An Honest Day’s Work:
Pastoral Romanticism in Open-World Role-Playing Games
Part 2
Isabella Bidmead & Markus Mindrebø
Citation: Bidmead, Isabella, and Markus Mindrebø. “An Honest Day’s Work: Pastoral Romanticism in Open-World Role-Playing Games.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, July 20, 2021.
Abstract: This paper serves as an exploration of the reliance of open world fantasy role-playing games on evoking emotions of pastoral romanticism in the player. Such games tend to be dominated by rural landscapes, and farming locations and objects often play a central role in the player’s interaction with the world. In particular, the paper will investigate mechanics where the player receives a personal stake in a pastoral setting, such as when a player-controlled hero spends significant game time engaging in farmhouse construction, food production, or other central aspects of rural life. It is in this aspect, the paper argues, that pastoral romanticism creates a significant player appeal entirely separate from the allure of heroic adventuring. Players of fantasy games take on the trappings of the aristocrats of ages past in their idealized engagement with otherwise taxing rural life, and similar to the early modern bourgeoisie, fantasize about escaping from the pressures of a modern industrialist lifestyle just as much as they fantasize about killing dragons. In absence of meaningful control over physical productivity in the real world, this progression towards a “perfect” rural landscape that one creates through shaping the land according to one’s wishes, is an appealing simulation of an activity not available to the average urban or suburban player. However, it simultaneously renders the same player a pseudo-aristocratic interloper into a fairytale version of working-class realities.
Keywords: Video games, pastoral, open-world, fantasy, romanticism, estate, role-playing games, digital media, rural life, farming
Part II: The Player as Settlement Leader
In the previous segment, we examined the pseudo-aristocratic portrayals where the player gets to essentially embody a pre-industrial manor lord, using examples of Skyrim: Hearthfire, and The Witcher III: Blood and Wine as case studies. However, still other games focus their presentations of the rural by crafting small communities along with various non-player characters (NPCs). As per Henry Jenkins, NPCs in such spatial stories as these are often “stripped down to the bare bones” as a feature of the landscape itself, for the player to interact with in a manner no different from their interaction with the natural environment.[1] The goal often starts out as group survival, but evolves into the building of one or more thriving settlements, complete with their own customization options. Here the player functions less as a practically authoritarian lord, and more as a leader by consent, at least on the surface. The pastoral draw for the player lies not in developing a character, but in interacting with the landscape,[2] and again in making one’s mark on it. This takes the form of a digitally simulated process of (re-)building settlements and in fostering relationships similar to small-town structures, including hiring and assigning inhabitants to various settlement roles, and maintaining their happiness. In this way, this is a different form of romanticizing rural labor, focusing on shared growth of a community in the wild, although on closer examination, it does not appear to be dissimilar at all.
Figure 3: Screenshot of Tarrey Town in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, © Nintendo
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a revitalization of the original Legend of Zelda games, moving from a more linear story in previous games to an open world game. The game begins with the protagonist, Link, exiting a cave and encountering the open plains of Hyrule, a land devastated by some calamity where the majority of villages were destroyed, and have since further regressed. The game contains few established settlements due to this devastation, and the ones that do exist are exceptions rather than the rule. In all of the games examined in this paper, it is arguably the least inhabited, and most rural. As such, the player is able to explore largely untouched plains, while also finding little evidence of destroyed human development throughout the world.
One of the longest side quests in the game is the construction of Tarrey Town. The area starts from undeveloped land, and slowly, a town is built upon it with players' aid. This begins with the player being tasked with sourcing bundles of lumber for the burgeoning village, to build housing, not dissimilar to the acquisition of lumber in Hearthfire. The only other function that this item has in the game is to build campfires. There is even a specialized item that assists in this: the Woodcutters’ Axe. The Axe can be used in combat, though it has comparatively low stats next to the actual specialized weapons, but is specifically made to chop down trees with far less swings and degradation than the swords found in the game. As the quest line progresses, Link must procure higher and higher increments of wood, making it necessary in some cases to go out to find areas forested enough to find the resources.
