When Play Embraces the Nihilist: The Power of Console Commands

Roger Caillois, possibly one of the most well-known theorists of human games and play, famously wrote that “play is ruined by the nihilist” in his book Man, Play, Games (1961). What he was getting at, in a nutshell, is that any game is an inherent agreement to play by the rules as the game outlines them. In chess, the opponent’s King could be toppled at any time—it would only take a reach across the board, after all—but each player agrees that this is not to be an action taken. The rules of the game become an agreed-upon set of rules for the world while the players are playing the game.

Nihilism isn’t something that can be easily brought across in mainstream game design. There’s something about nihilism that goes against the notions of crafted space that AAA design so famously holds dear—to the nihilist, play is an obstacle. To the nihilist, play is a series of rules, a barrier to a free space where the nihilist can frolic unperturbed. Conventional AAA game design sees nihilism as an insincere gameplay mode, something that disobeys the rules of the game-as-creation.

And yet, there is joy in the action. There is always joy in the simple action of breaking a rule, in the strange, taboo sense of achievement that it brings. And where else, where more harmless, than the digital? Caillois was writing, surely, about more analog forms of gameplay—boardgames, children’s fantasy-play, forms of interaction with rulesets where the rules are more malleable and the magic circle of play more loosely defined. To Caillois, the action of rule-breaking for nihilist purpose was a simple one, betraying the ideals of the game in service of one’s personal catastrophic satisfaction.

Videogames are a bit different. The term “verbset” is tossed around in design-centric circles; it’s a term that originates in ‘90s-era point-and-click adventure games, where the player’s set of actions to interact with the world were most often laid out on the screen as a series of verbs. It was direct. Explicit. In this game, you could PUSH and PULL, in another you could KICK or TALK. The verbset governed the way that a player existed within the world. Verbsets, like level or encounter design, form a part of the gameworld, and what the player “can” do is governed by which actions they have available to them.

The early 2000s saw the dawn of open-world gaming, a term used in reference to the vast, explorable spaces of a gameworld that came in sharp contrast to the more modular and walled-off worlds that prevailed in earlier, level-based game design trends. With the advent of more powerful technology, games could finally approach the mythical ideal of an entire universe—or, at least, an entire island.

Skip forward to 2003. A game called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is released by Bethesda Softworks. Morrowind, a high-fantasy adventure, is the third in a series of action-RPGs developed by Bethesda and the sequel to 1996’s Daggerfall. It was released to quite a bit of critical acclaim, and when I played it a few years later, it quickly became one of my personal favorite games.