Skyrim – My Life, or Something Like It

On the Hook & Engaged: Why do we play games?

My recent experiences with Fallout 4 and conversations about modding have got me thinking, how we get locked in and invested in the games we do, and why? Further still, why do we play games at all?

Forgive the featured image, but I can’t render the phrase “got me thinking” without picturing Skyrim. That fact alone, is a testament to my questions. I haven’t done a serious playthrough of Skyrim in years and yet there are specific references like this that continue to persevere. While studying or writing, I often find myself listening to the Oblivion or Skyrim soundtracks. I continue to have the game’s map tagged up at my work desk–a testament to the game’s place in my life once, even if it’s there no longer.

Our games, our video games, are cultural artifacts. They are designed with intent for specific outcomes, and yet, like many other games, they tend to develop a path of their own once in the hands of players in the wild.

But why do we play at all?

tennis2bplayers2bby2bhorace2bhenry2bcauty252c2b1885 — I wouldn’t want to run for a tennis ball in those skirts, I’ll tell you.

Last term when writing a paper about Undertale, I looked into some of the ways that video games tap into our minds at a very fundamental cognitive level. Well-executed games like Undertale subvert player expectations in order to create more engaging content. This content goes against RPG-trained gamers’ beliefs about the genre, and further still, about video games themselves. One of the ultimate messages in Undertale is to force players to question procedural narratives, the perceived kill-spare dichotomy, and notions of “progress.” This message is delivered not only through the narrative, but also how the game builds itself around the player’s decisions, even after many playthroughs. Undertale is successful in this way, due to its ability to really get inside the mind of the player (or at least pretend to do so). It too, questions why we play, but does so while you are playing.

In the research for that paper, I considered a number of figures in cognitive stylistics, including the writings of Kenneth Burke (1, 2, 3), Joanna Gavins, and perhaps most importantly for where I’m going with this series’ introduction: Gonzalo Frasca and Michael Kearns. Their notions of “simulation theory” (Frasca 2003) and “predictive play” (1996) are an excellent jumping point for exploring not only why we play, but also why video games as another form of storytellling, are so enticing. Essentially, simulation theory and predictive play suggest that we tell stories (and subsequently write novels, or by extension, make video games), because our brains are literally hardwired to want to do so. Not purely because we find them “entertaining,” but rather, that we enjoy participating in other worlds so that we can better learn how to navigate this one. The theory goes that evolutionarily speaking, the reason we got so good at navigating complex social situations or novel problem-solving was because we got so good at pretending they were happening through stories. Tell enough stories that deal with how to fight a bear in the woods, and you might have a better chance at fighting off a bear in the woods if it actually happens to you.

We’re not here to discuss the validity of this claim per-se, but it’s an interesting point to consider when we look at video games. If novels and storytelling more broadly are ways for us to exercise our minds in order to better manage reality, how much better (or worse) might video games and “real” simulations be at doing just that? Naturally we play video games because we find them entertaining, but perhaps they tap into something even more primal than that? Or at least that’s the excuse you should give someone the next time they say you play video games too much. Heh.

Alas, no matter what the reason we play games at all, there are certainly many reasons we play video games, and further still, why there are so many video game genres to suit almost any need. You have role-playing, shooting, adventure, platformer, puzzle, strategic, simulation, racing, and fighting games–only to name a few. This is compounded by different methods of playing video games–be it mobile, console, computer, or virtual-reality. At every step of the way, we have found a variety of environments to simulate and pass time in. Unlike traditional narratives, video games allow us to explore simulated spaces in previously impossible ways. Hand-eye coordination in particular, is something that is gained by stories-by-gaming environs. Unless someone telling you a tale happens to throw the book at you during the climax, chances are, that this part was missing from traditional mind exercises.

With the genres of video games extending past those of traditional narrative forms, blending with other forms of sport and play, and further splitting off into countless directions–how do any of them manage to keep our attentions at all?

They catch us on the hook.

