No Honor Among Thieves

Tuesday, 11 March 2008.

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A friend of mine, several weeks ago, suggested that I play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and went on at length about how great a game it was. One of the draws of the game is its open-ended world, of which he gave me this example (loosely quoted):

One of the things you can do is join the Thieves' Guild, which is headed by a sort of legendary centuries-old Robin Hood figure called the “Gray Fox.” Initially, you're just doing small tasks for the guild, like picking pockets and stealing trinkets from peoples' homes. However, as you rise throught the ranks, people within the guild start to become jealous of you and your successes, and start to come after you; of course, you have to take them out before they kill you. However, word starts to get out about the internal killings you've been doing, at which point the remainder of the guild come after you.

Eventually, you've killed everyone, including the guild master himself, which logically makes you the new leader of the Thieves guild, after which you can go and recruit new members who (having no reason to believe otherwise) believe you to be the Gray Fox, legendary leader of the Thieves' Guild for over two-hundred years. In fact, as you find out at the very end, this has been how the Thieves' Guild has managed succession since its inception: they assassinate everyone in the current guild and rebuild it in their own image! So the Gray Fox is neither immortal nor heroic; but the world as a whole knows no better, and needn’t know better…

Unfortunately, the above Dread Pirate Roberts scenario doesn’t actually occur in-game (it was, to my disappointment, sort of a cobbled-together collection of three or four of the game’s substories), though I truly love the black-as-pitch poeticism of the whole thing.