One of the main quest missions sends you into an area alone, with access to just whatever gear you have an NPC smuggle in for you. Lydia, the warrior assigned to me by the Jarl of Whiterun, had to stay behind.

I didn’t bother taking much stuff with me, anticipating that I would go for a stealthy, speech-based approach. It started out well, solving an initial hurdle through dialog. Then I got into the back area, and found myself stuck in an area I couldn’t sneak through successfully, and couldn’t fight my way through either. I turned the difficultly down, and the combat is now a breeze. Considering it hasn’t been the highlight of the game so far, it’s probably for the best.

So, I made it through, completed the objectives, and escaped through a trap door. Behind the trap door, I discovered that Lydia, my faithful servant, had apparently been waiting for me there. With a frost troll. So I guess that’s where Lydia’s story ends. She didn’t really have a lot to say even before the frost troll, so I don’t really know what I’ll be missing out on there.

I made my way back to meet up with the quest-giver to get my gear back, and then resumed what has turned into my favourite activity in Skyrim: smithing. The roleplaying centre in my mind fills in that my character must believe that perhaps if Lydia had been better armored, she might have lived, and vanquished that troll. And so she spends hours honing her craft, creating and refining better and better suits of armor. Banded-iron, steel — soon she will try her hand at Dwarven pieces. Her swords, war-hammers and axes are flooding the markets of Skyrim.

I’m starting to find the character now. Elissa, the warrior-smith who ventures out into the wilderness always searching for new materials to craft with, haunted by the knowledge that the armor will never been good enough.

Here’s the plan. Every few days, I’m going to start drawing a figure, and just see where it goes. The thought is that it might reflect something of what’s swirling around in my head on a particular day.

We’ll see how the project develops over time.

That main quest has been great so far (which, considering it mostly involves hunting dragons shouldn’t be all that surprising). So, I’m puzzled. What is about this experience that’s different? In most respects Skyrim feels like a simple refinement on the model set by Oblivion. So where did that desire to see what I’ll find if I walk down this path over here go? Why am I not stopping to talk to every inhabitant of every town I come across?

One possible answer is that the world of Skyrim seems more dangerous than that of Oblivion or Morrowind. In the small bit of exploring I have done, I’ve mostly come across giants, trolls and a seemingly endless supply of wolves. Also, bandits and the odd necromancer. Everything in the world seems intent on killing me, which doesn’t do a great job of incentivizing a hike through the woods.

Then there is the considerably improved scripting of the main story encounters. One effect of this is that the quest feels more like a conventional game. I have the distinct impression that I could follow from one sub-quest to the next, and treat Skyrim as a fairly tightly scripted fantasy adventure game. The older Elder Scrolls games, and the Bethesda Fallout games were less firmly connected. Their main quests frequently paused (or less charitably, ground to a halt), giving the player an obvious space to run off and do other things.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this enormous game, and from everything I’ve heard, there are tons of interesting side-quests and discoveries to be made. I just wonder how long it will take for me to find them.

Uncharted 3

There was a moment early in Uncharted 3 that sums up the problem: Drake, Sully and the new addition to the crew, Cutter, are making their way through an underground tunnel. Cutter makes a reference to Macbeth. Not even a tough one. “Lay on, MacDuff.” Pretty famous line. And Nathan Drake, typically a font of obscure knowledge and wit up to this point in the series, doesn’t get it. Uncharted 3 suddenly muddles the question of how smart Drake is. He can translate Latin on the fly better than any Oxford don, has to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of human exploration and archeology — but he flubs on a very common reference from one of the most famous works in the English language. Who is this man?

This is actually an intriguing question, which the game ostensibly seeks to explore. For the first half of the game, it seems like the answer is that Drake is just going through the motions, a highly damaged person. Characters ask Drake repeatedly in the game “Why are you doing this?” And tellingly, he never actually answers them. He just has to keep going. In this way he appears to be written as something of a metaphor for the series itself. Why does Uncharted 3 exist? Because it has to. It coasts through without a whole lot to say, because, well, there has to be an Uncharted 3, just as there will probably be an Uncharted 4. Drake pursues the game’s band of villains, because … that’s what he does.

Where Uncharted 3 is most interesting is in the second half of the game when we meet up with Elena again. Here is a character who isn’t as willing as Drake’s usual band of enablers to just go along with his mindless forward charge. She is sucked into his problems, but only because he makes it unavoidable. And she isn’t happy about it. Uncharted 3’s story is almost singlehandedly redeemed by a few moments between these two characters. In a few lines, the game transforms itself from a mere string of independently impressive moments, into a probably doomed love story, with Drake as a very damaged person who draws people in with his charm, but it seems will always push them away again in an obsessive quest to fill a void in his soul. This could be a description foisted onto quite a few games, of course. If we were to look at the behaviours we create with most of our video game protagonists from the outside, they would not look all that healthy. Where Uncharted 3 becomes something more, however, is in that at a certain point it becomes aware of this.