Academic References All-Posts Compilation

(Non-course):
– Burke, Kenneth (1925) Psychology and Form
– Burke, Kenneth (1968[1931]) Lexicon Rhetoricae. Counter-statement
– Burke, Kenneth (1984) Permanence and change
– Frasca, Gonzalo (2003) Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology
– Gavins, Joanna (2007) Text World Theory: An Introduction
– Genette, Gérard and Marie Maclean (1991) Introduction to the Paratext
– Kearns, Michael (1996)Reading Novels: Toward a Cognitive Rhetoric

(Course):
– Bogost, Ian. (2010) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games
– De Koven, Bernard. (2013) The Well-Played Game.
– Flanagan, Mary. (2009) Critical Play.
– Gibbs, Martin et al. (2012) Tomestones, Uncanny Monuments and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft
– Hart, Casey (2017) Getting Into the Game: An Examination of Player Personality Projection in Videogame Avatars (Game Studies)
– Isbister, Katherine (2016) How Games Move Us
– Juul, Jesper. (2013) The Art of Failure
– Kolo, Castulus and Timo Baur (2004) Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming (Game Studies)
– Krzywinska, Tanya (2008) World Creation and Lore: World of Warcraft as Rich Text in Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg eds.
– LaRell Anderson, Sky (2017) Watching People is Not a Game: Interactive Online Corporeality, Twitch.tv and Videogame Streams (Game Studies)
– Pearce, Celia (2009) Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
– Ruch, Adam (2009) World of Warcraft: Service or Space?
– Sharp, John (2015) Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Art

Haecceity: How long can you alter a game, before it ceases to be the same game?

The devices we have at our disposal for keeping a game going tend to become more and more legalistic as the concept of fairness evolves into a prerequisite for playing a game well. They are there to assure that the game is fair.

We establish such devices because we discover that, as we become familiar enough with a game to get totally involved in it, we tend to become a bit untrustworthy.

You know, you get involved in the heat of the game, you want to take the game as seriously and as fully as you can, and, if given the chance, you might in the blind passion of playing find yourself more willing that you normally would be to do something that closely approximates cheating—especially if no one happens to notice.

It’s not that you’re trying to be bad or inhumane or anything like that, it’s just that you’re so deep into the game that everything you do or think tends to become a strategy.

In other words, when you really get involved in a game, you forget yourself. In fact, the fun of the game lies in the fact that you can forget yourself. But what might happen is that you forget yourself too much (Koven 30).

Imagine that you have an axe which over time starts to break down. First, the handle breaks and you replace it, continuing to use it for a while afterwards. Eventually, the head breaks too and you’re forced to switch it out for a new one. No piece of the original axe remains–is it still the same axe?

This paradox, is perhaps better known as The Ship of Theseus paradox, with a variety of different fiction and non-fiction counterparts. Essentially, this paradox questions what happens when you replace all parts of an object (or person, robot, etc.)–does it still retain its original “thisness” or haecceity? It’s precisely the problem we see when looking at the more recent legacy of Bethesda titles: namely Skyrim and Fallout 4. There have been no shortage of mods available for Bethesda games, even as early as Oblivion. In the pre-Skyrim craze era, mods were already available to do just about anything. Recently, on my news feed I saw that Bethesda has basically stated that they’ll continue porting Skyrim “as long as people keep buying it.” My first thoughts after reading that was, which version of Skyrim is that?

Although Bethesda clearly has a good sense of humour about it, the fact remains that one of the biggest parts of what has given Skyrim and many of its other titles such longevity, was thanks to its modding community. A quick search through most-popular-mod-source Nexus Mods reveals the depth and depravity of said community. Hosting mods for a wide-variety of games, including Skyrim and the Fallout series, options are sortable based on community downloads, approvals, and general popularity. The version of Skyrim/Fallout that the ‘community’ wants you to play, is often vastly different than the one originally produced by Bethesda. Mods like these come when you know the game too well, you’re in too deep, and just want to keep that world alive (Koven 30).

