Commentaries on the Mysterium Nostalgia
from forrest
Book 1: The Mythic Dawn
“Greetings, novitiate, and know first a reassurance: I was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic.”
On December 31st, 2024, I spent exactly $236.74 all to play literally one game; I spent $161.02 on the Xbox 360 Slim in glossy black, and I spent $39.81 on an authentic Microsoft 360 controller, and I spent $35.91 on the actual game itself, and I even considered buying a mint-condition copy of the game’s official strategy guide, but this would have cost me an additional $41.36, and—considering that was more expensive than the game itself—it was all starting to feel a little excessive at that point, so I had to draw the line somewhere.
The game in question here is one that I’ve owned in one form or another since its release back on March 20th, 2006. Originally, I had it on the 360, back when I was fifteen years old, at which time I put in about 100 hours and earned all the achievements—according to my old Xbox Live account that I no longer have access to (“Wonderless,” look it up)—and about two years later, after I had sold the 360 for a vinyl record player, my mom bought me a nice gaming rig—a Dell XPS 700, to be exact—so I got the game again, at which point I started modding, making the game look and play like something it wasn’t, and—with a little help from Adderall XR—this led to many replays with different characters and different builds and all sorts of role-playing restrictions. The whole nine nerdy yards. I’m talking literal weeks’ worth of playtime here, which pretty much branded the game’s iconic symbol onto the gray matter of my underdeveloped teenage brain, and now it’s as if the game is part of my identity, my essence, my very soul—and it certainly felt that way back then, back when I was still a kid, in the Mythic Dawn.
Since that golden age, I’ve replayed the game every few years, putting in another hundred hours or so each time. In fact, I’ve played the game so many times that I can recite dialogue from it on demand—like the funny way Weebam-Na says “Rat Ragu with Powdered Deer Penis” or the very creepy but kinda cute way Falanu says “Do you happen to know what the fine is here in Cyrodiil for necrophilia?”—and I can even point to the location of the Ayleid ruin Vindasel on a map faster than I could my own home, and I can tell you exactly where and when to find Quill-Weave on the Gold Road on the 7th of each Tamrielic month, and I know how to duplicate any item using two copies of the same scroll, and I know how to get infinite gold by looting Dorian’s corpse over and over again, and I can even tell you exactly how long it takes to walk from Leyawiin to Anvil on foot with the default speed stat—which, in case you were wondering, is about 48 minutes, give or take, which is around one full game day, considering that one minute of real-time is 30 minutes of in-game time, which is yet another useless fact branded upon my brain, all of which just goes to show how much I really fucking love this game.
Of course, the game I’m talking about here is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The very same game that won five awards at the 2006 Spike Video Game Awards: Game of the Year, Best Original Score, Most Addictive Game, Best RPG, and the oddly titled Best Performance by a Human Male, which was, of course, presented to Sir Patrick Stewart—of Star Trek and Gnomeo & Juliet fame—for his portrayal of Emperor Uriel Septim VII, whose voice is the first thing you hear when starting up a new game, but not the last, because he accompanies you for only about twenty minutes before giving you his amulet and telling you to “close shut the jaws of Oblivion” before being murdered by a member of a fanatic cult while you’re just kinda standing there, powerless, in one of the few scenes where the game takes control away from the player, which kicks off the whole epic adventure.
And Oblivion’s not just any old epic adventure—it’s a beautiful epic adventure, even by today’s standards, but not only that, it’s also a twisted fucking nightmare. The province of Cyrodiil is a bright, colorful, Tolkienesque fantasy world, a work of art really, wherein both deer and demon frolic freely, a land where minotaurs are just as likely to bash your brains out as a wandering cat person is to tell you a funny riddle and wish you well on your way. It’s a huge, heinous, beautiful world out there, spanning 16 real square miles, dotted with sprawling cities, comfy settlements, dozens of camps, hundreds of forts and caves to ransack, and of course portals to some of the most deranged hell worlds you’ve ever seen. And I’m not just talking about portals to hell itself—because there are plenty of those, complete with fire, brimstone, and massive corpse-mashing machines—but also all the little pockets of hell found in the homes of seemingly well-adjusted citizens; I’m talking basements full of corpses and zombies and bodies hanging from ropes and severed heads on plates and blood all over the walls and limbs just scattered all over the floor. And this contradictory beautiful-twisted-nightmare aesthetic is made even more potent by the fact that the character models themselves are incredibly lifelike yet there’s just something totally off about them—maybe it’s their potato-like faces, or the weird way their eyes shift when you talk to them, or the fact that their dialogue is often batshit insane or just flat-out incomprehensible—all of which serves to give the inhabitants of Cyrodiil this uncanny feeling, like you’re standing right there in the valley itself, which adds an unsettling dreamlike quality to the whole thing.
