My Journey to Solitude: Loneliness and Virtual Fatigue in The Elder Scrolls
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
The Elder Scrolls games are the loneliest games in the whole goddamn universe. There. I said it. From the forests of Cyrodiil to the wastes of Skyrim, nobody has ever been more alone than that carefully-crafted avatar that you spent half an hour getting the nose just right for.
Back in March, Oblivion was my pandemic game. I played it on a laptop that ran as if it was as old as the game itself, and let me tell you, persons and gentlefolks, I was hooked. If I played that game for four hours, it was a short Oblivion day. Part of this was because, in my do-or-die, if-it’s-not-explained-in-game-I-must-not-need-it approach to game mechanics, I did not know about fast traveling. So I became Skell Goreyward (a Jack Skellington figurine and an Edward Gorey puzzle are on my writing desk), the most notorious horse thief in all Tamriel. That was the only feasible way to get anywhere. And I rode and climbed and delved and dove and caught vampirism and cured vampirism and got the thieves’ den and Mehrunes’ Razor and the Morag Tong armor and generally just kicked all kinds of ass.
A couple hundred game hours later, once I graduated to Skyrim, I started asking myself: “Why am I playing this so much?” In March, I thought it was the novelty of finally playing That Game I Always Meant To Get To. In April, I thought it was it reminded me of hiking. In May, I figured it out. I was trying to replace my tabletop roleplaying group—the last people I saw in March, before quarantine—with a bunch of clunky NPCs. And even though I was arguably a more proficient spellcaster in both games than I ever was in Pathfinder, nothing could remedy the stark truth: I was failing miserably. Even my isolation had isolation.
I fruitlessly tried to consider a backstory for Skell, my lawless Dunmer nightblade, or for Frog Blugrug, my lawful Orc sorcerer. I tried to play the game and be true to the fiction that I invented in my head. But it was ultimately meaningless to do so, because except for my bout with vampirism, I reached a point where most of the other characters treated me exactly the same way, no matter what I did. Even if I got caught in the act of robbing someone blind, after I went to jail and paid my bounty, most NPCs would continue to interact with me just like nothing had ever happened. Even after I broke the Forsworn leader out of prison in Skyrim, do you think anything was different the next time I stumbled into one of their gods-forsaken creepy-ass bone-sculpture camps? (It was not. I tried, and got the shit kicked out of me by their hagraven.)
Then there was the simple fact of hailing and its impossibility. It came to a point where if one more NPC called me “stranger,” “traveler,” or (worst of all) “friend,” I was ready to light them on fire. Of course, if you want audible dialogue in a game that also has a custom naming mechanic, you’re going to get referred to in the generic second person all the time, but it got to be an alienating reminder that no one around here could possibly know who I was.
I was delighted the first time a Skyrim guard said, “Hail summoner, conjure me up a warm bed, will you?”…But then the next one said it. And the next…and the next. The fiction’s thin veneer of substance and comradeship kept cracking and sloughing off, unveiling its bare virtuality until I could no longer suspend my disbelief. No one in this world knew or cared who I was. Whatever this experience was, there came a point where, in spite of my best efforts, I could no longer call it roleplay. There was no one for whom or with whom I could play my role. It was just a roleplaying simulator—a hall of repeating mirrors in a vast world where I was the only living thing.
As if we haven’t had enough of virtuality this year. All year long, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who argued in the ‘80s that we were entering an age defined by “hyperreality,” where we will never be inhabiting virtual reality or material reality separately, but always experiencing both at once. In The Ecstasy of Communication (a great title—if it’s not an orgy, the French philosophers aren’t coming to the party), he talks about how someday having a computer in a two-room apartment will make you feel like you’re on a satellite, orbiting a careless world in the vastness of space. “That which was preciously mentally projected,” he says, “which was lived as a metaphor in the terrestrial habitat is from now on projected, entirely without metaphor, into the absolute space of simulation.”
That’s exactly what happened between me and RPGs this year. This adventure story I used to tell in my mind, or collectively with others as we spoke in ersatz voices and rolled dice on a table, has now become a vacant simulation where I wander a cold wasteland trying to commune with hollow elves, orcs, and lizard people. The guy in the imaginary bar says, “You look like someone who can hold their liquor. How about a drinking contest to win a staff?” Of course there is no dialogue option to say, “All I want to do is have this conversation in a world where someone can say my name.”
Where do you go to escape from your escapism? This feeling that everyone I know has become two-dimensional avatars of themselves in flat boxes arrives concurrent with the fact I am more likely to die physically after a trip to the grocery store than I am to die virtually in a cave full of monsters. I am safe to wander in the vacuous space of absolute simulation while the walls of my terrestrial satellite creep slowly inwards. Is this all I have left? The choice between my empty virtual body in a frozen waste of ghosts, or one more video call that leaves me bereft of the fullness of those I love?
These are the questions that keep me awake on the longest night of the year. I suppose it’s well enough that I can’t sleep. I have business in the capital city of Skyrim—in Solitude.