In addition to audio-visual overhauls, character model and NPC model updates, and minor UI tweaks, these kinds of mods also offer monumental bug fixes left hanging by Bethesda (I’m looking at you Xbox 360 Skyrim), quest design, loading screens, new user-designed quests, backstories, tutorial skips–you name it, someone probably has designed a mod for it. It’s interesting to note, that while I’m saying ‘mod’ to describe what’s available on Nexus, in truth, some of them can also be classified as cheats, and generally speaking, we’re back to the problematic division of cheats and modification, especially in the mods cycling around for Bethesda titles. How much of the game can we tweak or change before we’ve gone too far and created something altogether different?

Recently my boyfriend encouraged me to return to Fallout 4 after my last dismissal of the title, following a very disgruntled encounter with its Settlement building system. I couldn’t build what I wanted, where or how I wanted, and it all required far more investment into the game than where I was at at the time. The UI was clunky, and I just wanted to build my post-apocalyptic city in peace as a home base before continuing. After facing a critical-fail bug after an hour or two of work, I walked away from the game and never returned. My renewed interest came from the inclusion of mods, following the insistence that it would improve a lot of the issues I had, and it ended up being true. I fell into the Ibister flow and lost track of time within the game, but not for the reason of the game itself, I fell into it, because of the modding experience.

I had dabbled in Skyrim modding when I eventually made my transition from Xbox 360 to PC, predominantly due to mindnumbing bugs at every turn. Most of these mods centred on adding new customization for my character, as well as some audio-visual improvements, and UI tweaks–the usual stuff. One of these important features included adding a “real time” clock to my loading screens, as far too many hours were lost in the “just one more quest” world of Skyrim in my undergrad before that. With Fallout 4, things were different.

With a cap of 255 mods, where is the line between *Fallout 4* and *Fallout 4 By Jenn & Friends?*

I spent an excruciatingly long time trying to get some of these mods to work in game, to work with one another, and to not generally break my ability to play the game. I made the foolish decision to start modding my game part way through an active save. While this was my first time getting this far, I didn’t feel comfortable incorporating mods or cheats that would break my “first” experience beyond the walls of Sanctuary. I would experience the “real” Fallout 4–or so I believed. It quickly became apparent that no matter what I did, I was changing the game beyond what it was “supposed to be.” A character interaction mod here, adapting how I chose my voice lines for chat interfaces, a “place anywhere” mod there, permitting my incessant need to build the perfect Settlements. My modding experience was about perfecting my experience within the Fallout space, all while trying to avoid doing as much damage to the game-as-intended as possible. It wasn’t about making it easier or harder, it was simply about improving the experience as it was–as determined by the community–like I was already so used to doing in WoW.

But I was wrong.

I made the mistake of remembering the existence of the console-command system. Alongside all the texture re-writes, the graphic overhauls, performance tweaks, and hundreds of hairstyles I had installed, I had yet to really “cheat” in my eyes, until I came to the console. Until this point, my boyfriend and I had been on the same page about what we were doing in the modvolution. Instead, I found as I got deeper into the game, that my opinions about cheating changed. I cared about the world, about my settlements, and about learning the story, but I cared less about how I went about building them or progressing through my murder sprees. I started implementing cheats for quick resources, alongside use of “killall” and “unlock” commands to get what I wanted without wasting too much time. I tried to use it sparingly, but it started to make the game feel emptier. If it weren’t for my desire to see the story or to make sprawling vaults and settlements, I don’t know if my heart would be in it. The ability to truly grind, to truly fail, to truly work for what I had given myself was missing (Juul).

With Skyrim, I had already beaten the majority of the game by the time I had started to dive into mods, and only ever did I cheat to advance my storyline the one time for my corrupted Xbox 360 save. The rabbit hole of cheating had encapsulated me, and now I was faced with trying to get clean or just commit to the deeds that I have done. Ironically, though his Fallout has the limit of mods, without cheating, my boyfriend’s Fallout may yet be more authentic than mine. A sentiment he shares, and that I might just believe.

It’s no wonder that Bethesda turns off achievements for players with modifications enabled (although with the Fallout 4 Script Editor, you can re-enable them anyway). With any number of mods enabled, even Bethesda seems to believe that having them changes the game enough that achievements are no longer valid when obtained on a modded system.