And, by virtue of the open-world design, all of Oblivion’s twisted dreamlike beauty is accessible from the very moment the tutorial ends, right when you step out of the Imperial City sewer, where the majesty of Cyrodiil is on full display, right there, in glorious first-person: The glowing white marble ruins of Vilverin right across the shimmering waters of Lake Rumare, upon which a lone wooden boat bumps against a time-worn dock, on which sits a single lamp perpetually lit by the magic of video games; and behind all that, out there in the foggy distance, the rolling hills of the Heartlands, where the meadows stretch like endless oil paintings and the sky is smeared with bubblegum clouds and the trees sway gently in time with “Wings of Kynareth,” as if the music itself were a light breeze upon which all possibilities drift. And, if you’re lucky, you may exit those sewers when the timing is just right: at night, when the weather’s clear and the two moons of Mundus—Masser and Secunda—hang low in the starry sky, pale moonslight the only thing between you and infinity. And in these moments, you will fall in love with a video game.
The sheer majesty of Oblivion will make you want to cry—or, at least, it will make you put the controller down and stare at the screen, slack-jawed and speechless; that’s certainly what it did for me back then, in the Mythic Dawn, when I was fifteen, back when I was playing the game for the first time.
Oh, how I long to go back there, to the first time, to the Mythic Dawn. Back before cigarettes and alcohol, cars and girls, work and bills, marriage and mortgages. Back when televisions weren’t “smart,” in the primordial era, when I would come home from school, eat some Easy Mac, lie to Mom about homework, take a dozen Diet Cherry Cokes up to my room, draw every curtain, make sure the lighting was just right, pop some Adderall, boot up the 360, scroll through my friend list, send off a few mildly insensitive voice messages with the official 360-branded headset, gulp some Diet Cherry, start up Oblivion then just get absolutely lost in another world. Back when phones still flipped, in the dragon break, when I was never worried about losing my job or becoming homeless, when politics were inconsequential and the price of eggs was never even a thought that crossed my mind, back when the most stressful thing in life was coming up with some sort of excuse as to why I didn’t do my homework because I had stayed up all night slaying goblins. Back when MySpace was still a thing, in the chaos years, when I was beautiful and could never die, when the things I loved were always interesting and my attention never waned, when the top priority in life was looting enough gold to enchant the sickest blade in all of Cyrodiil. Back when Mom still bought me CDs from FYE, when home was suffused with the scent of lavender candles, back when I was naive but believed myself not to be, when I felt totally safe as if there were a forcefield around me at all times, back when I was still basically in the womb pretty much, when I really believed that time could be stopped and that things would never change, when I was unwaveringly in my zone, slow-walking through the streets of Skingrad pretending like it was actually me in there, in the television, walking by all the Imperials and the Nords and that one crazy Wood Elf who wanted me to kill all his neighbors because he believed they were spying on him or something. Back when I was fifteen, when I was still willing to try new things, back when first times felt like forever and nostalgia was just some word in the dictionary that I had never even thought about. Oh, how I long to go back there, to the first time, to the Mythic Dawn.
It should be noted that I’ve owned Oblivion on Steam since at least 2012, and I have a perfectly good PC capable of playing it. So, considering that information, you may be wondering something like, “Well—if you already have the game, why did you spend $236.74 to play it again?” And that’s a valid question, especially considering the PC version is arguably the superior version because it runs without stuttering every few seconds, has considerably better visuals in all respects, supports mods for both enhancing the game and fixing the many game-breaking bugs—of which there are many—has load times that are pretty much instant as opposed to forever, and offers a number of other benefits far too long to list here. So then, why did I do it? Why did I spend all this money on one game? Well, I have multiple answers to that question, such as the fact that the PC version doesn’t have native controller support, or the fact that I’m running Linux so the three hours of system tweaking I’d have to do to get the game in a playable state is time I’d rather spend doing something else, or the fact that there’s no achievement support on PC, and I’m sure there are other answers I could come up with given enough time. But, of course, all these answers are just excuses, because I think you already know the real reason I spent $236.74 to play some video game that I still own and have played dozens of times before, and it has less to do with actually playing the game and more to do with the fact that I am a nostalgic idiot.
So, in short, I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry Coke and the perfect lighting. I wanted to boot up the old 360 again, feel the smoothness of that perfectly curved controller in my hands while I navigated that glorious Blades user interface. I wanted to feel that little hit of dopamine whenever that green-and-gray badge popped up for unlocking an achievement or whenever a friend logged in or whatever. I wanted to watch my friends logging in and out in real time; I wanted to check which games they were playing, which achievements they had unlocked, like I was part of some sort of real living breathing gamer community again, like it wasn’t just me sitting there, alone, in front of my TV, in my office, thirty-something years old, pretending I was fifteen years old. No. I wanted to actually be fifteen years old. I wanted to fold spacetime, actually go back there, to 2006, to the Mythic Dawn. That’s why I spent $236.74.
And it worked—but not for long. Because after a few days, something felt off. Something was different. Oblivion just didn’t feel the same. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. So I approached it as if it were a book of riddles, some sort of Mysterium Nostalgia. I figured what I’d do was, I’d just keep adding new nostalgic things into the mix, I thought that if I just added the right nostalgia variables, I could solve the riddle, unlock the secret, reach a point where I felt like I was truly back in the Mythic Dawn: maybe the lighting in the room wasn’t right, so I experimented with different lighting; maybe I wasn’t drinking enough Diet Cherry Coke, so I drank more; maybe it was because I wasn’t listening to the right music, so I started listening to The Strokes and Radiohead again, to cultivate that 2006 atmosphere; maybe it was because my 360 friend list was empty and depressing, so I scoured online forums and found about thirty people to add to recreate that old online-community feeling; maybe it was because the smells were all wrong, so I bought some lavender incense and lit them while playing; and I even exclusively ate Easy Mac for about three weeks straight.
