Among the dorkiest aspects of Bethesda’s winningly dorky The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the persuasion wheel minigame – also known as Persuasion Pie, also known as the Wheedlin’ Roundabout, also known as the Dartboard of Indoctrination. (Maybe not so much the last two.) This saw you choosing methods of gaining NPC affection from a disc with quadrants labelled “Admire”, “Joke”, “Coerce” and “Boast”, each of which elicits a different response previewed by the NPC’s gurnishly changing expression.
You have to choose all four options at least once per round, and the underlying “pie” rotates every time you pick one. The underlying segments are partially filled in to show how much they’ll affect the NPC’s opinion, for better or worse. The idea, then is to match responses that have a positive effect to the largest chunks of pie, by picking them in the right order. If you think all that sounds incredibly overwrought and laborious, then you are clearly not one of the hosts of Wheeljam 2025, a gamedev community knockabout dedicated to Bethesda’s ole Tart Of Cajolement. Here is a trailer.
The jam runs from Thursday, March 13th to Thursday, March 20th, the 19th anniversary of Oblivion’s 2006 launch. Oblivion aside, it takes inspiration from Bass Reeves Can’t Die, an unfinished game concepted by Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr, worked on by a group including Don’t Nod Montreal’s Colin McInerney, and promoted/discussed by Youtuber Julian “Noodle” Morley.
“Feel free to iterate on the original persuasion-puzzle concept or abstract your wheel into something entirely new!” explains the jam page on Itch.io. “If your wheel is recognizably derived from the Oblivion wheel in any way shape or form, it is fair game.”
Entry is free, and the hosts have considerately put together some Unreal, Godot and Unity Engine templates for people to work from. They’re also offering prizes in the shape of 3D-printed Oblivion Persuasion Models. From the Itch page: “They spin! And have magnets! Maybe I’ll put your names and the categories on the back of the wheel? I dunno! I didn’t think that far ahead!”
There are several prize categories. Under “Hotwheels”, we file developers who “spend an exorbitant amount of time juicing your wheel, making custom graphics for it, and making it buttery smooth”. Under “Reinvent The Wheel”, we find those who “use the wheel in a way that even the most seasoned game designers couldn’t possibly fathom”. And under “Put The We In Wheel”, we find developers who “somehow found a way to have multiple wheels”.
I’m quite fond of Oblivion’s Brainwashing Pizza. I’d love to see another developer randomly revive it as an in-game item – perhaps Kojima can be pie-suaded to build it into Death Stranding 2. I also adore gamejams run by sickos who are obsessed with extremely specific features or mechanics from many decades ago. I’ll be keeping one eye on this while the other remains peeled for news of Microsoft’s long-rumoured Oblivion remake.