Crucial to the progression of the quest line, though, is the development of the town through recruiting villagers. This means that as the player travels across the world, they encounter wayward souls and convince them to move to the brand-new village at the edge of the world. As the town grows, more NPCs are added, and the player gets a sense that this will be a lasting settlement with children running around and a variety of stores available for perusal. The final step of the quest line requires recruiting a priest to oversee a wedding between the originator and one of the later NPC Gerudo you help to recruit. Link, and by proxy the player, becomes ingratiated into the society they have helped create, not only performing necessary physical functions for the building of the town, but establishing emotional ties as well. While there is no mayoral role for the player to step into, there is the implication of them being a partial founder of the town, with the other NPCs acting as the day-to-day managers of the new village.
The NPCs recruited come from all corners of the playable map, and even though there are fast travel points above the town and nearby each recruitable NPC, the player still simulates the chance encounters that bring people together. While the gameplay is extremely open to user choice, the most probable order of encountering the NPCs required for the quest is almost reversed from the order as dictated by the Tarrey Town quest line; the priest who is the final NPC recruited for the town comes from the Zora people, who many players meet as their first of the four remaining nations. Most of the recruitable figures even have similar backstories of longing to find their place in the world.
Figure 4: Promotional image for Fallout 4, © Bethesda
Fallout 4 takes place in the alternate-futuristic Commonwealth of Massachusetts, decades after nuclear war has decimated the Earth. The landscape of the game requires brief comment: the game takes place in a condensed Boston metropolitan area, but due to the nature of the world, it is inaccurate to call it urban. While the player does spend a significant time in the center of Boston, a majority of the city has been bombed out, and the “urban” city is more rubble than structure, making the majority of the explorable game space rural. The particular gameplay mechanic we shall discuss here, the settlement system, takes place more or less exclusively in the surrounding, rural, landscape.
The settlement system is an innovation brought to the Fallout series by Fallout 4. Here, the player is encouraged to build and maintain small villages across the world, actively making it safer and more habitable for NPCs not blessed with a multitude of weapons, medicine, and monetary currency. Settlements are established by finding a suitable site, setting up a radio beacon to broadcast to potential settlers, and building structures that support a rising community. Several different categories of settler needs have to be fulfilled and consistently managed by the player as settlement leader, including food, water, beds, and defenses. The successful management of these needs leads to settlement morale rising, whereas the neglect of one or more needs leads to the opposite. Furthermore, several of the needs, including food production and certain types of defenses, need to be manned by NPC settlers, assigned such duties by the player.
Unlike in Skyrim or The Witcher 3 where there exists an NPC specifically for estate maintenance, the allocation of NPC resourcing lies with the player, providing a more accurate simulation of leadership in a growing community. The player also takes an active hand in manual labor of the settlement, including setting up buildings, defenses, crop planting, and irrigation, although, like in Skyrim’s Hearthfire Estates, the erection of such structures is instantaneous. This in effect means that while the hardship of managing a rural farm is hinted at, unlike in the first two games, the actual manual labor is still cheated away for the enjoyment of the player.
The game further cements the idea that the player is a valued member of these burgeoning communities, as these settlements also serve as homes for the multitude of companions that the player can have accompany them through the game. When the player decides to switch their companion, the non-active one is sent to a settlement of the player’s choice, and effectively becomes another settler available for assignment to a task. This encourages the player to make the settlements as functional as possible, with an emotional tie to each space as the home of the follower NPCs.
Differences aside, Fallout 4’s settlements are not entirely removed from the pseudo-aristocratic dream of idealized rural life as a personal playground. NPCs have no preferences or opinions when it comes to settlement, and the player is able to make wide ranging decisions on the communities’ behalf without comment from anyone. Even when happiness is decreasing, settlers will still do whatever they are told without complaining, although at a certain point they may choose to move away.
