Game of Thrones Vs. Skyrim

A hefty gameplay experience is something to be cherished. If I plunk down 60 American dollars for something, I want to know that I won't be bored with it 20 measly hours later. So, on the one hand, I appreciate that you can easily lose more than 100 hours of your life on a single Skyrim character, even though the largest percentage of it will likely be spent mixing potions.

But is it reasonable to spend 100+ hours getting through a single fantasy epic? With all that time, you could have watched Game of Thrones and plowed through all five of the currently available Song of Ice and Fire books, with time leftover to work on a first draft of your Renly and Loras slash fiction. Believe me - I timed myself. It's nice knowing that I can always go back and lose another month of my life to Skyrim, but I've still got something like 17 Dune books to get through over here.

It typically didn't bother me too much, because they were mostly of an aesthetic nature and didn't really affect gameplay, and even when a Skyrim glitch was really awful, you could usually fix it by restarting your machine while you take a Mountain Dew Code Red break. But some of those glitches were game-breaking, or at the very least momentum-breaking, as I've still got a Briar Heart I'm trying to get rid of, and a lute trapped behind a busted set of puzzles.

Meanwhile, you'll never see the ground in a Game of Thrones city suddenly disappear from under a building, and if I remember correctly, there aren't any unobtainable lutes (or any lutes at all for that matter - another plus in my book). In fact, Game of Thrones doesn't have a single glitch, unless you count the fact that Tyrion Lannister, who is supposed to be grotesquely ugly, is being played by World's Handsomest Dwarf Peter Dinklage (sorry, Warwick Davis).    

Puzzles can be fun. Everyone's taken the stickers off a Rubix Cube and rearranged them, there was the 8 month period when we all went apeshit bananas for Sudoku and if you get me drunk enough and stick me at the beach during inclement weather, I've been known to try my hand at a jigsaw puzzle. But the "Spin the thing to change the animal showing" nature of Skyrim's puzzles isn't exactly putting together a 2500-piecer with a wicked buzz on, and I could go the rest of my life without zooming in on another claw to look at what animals are depicted there.

You won't ever have that problem with Game of Thrones, as thusfar at least, the series hasn't featured a single puzzle. Mysteries, conundrums, enigmas and artifices, sure, but not one actual puzzle. The week that Game of Thrones ends with the audience being asked to trial-and-error their way to the next episode will be the exact moment I go back to that stack of Dune novels.    

Or at least get seriously, seriously wounded, as seen when Jamie Lannister knocked Bran's stupid ass out a window like an absolute sister-banging BOSS. Everybody can get killed in Game of Thrones, and generally speaking, spoiler alert, everybody f'ing does. Other notable children to get what they had coming to them include the peasant kid Arya was friends with, the young Targaryens prior to the start of Game of Thrones and Daenerys' unborn child, which may or may not count depending on how you feel about Planned Parenthood.

In Skyrim though, killing kids is strictly verboten, thanks to the prudes and/or fascists over at Bethesda Games. You can beat, stab and set children on fire, but you can't actually kill them, which we think sends a bad message to today's youth. Kids need to know that if they're obnoxious enough, someone will legit murder them - fear of your elders is one of the basic building blocks of any working society.

You can play Skyrim without knowing a lick about the Elder Scrolls series as a whole, but good luck giving a good goddamn about what plane the Daedra come from, what the hell an Elder Scroll actually is or even feigning interest as a too-talky Khajiit lisps its way through some half-assed remembrances of Elsweyr. Of course, you could always try and get yourself up to speed, but that would involve some combination of playing outdated, pixel-y looking video games and/or collecting and reading fake books in a video game. The only thing worse than collecting real books is collecting fake books, and if I want to play a terrible looking game, I'll go to the iTunes AppStore, thanks.

The world of Game of Thrones is no less expansive than that of Skyrim, but its history is doled out on an as-you-need-to-know basis, and compared with figuring out whoever the hell Barenziah was, wrapping your head around the Valyrian Doom is an absolute dream. I could barely get through Tolkien's book of painfully drawn out continuity and explanations of canon, what makes you think I want to do that on a video game?