When I first played GTAV, like any red-blooded male the first thing I did was look for the strip club. After wrestling yourself away from the main story, you find it’s only a few blocks away from Franklin’s house – a tacit admission that I am the game’s target customer. It knows what I want and seeks to deliver it.

The sign outside is unmistakable, searing the sky in blades of electric pink. In typical Rockstar fashion, it’s completely devoid of irony, but at the same time culturally ironic. As in, there is no subtext or double entendre about candy or gold clubs or spearmint flavored rhinos. It tells me there are HORNY GIRLS inside. There damn well better be.

Once inside, the strip club plays like its real-life counterparts – a blur of fake lights, fake boobs, and hollow dreams. The energy the DJ pumps through the speakers is somehow deflating, as false as the room it plays to. This is not a brothel. The brass pole is not your dick. There is no sign to tell you what you already know:

Look, but don’t touch.

Yet like many laws in the world of GTA, even the most sacred of rules can be broken. The text tells me to buy a lap dance. It kindly reminds me to press R2 to touch her booty, but only when the bouncer leaves the room. This is an important distinction. After all, despite being alone with Juliet and Cheetah (which I’m sure is her real name), and being privy to this girl-on-girl circus of flesh, I spent my entire time trying to look past the strippers to pinpoint where the bouncer was. Goddamnit, Cheetah, move your ass out of the way, you’re blocking my view! And even after our friend Mr. Killjoy was spotted, and stripper successfully wooed, I still had to answer to that great bouncer in the sky. The sex, unlike the sign that promised it, is always implied.

Touch, but don’t look.

Like any true patron of Dibella, Jolene is not designed to be a tease. She’s designed to tear down the old hypocrisies – violence good, sex bad – and show that religion doesn’t have to be a gormless, enervating suckfest, at least not figuratively. Religion can be fun, if your religion is about fucking.

Jolene is, in fact, a sex artist. She can turn your knob into a firecracker and paint the universe when it explodes. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like. Jolene knows what she wants, and more often than not, she wants it all. Men and women, beasts and bots, boots and boot-lickers, mages and brutes, cats and dogs, brooms and dusters, meats and vegetables, Daedra and Dremora, witches and hags, priests and Draugrs, midgets and Giants. All of it brings honor to Dibella and pleasure to her. She is what Rockstar would call a HORNY GIRL.

However, much like in GTAV, the sign around her neck isn’t necessarily as advertised. While I don’t have the government on my back demanding I install anti-penis software, I have my own limitations as a modder. I can’t make new animations and nude textures. Nor do I feel particularly comfortable asking Marcy to grunt and make whoopee noises. Much of it will have to be left to the imagination, and by that I mean sex and prostitution mods.

In many ways, for all her proclivities, this makes Jolene no different than her fellow priestesses. The limitations are different, but the result, unfortunately, is the same. Like its more modern cousin, the Temple of Dibella ends up being a tainted oasis, nothing more than a fading mirage in a vast, sexless desert – no matter how hard I tried to make it rain.

One of the things I find fascinating about sports is how it’s completely goal oriented. Creativity is a means to an end, but it’s hardly a requirement. The great Yankees closer Mariano Rivera built his Hall of Fame career on one pitch. In his later years, Michael Jordan would make a living going into the post and executing a simple, turnaround fadeaway. Neither of these could be considered original or groundbreaking tactics, but nobody cares how the ball gets in the basket, or how the outs are made. The goal is to win. To win, you need but one, unimpeachable skill.

All you have to do is repeat it.

The same can’t be said for an artist. What comes next can’t be the same as what came before. While athletic skill is built upon repetition – training your muscles to reflexively perform the same task over and over again – for an artist there is no greater sin than imitation, even if the person you’re imitating is yourself. The goal isn’t just to make something interesting, but rather, to do it in a way that hasn’t been done before.

This neverending search for novelty is why I changed Marigoth to a Disney villain. It’s why Ignar the Lucky embraces his odd misfortune whereas Jade can only see it as a curse.

For the character Lundvar, it’s the entire reason he was created.

Whether it was Hjoromir bitching about his sister, or Ingarte being driven off by her father, some of the early NPCs didn’t always have the healthiest relationships with their family. With Lundvar, I set out to create someone who unequivocally loved his brother, and as such, the conflict was derived from losing him as opposed to wanting him gone.

Only Lundvar doesn’t love his sibling the way Zora loves hers. It isn’t complicated. It’s compulsory. His brother is blood, and that makes him infallible. No matter what you say, he lived a great life, and died a greater hero. Lundvar would rather stick a fork in his eye than see the truth. That makes him loyal, and to an extent, admirable. It also makes him blind.