In looking back at my decisions to change Fallout 4, the how and the why, the community’s answers, and the community’s options–I can’t help but echo the idea of what “thisness” remains in the game after so many changes? Mods label themselves as vanilla or lore-friendly, suggesting that they’re closer to the game’s “thisness” than their counterparts. If the axe’s head you replace comes from the sister of the axe you already owned, does that make it closer to the same axe?

People cheat and modify these games for any number of reasons, primarily in finding new ways to establish their ideal user experience through improving identity (character, environment mods), flow (UI, ease or difficulty changes, performance enhancers), and even modifying what it means to fail. Through these changes, they reinforce community standards, while still toying around with what the developers have allowed them to change. While Fallout 4 and Skyrim allow for much larger changes to their core code than say, The Sims 4, World of Warcraft, or Sonic 2, any changes beyond simple interaction with the game-as-design call into question the “thisness” of a game.

We may cheat, modify, and break games for any number of inherent human desires to do so, however, is a game only what it’s produced to be, or should we begin to consider all changes, modifications, cheats, and adaptations to be part of the ephemeral haecceity that surrounds the initial game’s code? If we can adopt house rules as a relatively standard deviation from normal rules, and if Luxury Tax gets paid out to Free Parking on the regular, maybe modding and cheating aren’t so bad. Maybe they find ways to help us make use of our game worlds just a little bit longer. Or maybe, it’s simply a way for a gaming community to participate in the development world, beyond passive engagement.

After all, Skyrim played on Xbox 360, will differ from Xbox One, from the Switch, and from P.C., before mods or cheats are even considered. Why set the limits on user experience? As Koven stated in the quotation at the beginning of this series: “I am aware that the motivation for your sudden intensity stems not as much from your concern that I have broken a rule as from your feeling that I have somehow deprived you of your opportunity to win…” (24). If cheating is just a socially agreed upon set of rules and conditions of play, then what does it matter if no one is there to see you do it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE2BkLqMef4

Academic References/Further Reading:

Isbister, Katherine How Games Move Us (2016)
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure (2013)
Koven, Bernard De. The Well-Played Game (2013)

Videogames: What makes us cheat?

Gone are the days of mythological cheat codes and glitches now that we constantly share and update gaming strategies through YouTube, GameFAQs, and more. Yet, the need to cheat was there at the beginning, and so does the trend seem to continue through our contemporary gaming market, even in the wake of leadership boards and achievements. Thus we return to the primary question of this post: why are we doing it?

Perhaps we can revisit the idea that original cheat codes were meant to help playtesters in their intentional bug-finding failures for an answer. Jesper Juul spends a good deal of time breaking down our relationship with failure and videogames in The Art of Failure. Juul (2013) comments that while we generally avoid failure in our daily lives, we often seek out games that ultimately provide some kind of failure, even though we would otherwise avoid it (33). “[E]ven though players appear to dislike failure, we tend to believe that games should make players fail, at least some of the time” (34, emphasis added). He continues on to liken videogame experiences of failure with art, and most importantly, that our videogame failures offer us compensation somehow (like the exhilaration of finally achieving a difficult task), and that we don’t always seek them out for pleasure. “The most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well” (The Olympic Creed, as quoted by Juul, 43).

Interestingly, we often fail to remember that cheating, modding, and hacking videogames can be either to make games easier or harder. Up and until this point, I have even focused on cheating as that which makes the game easier, but there are plenty of examples of the opposite, including ROM Hacks and code-changing to give games that extra edge gamers desire to really “prove” themselves. Arguably, in these cases, players are actively seeking the possibility and likelihood of failure, so that when they finally do succeed, it’s that more momentous. Some games even have this built-in, as Juul discusses later on. GLaDOS seems to take joy in taunting the player in their ‘ineptitude’ while progressing through the Portal series (50), particularly when she is a potato. These taunts push us to excel and to feel better despite this sanctioned kind of ‘abuse.’

