This Post is Totally a Commercial for Another Post

I have been challenged.

Steam has this huge sale every 4th of July.  It's so huge that it actually goes on for weeks--not just on the 4th.  They run deals ranking from "That's a pretty good price for that game" to "Civilization and free market economies will crumble if they sell that game for that cheap!"  I'm talking Orcs Must Die and all the DLC for $4.99.

It's like they've lost their fucking minds over there at Steam headquarters or something.  It's like they don't know how to actually make money.  That's why I totally spent over $350 dollars on games during last year's sale for games that are only a couple of years old.  Because those guys are seriously so stupid, they don't know a thing about making money.  That's why twice a year they get almost every penny of spending cash I've made over the prior months on their outdated titles--because they don't know a damned thing about making money.  Not one damned thing.

Fools.

But this is not a commercial for Steam (even though it totally is a commercial).

I've been waiting for Skyrim to go down in price for over a year now, but even during the big sales 25% was its lowest rock bottom basement price.  I loved Morrowind and except for the leveling world, I thought Oblivion was one of the best games ever made, but I knew the price would go down further if I could just be patient.  But then...it didn't go down.  It just stayed at $60 and even during the ubersales it only went down to $45.

Until this year.

Half off is probably as good as I'm going to do unless I'm wiling to wait another year or two.  Sure, you can pick up Oblivion GOTY for 9.99, but that game is almost seven years old now.  So I just took the plunge and bought Skyrim.

And a friend suggested that I blog about my reaction to the story-lines, gameplay, and elements. However, even though I'm really big into mixed media and interactive media as fully legitimate art forms, could this even be possible?  I pointed out the use of light and shadow in the conversations of Dragon Age and how it enhanced the theme of true darkness being in the human heart and just about blew one of my friends away, but analyzing a whole game is a lot different than pointing out that one element is probably deeper than people are giving it credit for.

But can I bust out my full range of literary analysis tools on a video game?

Challenge accepted!

So stay tuned for what will likely be a series of posts with a final wrap up, right here on Writing About Writing!