But even then, after adding all those extra nostalgia variables, Oblivion still just didn’t feel the same. Something was off.
But why? What was I doing wrong?
Well, I have some good news.
After playing Oblivion for the six hundred twenty-third time, I’m writing these commentaries to tell you that I have indeed solved the riddle of the Mysterium Nostalgia, and the answer was right under my nose the whole time, practically staring me in the face with sunken eyes.
In fact, the answer was right there in the game’s narrative—in Gaiar Alata.
Book 2: Gaiar Alata
“Deny not that these days shall come again, my novitiates!”
To understand the Mysterium Nostalgia, first we must understand the mind and motives of Mankar Camoran, the main antagonist of Oblivion. Camoran, like myself, was addicted to nostalgia, to an idea of a better time, to the way-back-when: the Mythic Dawn. He led a cult, the creatively named Mythic Dawn, which aimed to return the world back to the era of the Mythic Dawn, and he planned to do this through a plot involving the worship of a Daedra Lord named Mehrunes Dagon—the self-proclaimed “Daedric Prince of Darkness and Destruction,” who also sometimes went by “The Flame Father” or “The Master of Razors” or “The Father of Cataclysm” or “The Exalted and Most Puissant Lord”—all of which really should have tipped Camoran off that maybe this Dagon character isn’t really all that interested in returning mortals to a golden age and instead may just want to cause destruction or something, but alas, nostalgia blinds us to even the most obvious of truths, as will be revealed in these commentaries.
The Daedra themselves are god-like beings that reside in the planes of Oblivion—hence the game’s name—and they follow their own social hierarchies and rules, all of which are mostly incomprehensible to mortals. These Daedric princes constantly meddle in mortal affairs, and some occasionally try to take over Nirn itself—the planet on which Cyrodiil is located—but they struggle to do this because of an ancient pact which erected a barrier between the planes of Oblivion and Nirn, meaning they (the Daedra) cannot simply cross into Nirn whenever they please. But for the barrier to remain intact, a living emperor with dragon blood, wearing the Amulet of Kings, must light the Dragon Fires at the Temple of the One. And if the emperor dies, the Dragon Fires are extinguished, requiring the ritual to be completed once more by the emperor’s heir.
As you might have guessed, Mankar Camoran wants to destroy the barrier, as he claims to have deciphered an ancient text—the Mysterium Xarxes—written by Mehrunes Dagon himself, which, with the help of four esoteric keys, supposedly possesses the power to bring back the Mythic Dawn, which was basically a paradise era wherein everyone was immortal, according to Dagon, the self-proclaimed “Daedric Prince of Darkness and Destruction.” But for the Mythic Dawn to return, Dagon must be allowed to cross the barrier so that he can merge his fiery hell realm with Nirn; hence his need to manipulate nostalgia-obsessed mortals into assassinating the emperor, which will extinguish the Dragon Fires, which will destroy the barrier, which will allow him (the self-proclaimed “Father of Cataclysm”) to cross into Nirn and turn the world into a fun-loving paradise of immortality—or so the clearly evil demon lord claims.
How Mankar Camoran doesn’t realize that he’s obviously being played by an evil demon is beyond my mortal comprehension. Perhaps Camoran’s nostalgia blinded him to the obvious signs, or perhaps he truly wanted to believe in something more, something beyond the mortal plane—a place beyond suffering, where everyone was beautiful and could never die. Maybe he really did long for the old days, the Mythic Dawn, a time before moon sugar and skooma, maidens and magic, marriage and mortgages, and all that mortal coil stuff. Perhaps he dreamed of the womb, a temporal bubble wherein he could remain unwaveringly in his zone forever. Or maybe he just wanted power, maybe he was just pure evil or something, who knows, his in-game characterization is, admittedly, pretty shallow.
Of course, by the end of Oblivion, the Hero of Cyrodiil thwarts Mankar Camoran’s plans and saves Nirn. But before all that, the hero journeys through Gaiar Alata—Camoran’s first attempt at utopia, a sort of beta-test paradise—located in Mehrunes Dagon’s realm. And upon entering this paradise, it appears stunningly beautiful at first glance, but closer inspection reveals a heinous nightmare world wherein people are forced to work and fight endlessly; a place of immortality, but also a place where suffering is forever, because anyone who dies is reincarnated only to suffer and die once more, at which point they’re resurrected only to suffer and die again, and so on and so forth. And to illustrate the levels of depravity here, there’s an underground lair where a Daedra has locked people in cages, and the cages are slowly lowered into lava—screaming, gurgling, and sizzling of flesh all quite audible—before the cages are lifted to reveal nothing but ash, at which point the Daedra laughs maniacally, resurrects the victims, and starts the whole process over again. What the point of all this suffering actually is, I don’t know—the in-game details are hazy at best—but one can assume, since Gaiar Alata is located within Mehrunes Dagon’s plane of Oblivion—which is literally called “Deadlands,” go figure—that it’s all to power some sort of demonic hell gate or maybe even the Deadlands itself, who knows.
