Ayla's story: An invitation

227 hours and 31 minutes.

It was just past the witching hour when I finished my first Baldur’s Gate 3 run through. It was emotional, to finally finish. It was an emotional game. How aggravating. I feel like Murderbot[1]—I need to withdraw from the feed because I’m feeling an emotion and I want to handle it alone. And it’s not because I don’t like emotion—I’m just a huge ball of it, all of the time, and that, too, is aggravating. I see you Murderbot, with your whole “I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.”[2] Same, dude. Same.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the funny, layered, hybrid experience that playing it turned out to be. I mean, maybe it’s because I’ve been playing it at the same time that I’ve been working on a dissertation proposal and thinking a lot about the role of media and games in education and social life in general. But it kind of snuck up and took over my brain.

What I mean is that lately, I’ve been undulating through academic and personal conversations on the value of gaming and the implications of a “gamer’s” way of being in the world. These thoughts had been humming in the back of my mind as I watched cut scenes, agonized over dialogue responses, and didn't quite give in to despair over that one boss fight that was hard enough before it presented me with a surprise second phase.

(It could also be the perimenopause. This shit is wild, let me tell you…)

Starting about halfway in, I kept a notebook on my desk and wrote down my thoughts and observations as I played (yeah, I’m a nerd…). The whole experience has been kind of fascinating.

Although I officially “finished” the game, I have an entire multiverse of characters/run-throughs in various stages of not yet finished. I created them all for very specific purposes—wanting to explore the companions’ storylines more fully and fiddle around with different classes. To be honest, not all of the characters are cooperating with my plans, which has also been a bit of a surprise, but those are their stories and I suspect they’ll spill out of me at some point. I already have an entire dissertation about Minecraft and YouTube to pull together, though, and that kind of writing doesn’t come easy to me. I’m not a wizard, Gale!

But maybe sharing Ayla’s story, with all my fascination, might just loosen these fingers for that little dissertation thingie. So, this is Ayla’s adventure and Ayla’s story. But in a way, it’s also mine, mediated through the affordances[3] and constraints[4] created by a whole team of insanely talented people who made a little bit of magic and shared it with the world. I’m not sure what shape this particular wandering will take, but, if you’re up for it, I’d love to have you along…

[1] The narrator of a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series of books written by Martha Wells. So good. I mean, really pretty awesome. I tore these (6 novellas and one novel) in about a month. Seriously, annotations all over the place.

[2] Martha Wells, (2020) Network Effect, Tordotcom, p.242

[3] What the game’s architecture, code, writing, etc. allows.

[4] What the game’s architecture, code, writing, etc. doesn’t offer or account for.