Even with the degradation of settlements, the player is still removed from many of the harshest realities of living in this landscape. Crops are planted instantly, without threat of failing harvest, which one might expect to be common in an irradiated wasteland. Settlers never age, fall sick or injure themselves beyond the ability to work, providing a workforce that never needs attending to. Fallout 4 could have easily included these aspects, as similar mechanics exist for player characters in survival games, such as The Forest and The Long Dark. Fallout 4 itself implemented a survival mode as a DLC long after the games’ release, but the survival elements only exist for the player in order to add an additional personal challenge, and do not extend to the settlements or their other inhabitants. The appeal of the settlements lie not in a realistic portrayal of a rural context, but rather in the same overall fantasy of the rural ideal as the player’s personal playground.
Both Breath of the Wild and Fallout 4 share an emphasis on village structures and management rather than estate ownership. Whereas Witcher and Skyrim emphasize the aristocratic aesthetic ideal of the rural estate with little personal effort involved, the settlement management of the other two case studies involve significantly more emphasis on the simulation of physical labor by expanding the process of construction and maintenance. In this way, the idea that the player character performs personal work is communicated, without putting any of the actual burden on the player. The mark the player leaves on the world is consistently deemed a benevolent and positive impact on the world. As opposed to Skyrim and Witcher, the player is explicitly thanked and told of the benefit they bring to the world through the erection of the villages they create in Breath of the Wild and Fallout 4. The structures made are not merely for their enjoyment but serve a larger purpose in the post-devastation worlds they explore.
However, whether the player is a manor lord or a settlement leader the similarities between all four games in their portrayal of the rural context are far greater than the differences. In essence, it is all about romanticizing rural life whether it is through creating one’s own perfect countryside fantasy, or simply by having fun in the digital process of simulating “farmwork”. In all games, a lot of the aspects of rural labor are considerably shortened for the player’s enjoyment. One does not ever get to see the processes of food production or construction. Rather, these just instantly happen, allowing the player to go on crafting their rural dream without interruptions caused by disruptive realism.
The modern player of a rural role-playing game is essentially pursuing the same idealized vision of rural life as pre-revolution aristocrats. Modern urban or suburban players of video games are just as removed from the realities of subsistence farming as historical privileged classes, and while many may have visited farms and farming landscapes, and most reap the benefits of farmwork, there remains an emotional divide between the work and the product. Conceptions of what constitutes the “pastoral” are more shaped by the players’ media exposure, rather than firsthand experience.[3] Past the exoticism of the pastoral for the urban modern player, there can be a deep desire for what a pastoral life can be a synecdoche for; these are all worlds either without or past the threat of destruction. The player gets to see the world “as it should be,” a world without climate change, and where labor isn’t accompanied by the reminder of economic pressures. These aspects are not inherent to rural life, but are more easily envisioned with the ability to traverse the wilderness. Fantasy representations of rural life are not intended to provide opportunities for realistic engagement (this is arguably what the farming simulator genre exists for), but rather to give players a chance to create their own personalized and fictionalized visions of the pastoral.
Endnotes
[1] Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Computer 44 no. 4 (2004), 122.
[2] Paul Martin, “The Pastoral and the Sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” The International Journal of Computer Game Research 11, no. 3 (December 2011).
[3] This is particularly well illustrated in Annie R. Specht and Tracy Rutherford, "The Pastoral Fantasy on the Silver Screen: The Influence of Film on American Cultural Memory of the Agrarian Landscape," Journal of Applied Communications Vol. 99: Iss. 1 (2016).
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Hearthfire, Bethesda Softworks, 2012.
Fallout 4, Bethesda Softworks, 2015.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo, 2017.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine, CDProjekt Red, 2016.
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Specht, Annie R. and Rutherford, Tracy "The Pastoral Fantasy on the Silver Screen: The Influence of Film on American Cultural Memory of the Agrarian Landscape," Journal of Applied Communications: Vol. 99: Iss. 1, (2016).