no, it's not the same stuff that my grandma used to put in her lemon pies when she didn't think we loved her enough. That was meth.
So what the heck is the 'intangible'?
Well, it's the element that game designers don't always manage to get right, no matter how royal their budget is. It's the thing that gets us to play “just one more game” when we said we were going to go to sleep four hours ago.
Using The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim as a lens to look through, we can see the 'intangible' at work almost immediately.
A game like Skyrim has an extravagant made-up world that you can visit. But Skyrim is more than that. It's a place you can stay.
You can chill out, get lost, try calling home, realize that you don't actually get very good cellular phone reception in Tamriel, and so you try hitting the phone against a tree, but then you realize that violence and small consumer electronics aren't the best of friends.
So now you have to get the damn thing fixed, but the mages don't understand roaming charges, and the blacksmith can't fix the battery…
…Unless you want that battery to stab someone. He can manage that.
A stabbular-phone. It'll catch on, I'm sure.
But back to the point, Bethesda has managed to captivate me in such a way, that whenever I'm not playing this game, I WANT to be playing this game.
If you develop separation anxiety (like I have) when you are away from Skyrim, then you know what the 'intangible' feels like. You might have that same feeling for other games, and maybe some of you even have it for other people.
So considering how vastly different everyone's 'intangible' is going to be, (like a psychedelic-neon-double-rainbow), it's remarkable when a game can please so many people at the same time.
Life is good.
Love, Gord.