what does a game mean to you
In my daily wanderings around the world wide web, I sometimes stumble into moments of profundity that I find astonishing.
This article about Skyrim players saying goodbye to Skyrim blew my hat clean off. And, babies, I never wear a hat.
Sentimental Skyrim Players Retire Original Characters.
I’ll excerpt from the article which really takes most of its reporting from the Skyrim subreddit.
"This is gonna sound cheesy, sentimental, and a bit much, but hear me out," they wrote. "I recently found my old Xbox 360 where I first played Skyrim. My total first play through, no strategy, no game plan, no knowledge of lore, I just went for it.
"It occurred to me, this account that I spent hundreds of hours on was just sitting there waiting for me to pick it back up at any moment. This little Skyrim dude saw me through high school, and part of college, and I just left him sitting this whole time. So I decided to get back on the 360 to retire my old guy.
"I took him to his custom built house, put him in some emperor clothes, put all the weapons away, and sat him at the table. Saved the game and shut it off. Gave the virtual dude some closure and said goodbye to my first playthrough. It weirdly felt kinda nice. Before you laugh at the idea, give it a try."
I’ve written many times about the way videogame characters have meant the world to me1. And so perhaps I was primed for something like this.
I was recently talking to
about Count Zero and this topic came up, in a way. But he made the point that videogames have become the dominant commercial artform by which people experience narrative stories, and I think that’s not unrelated to this.And while I could bemoan about the fact that movies2 and books3 are waning in cultural importance, I’m more interested in the way this reflects my own experiences with art and stories and how I was told that games don’t matter.
We can mock these players for attaching so much meaning to a game4, but I think this is actually a beautiful moment. And if they were doing this for a novel or album, no one would even bat an eye.
But I like the idea of saying goodbye to the characters who have meant to so much to us. Because, ultimately and actually, these people are saying goodbye to themselves. The person they once were. The person who needed that tether to another reality, who spent hours inventing their character.
Because even in a narratively driven game, interactive media demands that we invent our own narrative. There’s a generative quality to games where the hours we spend inside them becomes as much a part of the narrative as the words written to direct the narrative.
Yes, some games set you on rails and push you along a path tread by millions of others. But even within that path, it was your footsteps that carried you forward. Yes, maybe other landed in those exact same footprints, but that’s part of the beauty of them.
No one would say a book is worse because other people read it or understood it the same way.
That’s part of what makes them powerful and communal.
But here, with a game like Skyrim, you are the hero. You determine the path and style and decisions and, in this way, you make yourself within the confines of the game.
And maybe that you within the game escapes and becomes part of you, helps you see the world you daily live in new. Lets you become the version of you that fills you with pride and hope and desire.
And so I do find this beautiful.
I find it moving.
There are versions of ourselves tied into the games and books and shows and movies we loved, that shaped us, that allowed us to make it through our worst days, our deepest nightmares, and some of them are still sitting there waiting for us to look upon them again.
If Toy Story 3 made you cry, you didn’t even need to read all these words. Because you felt it bonedeep in 2010 when you were 22 and too old for kid’s movies only to have this one punch a hole through your heart and leave you week kneed as you stumbled out of the theatre, unable to catch your breath.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
Again, I’ve written about this many times but I’ll point you towards my essay on Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love & 2046
Again, how much can I jam in here? Why not just my piece on Lord of the Rings?
Especially since Skyrim is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Maybe I’ll write about it someday.
Yes, all this. I always feel so bittersweet when I end a game. Every time, it hits as hard.
I was feeling a similar idea this weekend and your post put it into words in a way I couldn’t. I started playing FFXIV, which has this very long, epic storyline. And after a particular heavy moment, I travelled to a main city and a few other players were playing music in the town square. I realized I had made my own pacing, my own come down after a big dramatic story beat. There’s something really special about that. I often feel really torn with games, since that judgement you speak of is always in my head. But then something happens that feels truly yours.
Anyways, great article.