{"id":16121,"date":"2011-12-06T12:21:21","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T16:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christandpopculture.com\/?p=16121"},"modified":"2011-12-06T12:21:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-06T16:21:21","slug":"when-games-matter-the-wonderful-lore-of-skyrim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/christandpopculture\/2011\/12\/when-games-matter-the-wonderful-lore-of-skyrim\/","title":{"rendered":"When Games Matter: The Wonderful Lore of Skyrim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When Games Matter<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is a weekly exploration by Drew Dixon of meaningful moments in games. Operating under the assumption that games do in fact matter, Drew seeks to highlight those moments that have much to say to say about who we are and the world we live in.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tom Bissel recently wrote an interesting review<\/a> of sorts of\u00a0Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim<\/a> <\/em>in which he spent the latter half of the article criticizing the game\u2019s poorly conceived dialogue and overly abundant lore:<\/p>\n

Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories \u2014 especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics \u2014 and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player\u2019s role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. . . .<\/p>\n

Why make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments? After all, the world and environments are already there in\u00a0Skyrim<\/em>; they\u2019re quite literally everywhere you look, gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore. And they\u2019re beautiful. Like most who play\u00a0Skyrim<\/em>, I\u2019m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bissel is one of my favorite game critics and his book,\u00a0Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0helped inspire me to take up writing this column but I don\u2019t think I could have had a more divergent experience with the lore of Skyrim<\/em>.\u00a0What Bissel feels detracts from an otherwise compelling world, I feel enlivens it.<\/p>\n

Skyrim<\/em>\u00a0is my first true Elder Scrolls experience. I played about 10 hours of Oblivion which pales in comparison to the many people who spent 200+ hours playing it. I have found myself\u00a0willingly reading Skyrim<\/em>\u2018s many books and stopping to listen to the stories of it\u2019s many characters. I am not, as Bissel suggests, a lore-fan. I skipped nearly all of the lore of Dragon Age: Origins<\/em> and stopped midway through my second reading of The Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy due to feeling overencumbered by it\u2019s lore.<\/p>\n

For the first time ever, I decided to make a female character\u2013I did this for a very distinct purpose\u2013to make clear in my mind that I am not my character. I don\u2019t live in Skyrim, I can\u2019t cast magic spells, and I am not a dark elf. As I explored Skyrim, I came across many books about the Dunmer or \u201cdark elves,\u201d my character\u2019s people. I discovered that many were forced out of their homeland of Morrowind, many are now exiles or slaves, and that most Nords (the native people of Skyrim) hate the Dunmer.\u00a0I read about their wars, their bitter history, their heroes, their villians, their religion, their culture, and their checkered past. I was also fascinated by many of the stories of my kindred or \u201clore dumps\u201d as Bissel calls them. When I arrived in Windhelm and found out that all the dark elves were living in poverty in the slums. I was eager to hear their stories\u2013rather than oppressing me, their stories enriched the story of my own character\u2013this expositional lore became \u201cuniquely my experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

I understand many of Bissel\u2019s complaints. There have certainly been times that I found Skyrim\u2019s <\/em>dialogue annoying. I often wanted to tell the guards in Whiterun, \u201cGive it a rest! NO ONE STOLE MY SWEET ROLL!\u201d However, given how videogames tend toward power fantasies<\/a>, I found the history and lore present in Skyrim refreshing, it reminded me that the world around me is much bigger than my character.<\/p>\n

Were it not for the dense lore of Skyrim, I would not have known much if anything about my character\u2019s people and I don\u2019t think I would have cared as much about her if I hadn\u2019t. Further, all this lore is optional\u2013most of it you can pass on, but quite often, I find myself not wanting to. I also find myself constantly stopping to listen to the conversations of others\u2013many are awkward but each tells me something about the city I am in. These are details that Bethseda did not have to include and details that I could pretty easily ignore but the multitude of them serves to do something rather rare in video games\u2013it makes the game more about the world than it is about me.<\/p>\n

Skyrim\u2019s history, culture, and lore certainly are embodied in its world but why can\u2019t games embody lore in dialogue as well? Despite the fact that I am able to slay dragons and shoot fireballs from my hands, as I climb Skyrim\u2019s peaks, explore its ruins and listen to the stories of its inhabitants, I can\u2019t shake the how small it makes me feel.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“… the multitude of these details serves to do something rather rare in video games–it makes the game more about the world than it is about me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1220,"featured_media":16137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[404,68249,1154,1363,1410,1436],"class_list":["post-16121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asides","category-games","tag-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim","tag-games","tag-skyrim","tag-tom-bissel","tag-videogames","tag-when-games-matter"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Games Matter: The Wonderful Lore of Skyrim<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""... the multitude of these details serves to do something rather rare in video games--it makes the game more about the world than it is about me."\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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