Is Uncharted 3 the equal of its predecessor? No. While it does get there eventually, the story takes too long to realize what it is about. The game has internalized the expectations set by the other games, and you can often feel it trying to be clever. In Uncharted 2, Drake’s wit seemed to rise organically from genuine surprise at situations he found himself in, or the actions of characters around him. (“I’m sorry, do you have a plan to go with that grenade?”) In Uncharted 3, you can almost feel the writers pacing in the background, “How about that? That was funny, right? Right?”

I can only hope that the next time Uncharted comes around, Naughty Dog has a sense of what they want to say that lives up to the flair with which they can say it.

The impression I have received of the Occupy camps, particularly the Zuccotti Park camp, is that of a place where likeminded people have created a place of questioning, and learning. By their small example, they have created a place where each person’s voice really does matter, and each person in the group is provided for by the whole of the group. In these broad strokes, at least, the movement is remarkable.

For the past couple of days I have been suggesting that the Occupy movement should have metamorphosed into something else by now. I think I’ve realized one possibility of what that could be. At the moment I’m writing this, the Occupiers have been granted a temporary restraining order which at least in theory allows them to return to the park. At the moment much of the conversation seems like people will just be trying to go back and continue with what they were doing before the eviction. That isn’t the answer.

Something in the culture of protest has left the idea that the aim of protest is to be a thorn in the side of power, and in the side of the those who simply aren’t paying attention. Marches, sit-ins, barricades — all of these are meant to force you to pay attention, at least for a moment, and hopefully in so doing create change. It isn’t going to happen. The surest way to effect change is to change how you live your own life, and to hold it up as an example to others.

What the Occupy camps (and for that matter, numerous communities of young entrepreneurs around the world) have demonstrated, is that it is within the power of dedicated people to largely bypass the systems and corporations that they oppose. What if the Occupy movement turned itself into a framework for demonstrating to people that buying from large corporations isn’t the only option available to you. You can do quite well buying from cool, interesting people that you know. Likewise, you can do alright by providing some service to that same pool of people. What if the Occupiers didn’t go back to camp out in Zuccotti permanently, but instead came back every weekend to give classes? Zuccotti and a thousand other parks, everywhere? Learn about how to grow your own food in an urban garden, learn about how to minimize your environmental footprint, how to raise bees — whatever.

The beast is too large to ever be disturbed by a thorn in its side. But I think if we just left the beast alone, it probably isn’t going to notice you. And that’s good. Let Occupy become a mechanism that shows people how to begin freeing themselves from the sense that they are necessarily beholden to that beast.

That the police moved to evict the protesters from the park is hardly surprising — in fact, the most surprising thing is just how long it took for it to happen. What is surprising, and indeed disturbing to me, is the media blackout imposed over the area surrounding the park. Chief among the things that makes the United States great is the high protection it gives to freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. Simply put, it is vital to a healthy and free democratic state that the citizenry is free to observe and report whatever they deem worthy of their attention. Last night, news helicopters were barred from the airspace over the park, and journalists were forcibly removed from the area.

Independent journalists from The Other 99 managed to keep up a stream from the scene of the protests as they continued, demonstrating the importance and power of new social media like Twitter and UStream.

So, yesterday I said that I thought Occupy needed to figure out what the next step was to be. I still think that, and now it seems that the NYPD has forced change on the movement. We’ll see what shakes out. I can only hope that it will be a positive change.

Above all, it is important that we are allowed to observe both sides, and hold both the protesters and police accountable for what they do. And thanks to the new proliferation of camera phones, UStream, and Twitter, I think we will be able to, regardless of who gets a press badge.

At first, the protest was impressive. 20,000 people, all gathered in common cause. From the hotel, the mass of people marched through the city to Spring Garden Rd., a major commercial street. They arranged themselves to block the intersection with another major street. People with megaphones spoke, the crowd cheered them on. They were being noticed.

But then a couple of hours passed by. The protesters had taken to marching about 1000 feet, up and down the street, alternately blocking one of two different intersections. Their numbers had long since begun to trail off, and by the time I left there were only a couple of hundred remaining, still blocking the roads.

What had started as an impressive display of public protest had gradually eroded into a symbol of the futility of such demonstrations. The police didn’t have to move to break things up. (I spoke briefly with one Officer, who seemed almost disappointed in the increasing aimlessness of the mob.) All it took was entropy.

I’ve increasingly been reminded of that protest as they current Occupy protests continue. The problem with the Halifax protest was that no one ever came up with what to do next. That initial outpouring of energy was allowed to slip away as the march went on too long, and morphed into a farce. I fear that the Occupy movement is in danger of doing the same thing. Whatever statement was to be made from the sit-ins in parks around the western world, has already been made. To go any further Occupy would need to morph into something else, find another way to continue directing that energy as a force for good in the world. There are a few thousand people camped out in those tents. In the beginning there were millions of people who agreed with them, and supported them. It is up to that core of thousands to come up with a new way to engage those millions before their patience runs out and their attention drifts away.

The power of protest has been eroded by those who treat it like a bonfire — it burns bright for a while, but eventually it cools, the fire goes out, and soon enough there is hardly any sign that anything happened at all. The point should be to capture that initial energy, and use it. A week ago, I thought Occupy might have the potential to do that. Now it is starting to look more and more like that Halifax protest, running up and down the street, looking more and more ridiculous with each person who walks away.