The point is, basically, to no one’s surprise, Mankar Camoran’s paradise turned out to be a hell world wherein people were doomed to repeat their terrible lives—and gruesome deaths—over and over again in the most heinous ways possible. So, of course, cult members who entered Gaiar Alata enthusiastically, expecting an immortal paradise, were begging to leave pretty much as soon as they got there, only to find themselves trapped, endlessly repeating themselves, dying over and over and over again.
So, at this point, you may be wondering something like, “What does any of this have to do with nostalgia?” And, well, the answer is simple: Gaiar Alata and nostalgia are one and the same. This is the first truth required to even begin to understand the Mysterium Nostalgia.
Let me explain.
Book 3: Nostalgia
“Know this, novitiate. Enraptured, he who finally goes unrecorded. Recorded, the slaves that without knowing turn the Wheel. Enslaved, all the children of the Aurbis As It Is.”
What is nostalgia, really?
One might liken nostalgia to magic, but everything is magic before explanation. So here, to the best of my ability, I will provide an explanation of what “nostalgia” actually is, although the explanation of nostalgia is less important than nostalgia’s effects on us as real fleshy human people.
If I had to describe nostalgia in a non-video game context, I would liken it to a sense that can draw upon the other five basic senses but is its own sense entirely. The sixth sense. And I know this because I’ve felt it—you have too, we all have.
With a single thought, nostalgia can twitch our noses, make us smell aromas that aren’t even there, like the scent of an old lover’s perfume; and it can perk our ears, make us hear notes that we haven’t heard in ages, like a familiar melody that we can’t quite place; and it can trigger our taste buds, make us savor foods that aren’t even in our mouths, like the taste of grandma’s chocolate-chip cookies; and it can even give us goosebumps, tingle our jaws, simply by looking at an old familiar thing, like the glow of a CRT showing some old game that, by today’s standards, looks like total shit but, through the veil of nostalgia, looks like the most whimsical thing we’ve ever seen; and, in this way, nostalgia can pull the wool over our eyes, make us see things that aren’t actually there. And nostalgia can work in reverse, too; we can smell a certain aroma, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, we’re in an old girlfriend’s house or something.
Not only is nostalgia a psychic sense but also a spacetime sense—a psychic-spacetime sixth sense that deals in the temporal, the folding of space, by transporting us, sensorily and psychically, back to a specific moment in our lives, forever tethering us to our pasts, almost as if nostalgia itself is core to who we are as individuals, as if nostalgia is part of our very identities—because who would we be without the things that came before? But nostalgia doesn’t just fold spacetime; it also makes that specific time and place seem perfect in our mind’s eye—like a paradise, a Mythic Dawn—as if, back then, everything was awesome and there were no problems whatsoever.
Nostalgia is incredible and can make us feel really good. But while incredible, nostalgia is also addictive, blinds us to the present, and has diminishing returns when excessively indulged—and, for the purposes of these commentaries, that last bit about the diminishing returns is most important; because the more we repeat a thing, the less special that thing becomes, until, eventually, we wear the thing out, at which point we tarnish the very thing we loved—like listening to a song over and over again in a short period of time: the melody dulls, and we become sick of it—until, eventually, there’s nothing left but a faint memory of the thing’s prior glory. And sometimes, upon repeating a thing, we may even start to notice the thing’s flaws more than we normally would; we may even start to nitpick the thing to death, which only serves to diminish the thing even further.
What I’m trying to say is, nostalgia draws us in, makes us play Oblivion, again, for the 17th time; because, in our mind’s eye, Oblivion is not only the greatest game ever created, but it’s also a fixture of a time and place in our lives, all associated with its own smells and sights and sounds and feelings; and maybe, just maybe, by playing Oblivion again, we can actually go back to that place. And it may work for the first few times, but nostalgia, like any drug, is a false promise of paradise—a Gaiar Alata—because after we’ve been there for a while, playing Oblivion for the 36th time, waxing nostalgic, repeating the same thing over and over, we start to wonder why everything feels different, why the experience seems so dull, why everything feels so decayed; but we persist anyway, we keep playing Oblivion, as if chasing some perfect high, some Mythic Dawn feeling, at which point it’s too late—the nostalgic thing has already been used up, changed for the worse.
And before we know it, Oblivion is ruined.
At least, that’s what happened to me, this last time I played Oblivion, for the hundredth time.
Book 4: Oblivion, My Oblivion
“Novitiate, you will sense a shadow-choir soon. The room you are in right now will grow eyes and voices. The candle or spell-light you read this by will become gateways for the traitors I have mentioned.”
Nearly every video game I’ve played, movie I’ve watched, album I’ve listened to, television show I’ve binged, or book I’ve read has been replayed, rewatched, relistened to, rebinged, or reread countless times. And I do this because I hate how everything decays, how nothing can last, how innocence is lost, how children grow up, and how adults forget. I don’t want to forget. I long for permanence. I need it. And the inanimate things from my youth are permanent, in a way. So, by playing the old games, I can feel both young and permanent, because the games themselves are unchanging, they’re the same old games they were back then, during the Mythic Dawn—or at least, that’s what I thought, until just recently.
