A second year friend of mine is still around in Oxford and he doesn’t his gaming computer with him to avoid distractions during term—indeed he has no computer of his own at all, it’s quite wonderful—so for the past three or four days he’s been playing Skyrim in my room with the idea being that it forces me out of my room into the library. This hasn’t worked so well and I have spent many hours watching, and a small number playing. There are some very cool killing blow animations, and nice environments, and I am loving watching these; the gameplay is boring though and I’m like, groan, a dungeon, can’t we just advance the plot?

The point is that the plot of the main quest has grabbed me. Why? Because of the sudden storm of references to Morrowind and Oblivion, zomg I don’t want to spoil them for you, but wow this is too cool. The politics game is starting to kick off, with the Thalmor, Greybeards and ??? all vying for positions, which is great. I’m loving it. I desperately want to know what’s going on with the Empire and the Dominion.

But as I say I’m so bored with dungeons and fighting. I’m not very good at the combat, and aside from the pretty parts, am not too interested. I don’t mind suffering a bit though in order to find out more about what’s going to happen with the plot.

My friend and I are sort of playing co-op in that our characters are doing different quest lines; for example, he just finished the Fighter’s Guild, which had an AMAZING surprise early on, but had a completely boring ending. He’s joining the Imperials, I interrupted the execution in Solitude like a true Stormcloak. I’m doing the main quest. Unfortunately he’s going home tomorrow so this partnership cannot continue.