Saturday 20 July 2002

Newbie: Taking the plunge. (Screenshot from the game Morrowind.)

The Eternal Newbie

I don't easily identify with Superman.

Apart from taking some long walks today, I also found time to play Morrowind quite a while. I have also started to make a few pages about Morrowind, kinda like I did with Daggerfall, but different. Not a collection of links to other sites; the official web site does that well enough. Instead I would like to bring to bear my special perspective: Persistent newbieness. The theme of the pages will be newbie things. My identity on the pages will be "The Eternal Newbie". That's pretty descriptive. (Except I don't live forever. Well, not in one stretch at least.)

I have told again and again how I tend to start things, but not finish them. This may be one reason why I spend so much time as a newbie. I start a new character, experiment, and when I feel that I have it "in box", I start over with a new character. Different races, different classes, different approaches to the problems in the game. When I feel that I succeed, I retire.

Another reason may be that I identify more strongly with new characters. They have little in the way of magic or weapon skills or special equipment. I feel the same way about superheroes. I remember liking John Byrne's reboot of Superman exactly because we got to see a superman who was little more than human. A young man who discovered by accident that he could fly, and who didn't know his own strength. It was easy to identify rather than worship. Of course, it didn't last long until the series took off again to cosmic proportions; more's the pity.

***

It's the same in my own fiction. I enjoy writing about people who first meet magic and start to explore it. Or superpowers, or psionics. Stephen Donaldson claims that the key to his success as a fantasy writer was blending the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sounds like a good idea. Also tonight I finished reading another free e-book from Fictionwise, May Be Some Time by Brenda W. Clough. In it, a person from 1912 woke up in the year 2045. A point that was repeated over and over was that you had to know 70 percent of anything to grasp it all. If you didn't understand at least 70 percent of the concepts that were used, the whole talk would pass over your head. The e-book is warmly recommended, by the way. And it is free.

So I role-play newbies and write about newbies and read about newbies, preferably. Because they live in the borderlands between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It is a good place to live. Then again, isn't life itself always on the borderline between the familiar – the past – and the unfamiliar, the future. Between the certainty of yesterday and the uncertainty of tomorrow.