The truth is, games change all the time—but not necessarily in the way you might expect. And I know this to be true because, upon playing Oblivion for the thousandth time, I realized the game had actually changed quite a lot.
At some point, while wandering through the beautiful meadows of the Heartlands, playing Oblivion for the millionth time, I started to think that the Heartlands themselves looked kinda samey, like everywhere else in the game, and then I started to think that Oblivion’s landscapes weren’t actually all that varied—almost generic, in a way—and at that point, something changed; the game felt a little less special, as if I were looking at a copy of the game instead of the original, like the game had been xeroxed and the ink had faded. And from that point onward, each time I booted up the game, it felt as if I were making a copy of it. The first copy was fine because the faded ink—the nostalgic decay—was more or less unnoticeable, but eventually, as days passed, it felt as if I were playing a copy of a copy, then a copy of a copy of a copy, then a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on and so forth, until eventually, the nostalgic decay was so prominent that I had to make a conscious effort to block it out, which meant I could never truly immerse myself in the game because I was too preoccupied with blocking out all the aforementioned decay; and, as a side effect, this caused my ever-sought-after sense of permanence to decay as well. That special feeling I had once associated with after-school sessions of cutting down zombies in old Ayleid Ruins while chugging Diet Cherry Coke and bare-fisting pretzels had melted away, leaving nothing but the acute awareness of myself being an almost-middle-aged man who had spent $236.74 to play a single game he already owned—all to pretend that he was fifteen years old again.
And then I started to notice a number of little annoying things about Oblivion. I began to nitpick the game to death. Like how, for a game that prides itself on its open world, player customization, freeformity, and role-playing options, the game itself is actually very linear, because while quests themselves are well-written and often surprising, there’s very little the player can do to actually influence the outcome of the stories, to the point that, at worst, it feels like you’re just a floating camera that sometimes kills people to push along a story that was very obviously written without you in mind; an NPC may thank you for “getting rid of those evil cultists” then proclaim you a hero or whatever, but that’s the extent of your involvement—you are the muscle to push along a pre-written story with very rigid outcomes that you have no control over. So, you end up feeling as if the only role you can play in this quote-unquote “role-playing game” is the one the developers want you to play. There’s very little real choice, outside of refusing to play outright, and when there is choice, it’s shallow stuff like, “Should I kill this thief and take the stuff back or should I report the thief to the authorities?” Whereas, maybe, if I want to play the role of an evil villain, I might want to partner with the thief, get a cut of the profits, then kill the thief and reanimate his corpse, for funsies, only to kill him again—Gaiar Alata-style—or perhaps I’m playing a selfish anti-hero who would demand a better upfront reward from the quest giver, or maybe I want to convince the quest giver to let it go and move on because I’m playing a monk-type character that believes in total non-violence or something. Don’t get me wrong, certain quests do have multiple choices, and some even have multiple outcomes, but these choices and outcomes feel so predefined that you might as well have no choice at all—there’s no true freeformity here, which is the game’s surface-level promise as an open-world role-playing game, so after awhile it all starts to feel like a trick almost, and this is especially prominent after replaying the game a few times, when everything starts to feel like some sort of weird deja vu in which you can predict literally every little thing that happens; which means that, on the second or third playthrough, there's no surprise left, which would be fine if this were a novel or something, but this is a “truly immersive” game wherein “the NPCs are not scripted” (according to the game’s director, Todd Howard), so at some point you have to wonder if you've been bamboozled here. But, of course, back then, when I was a kid, in the Mythic Dawn, it all felt magical, like I was truly in another world, so none of this mattered.
Then I realized how broken the game’s progression system is; since the game uses a scaling level system—the monsters level up as the player does—if you don’t build your character in a very specific way early on (max Endurance and Strength as soon as possible), you’ll get absolutely wrecked by even the wimpiest of mudcrabs because the monsters’ stats have advanced far beyond your own, meaning to succeed on the normal difficulty you must actively plan each level-up so that you can increase your stats in such a way that you don’t accidentally under-power your character, which is very easy to do, especially since the game gives very little guidance on how to avoid this; and leveling up the proper stats is often a tedious task, like mindlessly summoning zombies and hitting them over and over again for an hour so that your Blade skill increases at least 10 times, so that, upon level-up, you can raise your Strength attribute by the maximum of 5, and you have to do this for three different attributes per level—otherwise, you won’t be able to kill monsters who have leveled up more efficiently than you have—which creates a gameplay loop of literally making little check marks on a notepad each time you gain a skill-up, carefully watching every little thing your character does to make sure you don’t accidentally increase the wrong skills, which means you never feel immersed in the game because you’re always number-crunching and worrying about fucking up your build. And even the developers knew they had created an awful progression system, because they added a difficulty slider that can be adjusted at any time, almost as if they realized late in the game’s development that the progression system they had created ironically punishes the player for progressing, so they said, “fuck it, we’re not going to fix it, we’re just going to add this difficulty slider here, and besides, this is a game about pretty landscapes and vibes, so who cares.” And, of course, back then, when I was a kid, in the Mythic Dawn, none of this mattered. But as an adult replaying the game for the billionth time, it matters a hell of a lot for some reason: I want some real delicate craftsmanship in the games I’m playing; I want to feel like the developers really put love and care into it; I want to feel like the game is cohesive, not held together with cheap glue and string; I want to be able to freely build a cool character without having to keep a notebook full of level-up graphs so that rats don’t one-shot me, because that just feels dumb as hell. Of course, to get around this stupid rats-one-shot-you dynamic, I could set the game to the lowest difficulty—where everything dies in one or two hits regardless—but this kinda defeats the whole purpose of a progression system to begin with. But, again, as a kid playing the game for the first time, in the Mythic Dawn, I didn’t care about any of this, because it was all so new, and I was so fully immersed.