Katherine Isbister explores how videogames work actively and intentionally on our emotions within her book How Games Move Us and might be able to help shed some insight here too:

To the human brain, playing a game is more like actually running a race than watching a film…When I run, I make a series of choices about actions I will take that might affect whether I win. I feel a sense of mastery or failure depending on whether I successfully execute the actions…My emotions ebb and flow as I make these choices and see what happens as a result. In the end, I am to blame for the outcomes, because they arise from my own actions (3).

Sound familiar? GLaDOS taunts the player forward so that the player continues, but also because it helps to convince the player to be emotionally invested. This emotion is derived not only from the content of the game, but also through its design (again, via Procedural Rhetoric). You are required to be the active agent that makes decisions and makes the game progress. Games that centre around this “flow” as Isbister calls it, “[t]he ability to choose and control your actions” that cause players to ‘get in the zone,’ “…time seems to melt away and personal problems disappear. Well-designed games, with the control they offer users over actions in a novel world, readily engage players in a flow state” (4). She goes on to cite the necessity of goals, action and awareness, challenging activities, loss of self-control, and altered sense of time as features of this flow. What’s interesting for our discussion of cheating and modding, is that in some cases, these features remain. The very act of modding, as we’ll see later with Skyrim and Fallout 4, can be as emotionally engaging as the game’s content itself.

So if cheating to make things harder follows Juul and Isbister, what can we say about when games are made easier through cheating and modification? What happens when the risk of failure is reduced, if not removed altogether?

Juul spends a great deal of time discussing the different types of failure we encounter when playing videogames. However, I would like to suggest that modding (of some kinds) and cheating to make things easier on the one hand makes failure nearly impossible in-game, but actually equates to “failing” in the real world. By neglecting to play the game “as intended,” you ultimately circumvent any real engagement with the content and ultimately fail before you even begin. While you may feel no guilt or remorse for cheating, you will always be aware that you cheated, even if it was only once. The entire experience of that game is now attached to your decision to cheat. It will never be “the same” as if you had progressed naturally. In this way, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid failure altogether when playing videogames, as when cheating to make things easier, you might only be cheating yourself out of an authentic experience.

But alas, things are never quite so simple. There are plenty of ways to cheat that can be legitimized–not all console commands are created equally. While this leads us into our upcoming discussion of The Sims and World of Warcraft, I will end off on my own anecdote about utilizing cheat codes at my disposal.

When I first started playing Skyrim on my Xbox 360 I got lost in the ‘flow’ and wasted a good number of hours in the woodland mountains. As I type now, I’m even listening to the world nighttime music of the game. I was seriously invested. After more hours than possible to reset, I encountered a game-breaking bug where I was unable to progress the main storyline of the faction I wanted to join. Vehement that I could not join the opposing faction, I found a way to port my save file to a USB before plugging it into my computer and converting it to a PC game file, and console-command progressing my character along the questline I needed, past the bug. I then reconverted the file to an Xbox 360 save, plugged it back into my system, and continued being the Dragonborn.

skyrim_special — “It got me thinking, maybe *I’m* the dragonborn and I just don’t know it yet” – Every Skyrim guard ever

Do I feel guilty about this? Does it taint my memories of the game? Well, no, not really, but I’ll always know I did it. While I felt justified in my reasoning behind progressing my save, and while my Xbox 360 achievements never blinked an eye, I was still saddened that it was something I was forced to do. While toying with Bethesda bugs is something the modding community is well-invested in (something else we’ll tackle in a later post), there’s something to be said for cheating justification in our gaming–and that’s not even something that’s just from the developers. What’s acceptable to modify or how one chooses to cheat within the gaming community is vastly different depending on what kind of game it is (solo vs. multiplayer, online vs. offline, to name a few). Even the pedigree and age of a game can affect how players see any sort of deviation from the scripted norm. There are countless and fascinating areas worth looking into and studying when dealing with this area, and I regret I’m only able to touch on so few.

The next few posts will look at cheating and modification in action as viewed through The Sims (series), World of Warcraft, Skyrim and Fallout 4. Buckle in, it ain’t over yet.

Academic References/Further Reading:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (2010)
Isbister, Katherine How Games Move Us (2016)
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure (2013)

This Day in Video Game History: April 4th

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