Moreover, Lundvar’s devotion isn’t limited to his brother. He’s your classic jingoist, your banner-waving, axe-wielding, mead-blooded Nord. It’s what blinds him to the rampant corruption of the city, and what makes the narrative of his brother, Defender of the Reach, such an easy sell. You often hear about people altering the facts to fit their viewpoint. Lundvar is the same way. Nords are paragons of honor, and the guardsmen are true Nords.

So when confronted with Wuuthmar’s letter in The Raven of Anvil, it’s no surprise Lundvar struggles to grasp its inherent contradiction. The words are damning, and while he partially accepts them, he still insists on going through his superiors – despite the likelihood those are the very men who betrayed his brother. Ultimately, there is only one answer that will satisfy Lundvar. He wants his superiors to convince him the letter is fake. His goal is to seek the liar’s comfort, a place where the integrity of his misguided beliefs remain safe. For Lundvar, these lies can be true.

All he has to do is repeat them.

With the release of version 3, I want to talk about some of the new quests, which are a bit experimental at times, and perhaps require some discussion. The first of which is Idle Dreams, a quest I’m fond of much in the same way I’m fond of The Paper Mirror, but I’m not sure how well it will be received.

SPOILERS CONTAINED BELOW. If you haven’t played the quest, which is highly likely given it’s new, then I suggest you do that first, as this will make even less sense than it already doesn’t.

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The word addiction is never meant to be a positive. Regardless of the consequences, it essentially amounts to a lack of control. An addict isn’t an addict because he uses. He’s an addict because given the choice, he can’t say no.

Amicus is an addict, and his choice of drug is a soft pillow and a warm bed. He spends every night and half the day in his own world, and shows no concern for the waking one. When he does manage to open his eyes, he directs them straight at a noble’s coin purse. When you first wake him from his slumber, he nearly throws a fit.  He gets angry at Haelga despite the fact she’s providing him with room and board. Amicus doesn’t care about the needs of others. For him, the only world that matters is his.

When Vaermina turns his gift into a curse, the larger metaphor is obvious. He is trapped within the walls of addiction. However, it’s his self-absorption that manifests itself first, in the form of a warrior coming to rescue him. Like the Falmer in the dungeon, the warrior wears his face, and moreover is Amicus’ betrothed. In this dream, he is literally making love to himself, over and over again.

When this realization hits him, with perhaps an assist from the player, Amicus tries to picture someone other than himself.  Yet all he can think of is Sadrin, who predictably, cares only about Haelga.  In the second chamber of his dream, it’s evident Amicus not only fails to make lasting and meaningful relationships, he can’t even fake them.

In the third and final chamber, Amicus retreats to his child-like fantasy of wanting to be a jester. The clowns once again wear his face, but the larger theme is that of immaturity. Amicus is a grown man who spends all his days in a child’s world. He enables this behavior by stealing from hard-working folks, and yet justifies it by saying his dreams hurt no one. When you speak to him about the doors, he will tell you he never managed to solve the riddle. That’s because Amicus has trouble growing up. He can’t find his way out.

Now, I’ve been asked, and with good reason, about the emotional aspect of this quest, or lack of it. In other words, do we care if Amicus overcomes his addiction?

For instance, in another quest, I gave the main character a wife and a child to add an emotional component to his behavior. That way, even if he continues his current path, the fact that someone loves him provides a measure of tragedy or success depending on the outcome. The player is given a reason to care, if not for the character, for his fate.

So it’s safe to say I took a risk when not doing the same with Amicus. Amicus has no family. He has no friends. He is completely lost in his own world. Which is sort of the point. I don’t know if there’s a reason to care about Amicus, but your concern for him wouldn’t be a solution. In fact, it’s part of the problem.

You see, in this quest the player is the enabler. Rather than overcome his childish behavior on his own, Amicus cheats his way out of the nightmare by enlisting the player’s help. It’s unclear, however, if he even has the mental fortitude to escape, as allowing the warrior to take him will have him shuddering in a corner for the foreseeable future – but I stress that that is a future I’ve left open-ended. It is not necessarily a bad ending.  It’s also unclear whether helping him will cause him to re-evaluate his behavior. He seems intent on returning to his dreamworld, but it’s possible that if he doesn’t change his ways, the nightmares will continue. After all, it’s his self-absorption, his indifference, his dream. He owns it until he proves otherwise.

Do we care if Amicus overcomes his addiction? The real question is, does Amicus?