Then I noticed that the game’s melee combat is brain-dead stupid, basically just hitting the enemy with the same basic attack over and over, with very little deviation—sure, there are sideways power attacks, backward power attacks, and neutral power attacks, but these are just fancier swings that, in most cases, are worse to use because they take longer to wind up. And Oblivion gives you a lot of time to notice its brain-dead combat, because the enemies themselves always have way too many health points—due to the dumbass progression system—so every encounter devolves into just smacking your enemy with what feels like a wet noodle for twelve hours, hearing their little pained ooo’s and aaa’s as you watch their health bar slowly diminish, you yourself half asleep, nearly zonked out. And the damn zombies are the worst because they take even longer to kill due to their innate health regeneration, I mean they’re so bad that it’s hard to believe they even made it out of playtesting, or that there was any playtesting done on the game at all. Again, the difficulty slider solves many of these issues, but the issues themselves shouldn’t exist to begin with. And yes, there are magic spells that make things a bit easier, but outside of blasting things with fireballs or electricity—which gets monotonous—enemies under the effect of debilitating spells like paralysis still need to be smacked with the wet noodle a billion times to properly die; you could instead cast an “enrage” spell, which will cause enemies to attack other nearby enemies, but it might also cause them to attack friendly NPCs, which might trigger those NPCs to accidentally hit other NPCs, which might just trigger an all-out NPC war, and then, before you know it, you have a whole town full of dead NPCs, and sometimes this just happens randomly because the NPCs have some randomness built into their programming, which is all to say that cities accidentally turning into graveyards is a far too common occurrence; so common, in fact, that “What’s up with all the dead bodies in the Imperial City?” is usually the first or second post on any given online Oblivion discussion board; and the developers also knew this would happen, evidenced by the fact that they made quest-essential NPCs effectively immortal as a workaround for their buggy programming, which is just another tacit admittance of the game’s jank. Truly, the creators of Oblivion are some of the most impressive Jank Wizards of our time for how much jank they were able to jank the masses into spending money on. And furthermore, some spells, like invisibility, trivialize every encounter to the point where using them feels like cheating, and then there’s the fact that there are only like three or four voice actors, so every other NPC sounds exactly the same, and then there’s the fact that every cave looks and feels identical—same goes for every Ayleid ruin and Oblivion gate—and also you have to scroll through hundreds of items in your inventory to get to whatever you need due to a lack of granular item groupings combined with a janky interface, and also accidentally hitting your horse kicks you out of the Mages Guild for some reason, and the game doesn’t encourage exploration at all because all you have to do is just follow the fucking quest markers which consequently means that NPCs never give directions beyond stuff like “I put a marker on your map” as if the whole population of Cyrodiil is plugged into one big Google Maps database, and also the writing for the Shivering Isles expansion basically amounts to Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m so every line of dialogue triggers an involuntary cringe response, and also becoming a vampire overrides your character’s facial customization for some reason replacing it with a gaunt version of the default face which makes every character look like the damn Count of Skingrad.
OK, I realize that I might have gone off the deep end there, but the whole point is that during my most recent playthrough of Oblivion, I wasn’t actually playing Oblivion—not as I knew it—I was playing some different game altogether. The game may have been technically the same, but my perception of it had changed entirely, and this depressed me very much so indeed.
So, in an effort to restore my childhood Mythic Dawn vision of Oblivion, I figured what I could was, I could smoke some weed, get into an immersive headspace, just zone out playing the game. So I bought myself a nice blue bowl shaped like a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe—which I took to calling “Sherlock Bowlmes”—and also bought some of that legal Delta-8 flower, and then one night I packed up Mr. Bowlmes and took some micro-hits, just enough to feel a little something, and then I sat down in front of the TV and booted up Oblivion; and, for a few nights there, it worked, I was immersed once more, back in the Mythic Dawn, walking through the dilapidated streets of Bravil, savoring that perfect Diet Cherry Cola, conversing with beggars and mages alike, eating the best damn Easy Mac I had ever tasted, thwarting evil plots left and right, happily summoning zombies and striking them with swords and lightning bolts for hours to skill up, making my little check marks, head full of lore justifying all the game’s jank, fully immersed in just becoming the best damn Nova Knight Battlemage named “Forestralonarth” that Cyrodiil had ever seen. And this worked for about a week until my weed tolerance built up, and I had to smoke even more to get into the same hyper-immersed superstate. Of course, my tolerance built up even further, so I had to smoke even more, and then even more than that, and so on, until eventually, I was puffing on Mr. Bowlmes all the time, just totally zonked out every night, real high on dope, all in an effort to revive some long-dead feeling from my youth.
