So, the world. It’s not going well; not really functioning. It feels like we’ve been invaded by demonic forces—though, really, it’s not an invasion, just the demonic forces who were always around taking hold of levers and dials we long ago stopped paying attention to. Keeping them away from the levers always felt like someone else’s job.

And sometimes—too often, honestly, anymore—I need to dissociate of an evening, and sometimes I dissociate with a video game. Lately it’s been The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I’ve always been a Mac user, and a console didn’t fit my budget until its time had come and gone, so I never had the chance to play Oblivion before the rerelease.

It’s the kind of game I like—the kind where you don’t have to care what the game wants you to do. The plot stands accommodatingly still as you ignore it. You make an elf or a dragon guy and poke into the corners of a big imaginary world. You dress them in different outfits. You buy a house to store all the magic junk you never stop picking up. You randomly wander Cyrodil, and make your elf jump around like a rag doll loosely bound by gravity, and sometimes they land so hard they hurt themself and utter the only sound they ever make, a generic Wilhelm-scream “Aargh.”

You can’t ignore the plot entirely, though, because of all the gates to Hell. Or “Oblivion,” as the Cyrodilianites call it. They pop up all over, the weather turns bad when you get close, they’re annoying. Fortunately you can close them. Unfortunately this is the most tedious part of the game.

It’s not difficult. You walk to the top of a tower and grab a ball. (No, sorry, an orb. Magic balls are orbs.) Occasionally a monster tries to stop you, but you get used to that in Oblivion: wolves try to stop you wandering around forests, giant crabs try to stop you hanging out on the beach. And these are not competent monsters. These are monsters whose plans fall apart when someone jostles their orb.

The problem is there’s nothing in Oblivion but lava, identical dark, empty towers, and a handful of demons. Or “Daedra,” as the Cyrodilianites call them. And getting to the orb invariably involves wandering a maze of ramps and corridors across several towers. Not difficult, but slow. And the towers are identical, and identically uninteresting. It doesn’t feel like an adventure. It feels like a crappy warehouse job where sometimes Daedra punch you in the face.

Usually a video game character has a special adventure-attracting power: your dad was a god, or you can see souls, or you’re the one person who can close magic rifts, or even just the one person with a certain piece of ancient technology.

Your Oblivion elf doesn’t have a unique power. Not even a rift-closing power, like in Dragon Age. Again, all you’re doing is swiping some not particularly well-guarded orbs. But everyone acts like you have a unique rift-closing power. “Wow,” they say, “you’re the hero of Kvatch! And you closed the gate right outside my own unpronounceable city! I was so worried!”

Which is weird. You’re not that special. You keep losing fights to random bandits or goblins or crabs. You don’t get less likely to lose fights because as you train up everybody else in Cyrodil scales with you. And the Oblivion demons aren’t so tough, when you get down to it. Any bandit could decide they were tired of living in a ruined fort, walk into the nearest Oblivion gate, and become the hero of Bvlx or Snrpl. Or the city watch could handle it, or the people who hang out in the Fighters’ and Mages’ guild. They just… don’t.

And then I realized. Your Oblivion character does have a special power.

Their power is that they are the one person in all of Cyrodil who doesn’t think closing Oblivion gates is someone else’s job.