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The miracle here is that something born from such monstrous breadth and simulacral ambition is simultaneously so compassionate towards its own world, so curious towards its affections, and so abundant with roles to give it beyond a stage for dull histrionics. Call it hindsight that tells me the significance of that. The fashies at the RPGCodex tell me (among many unscrupulous things) that an RPG is cleromancy, a Yijing with a billion yarrow stalks; Bethesda nowadays seems to see it as fodder for the display TVs at Best Buy. Morrowind is closer to the former but in truth is neither: it’s a library, a massive, adirectional constellation of interlocking places and ideas. Rendered out of a holy reverence for the physical world, Vvardenfell’s domestic sphere - its largest towns down to its smallest props - incarnates this constellation with powerful inclination. All of Vvardenfell is imbued with the potential for explosive force, that its inhabitants may at any point in time prop up tons of brick and clay for a new house down the road, or at the very least cook a new meal in their homes. Or sometimes not. Vvardenfell’s propensity for social momentum - a pattern so central to its anxieties - lies on a spectrum deciphered through its construction: consider how Balmora’s perpendicular roads anticipate future growth as much as Hla Oad’s rotundity suffocates it, or that the Telvanni’s mushroom towers, in their decades of growth to maturity, are as much of a gatekeeper to a newly landed noblesse as their inhabitants are. Everything in Morrowind exhibits this vivid intertextuality: even conversations with NPCs trace themselves through the world in a web of hyperlinks like a big encyclopedia. And the best parts are when this network manifests an order attributable to a human-settled place but untethered to the autocracy of a developer, when Vvardenfell comes of its own as an honest-to-god world fraught with tantalizing contradiction: high level dungeons scattered throughout early areas, a knife found under someone’s pillow, secrets and insights unearthed from a mundane chat with a commoner. Much like the real world, insight comes from unexpected places.

Playing Morrowind is ultimately a flashbulbing of this network into perceptive existence through interpretation, Morrowind’s greatest means of compassion. The Dunmer pride, for example, would be difficult to tactfully handle with the theatrics of voice acting and scene blocking; but here, informed from numerous in-game literature ranging from Edward Gibbon-esque historical tomes to religious esoterica, it’s brought to a comprehensive light as an admirably bold and assertive loyalty darkened by abject cruelty. In this sense, Morrowind shares the anthropologist's dream: to chase down that digestive absorption of a world, swallowing it whole and untangling its people and customs; or moreover, to see geist in a corner of the earth. Morrowind at its core is concerned with anthropology as a performative act: each nerevarine is a reweaving of the world, a new blind man’s hand placed upon the elephant. And every one of these of playthroughs is accomplished through a concatenation of intimate encounters along the way: every stray look at a Hlaalu propaganda pamphlet becomes the chance to turn a thief’s life around to safer profits, every accidental murder could induce the religious to a life of penance (delivered swiftly through a custom Fire Damage on Self spell): in other words, every playthrough becomes a reconciliation with Vvardenfell. Rarely has there been a game that has offered so many variables in the construction of a personal story like this; but more importantly, so few have fostered a tonal ecosystem so conducive to this kind of imaginative reflection. In a genre so often evaluated merely by the player’s actionable range in pre-determined scenarios, it’s Morrowind’s dominant use of text, its sustained moments of silence punctuated by gravelly little voice clips and silt strider calls, that marks it as one of the most elegant and delicate exchanges with the player ever seen in a game: the player here doesn’t choose in a situation, they make their own situation up entirely.

Multiplicity, in other words - to see a little virtual world rebirthed through perspective and gaze - is Morrowind’s greatest gift. I don’t doubt that Morrowind is the only RPG capable of doing this - I think that might even be the very purpose of the genre - but it’s the only one I’ve come across that really gets this idea; or at very least, it’s the first to personally affect me in this manner, to make me understand roleplaying to my core. The soft violence of the modern world can withhold us from this sort of plasticity: our thoughts and actions swell to such perilous autonomy in the day-to-day that they run out underneath us, without us. We are offsprings to a cultural export that has taught us that this gap within us either does not exist, or is, in some time still inaccessible to us, amendable in whichever legendary figure the context demands (free will, praxis, etc) - in other words, we dream of a return to that ordered place in which our actions and ideas make sense. And sometimes after playing Morrowind, I get that sensation, that same one when I put a great book down: returning to the real world, the violence and pain in life’s ideas neutralized for a brief moment, seen again in an anonymous curiosity like hanging above it all in a dizzying amazement, fertile ground for the new. It’s one of the most joyous games I’ve ever played.