Then, one night, I guess I smoked a little too much weed, and I got so introspective and paranoid that I hyperfocused on the fact that I was, indeed, getting high every night all in an effort to revive some long-dead feeling from my youth—which was, of course, something I never had to do back in my youth, ironically, which my high brain also fixated on—and this made me feel pathetic, like I was a drug addict trying to get his fix not only on nostalgia but also on literal drugs; at which point, I became acutely aware that a part of my childhood had died, and I was trying desperately, in vain, to bring it back. And then, super high on dope, candles suffusing lavender smoke throughout the room, Oblivion still running in the background, NPCs talking nonsense in my periphery, I started looking at all the stuff in my office, and I noticed that almost all the games and DVDs and books and comics and records that I owned were from my childhood, at which point I realized that my entire office was pretty much just a shrine to myself, my own youth, which felt incredibly egotistical, in a way, but also depressing, because it meant that my entire office was full of stuff that was once very special to me but was now diminished, tarnished by the false promise of Gaiar Alata, faded by the xerox copy machine of nostalgia, and at that point, I became so flustered that I had to leave the room.
So I stepped outside, sat lotus on the dirt, and put my head in my hands for a whole hour, as if I were in some sort of dark meditative state, feeling like I was going to cry; and during this dark meditative state, in which I felt like I was going to cry, I realized that I hadn’t tried anything new—games, books, whatever—in a long long time; in fact, the last five games I had played were all old games that I had played dozens of times before. I could even name like twenty interesting newer games that I had recently dismissed offhand with some sort of, “they just don’t make ‘em like they used to, everything’s garbage now” reasoning—in fact, I remember specifically calling The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a pale imitation of Assassin’s Creed fused with Skyrim, without ever having actually played the game myself—which all served only to keep me tethered to the past, repeating myself, xeroxing the things I loved, instead of living in the moment, in the present, creating new experiences, ones untouched by the hands of the way-back-when.
And that’s when I realized:
I didn’t spend $236.74 on an Xbox 360 and a video game—I spent $236.74 on an existential crisis and a newfound addiction to marijuana.
Oblivion, as it turns out, was my oblivion.
Book 5: Return to the Mythic Dawn
“Greetings, novitiate, I was once you, asleep, unwise, protonymic, but Am No More.”
Yet, despite all that, I just kept packing more and more weed into Mr. Bowlmes, getting totally zonked out every night, until eventually I finished my trillionth playthrough of Oblivion, and I even unlocked all the achievements, again, for the quadrillionth time, just to prove that I had been there and done that, again.
But upon unlocking that final achievement, while standing in the courtyard of the New Sheoth Palace, Amber Mace in hand, Jyggalag dead before me, both Golden Saints and Dark Seducers now addressing me as the new God of the Shivering Isles, the real me—sitting there in my office chair, high as fuck, 360 controller in hand, watching that virtual representation of me in the New Sheoth Palace courtyard—felt neither pride nor joy nor satisfaction nor any sense of achievement whatsoever.
I just felt empty, and a little sad.
So, I bent over, sank the power button on the $236.74 existential-crisis machine, then sat there, looking at the reflection of myself in the blackness of the flatscreen, myself both real high and a little dead inside. There, in the black, I saw a thirty-something-year-old man—shaved head, pale face, baggy shirt, big sweatpants, kinda sunken eyes, real high and a little dead inside—staring right back at me, and that’s when I realized I had wasted 78 hours, 51 minutes, and 34 seconds of my life (according to the 360 save file metadata), not because I was playing a video game or whatever, but because I was looping, and I wasn't even having fun doing it. I was living in the past in the present, repeating myself, experiencing a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. But not only that, I also realized that instead of reliving the Mythic Dawn, I had tarnished it somehow, made it worse in my mind, as if I had personally strangled a little child version of me to death. And I also realized a few things about myself, such as: I’m the perfect petri dish for the cultivation of nostalgic decay. Because I just love how nostalgia makes me feel and am also psychologically compelled to finish anything I start, which often results in exactly what happened with my quintillionth playthrough of Oblivion—that being, enjoying only the first few hours of it, then becoming bored or disenchanted or whatever, but still forcing myself to complete it because I would feel like some sort of failure otherwise; like, if I stopped playing Oblivion after I had already told myself I was going to beat it, I would somehow be betraying myself, breaking my own oath; I would be failing to live up to my own expectations, like it’s a matter of personal responsibility or something. It’s hard to explain. I just know that, at some point, I was very passionate about playing Oblivion, but while actually playing it, something happened, and I was no longer passionate at all—but I still wanted to be—so I pretended, and ended up feeling like a fraud because of it; and, at that point, every time I sat in front of that TV with that 360 controller in hand, I was living in my own little personal Gaiar Alata, like: “If I love Oblivion so damn much, why am I not having any fun? And if I’m not having any fun, why can’t I stop playing? What the hell’s wrong with me? Am I going insane?”
