To truly research the impact of mountains in the strangely misunderstood medium of videogames, I wish to delve into not blog posts and journalistic articles written by people with an agenda for or against the medium. In Czechia, we see it often, as do people in America. The vilification of video games as something bad, negative, something that just ruins children’s lives. It is a strange thing that TV seemingly does not.
Mountains in games have existed from the first RPGs. Their looks changed from pixels to polygons, and so did their function.
From impassable walls that shield the player from the immersion-breaking reality that there is nothing beyond, that the world their character inhabits must have a border, to a beacon that helps navigation, and even to a villain, a character, a challenge.
To truly describe the process of change in how mountains have been portrayed by the medium, I wish to utilize a select list of games. One that might increase or decrease depending on necessity.
A start I wish to find in the center. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the fifth installment of a venerated franchise of western role-playing games. In a promotional video, the lead designer Todd Howard mentions a mountain in the distance and entices the player that they can climb it if they so choose. It is there where we truly see a shift from mountains being unreachable to them being truly a part of the world.
While Skyrim’s reality was not close to what one would want as the only path up that mountain was a genuine prepared path, a road that the player must take to progress the story, I believe it to be a valid central point of my research.
From Skyrim into the past, I wish to look at the Grand Theft Auto series of games. Two of its most famous installments Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Grand Theft Auto V, include a mountain. In neither, it is as much in focus as in Skyrim. In those games, it serves as a simple part of the world where the player may or may not choose to explore.
The last two games I wish to mention in this article are the 2017 installment of The Legends of Zelda, titled Breath of the Wild. For many, that is a true personification of freedom. No mountain, no building, no ruin is inaccessible to the player. Often one might climb and think they are breaking the game, going to places that are forbidden only to discover a secret.
And in 2018’s God of War, the mountain serves not as a part of a game world but as a character, an imposing threat where the goal of the protagonist lies.
GTA shows a mountain as a simple reality.
Zelda as a challenge to be conquered.
God of War as a character, as part of a narrative.
Many more games will be added to this list, yet it is those three alongside Skyrim that I wish to use as points that keep me focused on the goal of my research. To do so, I will play parts of these games again.
To verify at least a plausible amount of objectivity, I wish to utilize numerous internet forums to express the feelings of mountains in games from the people who matter the most – players.
Broad is the topic of my research, yet I believe it is worthwhile nonetheless.