Again, this is all very hard to explain. One thing I can explain, however, is that the passion I originally felt before starting my sextillionth playthrough of Oblivion was the product of nostalgia: a longing to return to the Mythic Dawn. Nostalgia had passionately compelled me to pursue Oblivion—to chase the Mythic Dawn—but when that nostalgia wasn’t powerful enough to maintain the passion, I crashed, hard, at which point I ended up noticing all the little flaws of the game, diminishing the very idea of the game in my mind’s eye, basically ruining Oblivion for myself, thus snuffing out a little piece of my childhood, at which point I was left wondering: What good is nostalgia if it causes so much ruin?
This is the riddle of the Mysterium Nostalgia distilled.
But the good news is, my time playing Oblivion wasn’t all wasted because, by staring into that black screen, I unlocked the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia. And it’s actually really simple, and it only requires four keys.
The first key is the most saddening of them all—it is the realization that no matter how much money we spend, or how many drugs we take, or how much we trick ourselves, we will never experience something for the first time a second time. First times are not forever. Time marches on. Any time we try to recreate a first-time feeling, we are really just experiencing the first-time thing a second time, thus creating a slightly faded copy of the first-time thing, and with each subsequent attempt, we are creating a copy of a slightly faded copy, so each copy will have less fidelity than the one before it, until eventually the first-time thing we were copying becomes so unrecognizable that we may even grow to dislike it, as I did with Oblivion.
The second key is the realization that nostalgia and obsession are one and the same. The endless pursuit of that special first-time feeling is not driven by real passion; it is driven by obsession—a selfish desire to feel a certain way, a gratification of self. And while neither nostalgia nor obsession is inherently wrong—as both can lead to feelings of immense happiness, accomplishment, or both—they can easily become twisted when indulged without moderation and introspection, as evidenced by my nonillionth time playing Oblivion.
The third key follows from the second, and it is moderation. It is the realization that if we love something then we must set it free, leave it alone, otherwise it will not stay golden in our minds. Overindulgence of the things we love turns them stale and mundane. Perhaps one day the things we love will return to us, but we must never force them to return; otherwise, we are harming the things we love, and we would not harm the things we truly love. Remember this: the idea of a thing already experienced is often better than the thing itself, especially if we have done it many times before, and this compounds.
The fourth and final key is the hardest to grasp, but also the most eye-opening—and thus the most important to unlocking the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia—and it is the realization that:
Every Moment Is a Nostalgic Moment.
Yes, we are living in a nostalgic moment right now, reading this—we just don’t know it yet.
The fourth key is the realization that we are always creating nostalgia, and therefore there’s no need to chase nostalgia at all, because we’re experiencing nostalgia literally right now. We’re actually creating and experiencing nostalgia all the time, with everything we do.
This is what I realized, back then, after I had beaten Oblivion for the decillionth time, as I was staring at myself in the reflection of that black flatscreen, real high and a little dead inside, sunken eyes staring right back. In that moment, I started thinking back, to even just a few months ago, and I realized that there was some nostalgia there—nostalgia for a time, a few months ago, when I was reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and taking my son out to the playground near the soccer fields every afternoon and listening to The Verve all the time. There was some sort of fuzzy nostalgia there, a special feeling. And then I started thinking back to a few months before that, when I was playing Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color for the first time, listening to The Fall and Guided by Voices a lot, when my son was still young enough for the playpen, and after work I’d get in the playpen with him, where we’d roll around, have tickle fights, and watch Blue’s Clues together, singing “Mail Time.” There was a special feeling there too, a nostalgic feeling. And then I started thinking back to the hard times, like back during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was living in a small trailer in which raccoons fell through the roof due to mold and water damage, when I was always worried about making enough money to pay rent, when my daughter and I would stay up late playing Fortnite and Minecraft together, when I was going through a phase wherein I listened only to Depeche Mode for some reason and was maybe drinking a little too much. There was nostalgia there, too. And I just kept thinking about all these golden moments, some near, some far, all nostalgic, every second of them.
Staring at that black flatscreen, sunken eyes staring back, I realized that each moment in my life is like a little epoch, and each little epoch has its own color, its own nostalgic flavor. And these little epochs didn’t just happen in my childhood—some happened just months ago, some even a few weeks ago, a few days ago, a few hours ago, some even just a few minutes ago, and some even a few seconds ago—like just now, when I was typing up that last sentence. All of it, nostalgic.
Every Moment Is a Nostalgic Moment—this is the final key, and with this final key, we unlock the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia. And that secret is:
The Mythic Dawn Is Now.
Consider for a moment, realize that when we're 20, we look back to when we were 10; when we're 30, we look back to when we were 20; when we're 40, we look back to when we were 30; and so on. Then realize that everyone has their own “good old days,” that every generation says their generation was the best, and that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Then realize that if these statements are true, then it must be the case that nostalgia is all around us, happening all the time; therefore, everything is nostalgic, therefore we are living in the Mythic Dawn literally right now. Then realize that every moment spent longing for the past is a moment spent missing the present, a moment spent missing the Mythic Dawn, a moment we could have spent creating a new first time—because first times can be forever, as long as we keep doing new things.
This is the secret: The Mythic Dawn is something we create ourselves, all the time, just by living in the moment.
So it’s time to abandon our pretensions—our back-in-my-day’s and they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to’s—and create some new first times.
Only then can we begin truly living in the Mythic Dawn.
If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.
#Oblivion #Essay #Autobiographical #ComputerGames
