Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Mike Piero

Author:Mike Piero
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2021-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Passive and Active Environments

Chang’s “Games as Environmental Texts” is a call for games to focus on the environment in ways other than the extractive, stereotyping, and passive modes through which most games represent nature. She argues:

Games that call our attention to environmental states and shifts, and to our implication in those processes, promise a new kind of gameplay challenge, one that would deliver the deathblow to the pernicious myth of a free and ­ever-abundant Nature while establishing a new level of consciousness in player experience. Why must games replicate the same kind of costly obliviousness we see every day in the nonvirtual world—the refusal to acknowledge or even attempt to understand our role in climate change, environmental degradation, and species ­loss-when they could instead take such factors into account, with very interesting results? [7]

Skyrim modders cannot change the base game completely, but they respond to Chang’s call by troubling the “free and ­ever-abundant” conception of nature. The refusal to acknowledge bigger questions such as climate change, however, very much remains in place. Skyrim is designed as a ­pre-industrial land, and the environmental concerns that daily plague the contemporary world are very far away for the pastoral inhabitants of Skyrim. Even with the mods that add realistic needs and consequences to the game, the inhabitants of Skyrim, both human and nonhuman, are at risk from a stray blizzard or from hunger, never from systemic problems such as habitat destruction.

However, the games and texts that Chang points to as sufficiently environmentally aware also may have their shortcomings. Chang uses Timothy Morton’s literary ecocriticism as a basis for her arguments about which games are environmental texts, but also notes that Morton “looks to art ‘above all else’ and Romantic literature in particular for ‘properly ecological forms,’” an assertion that she also adopts. I do not believe that the Romantics had the perfect approach to ecological literature, but nor do I entirely buy Wills’s assertion that Romanticism is to blame for shallow ecological representation. Furthermore, I am critical of relying too much on games that are specifically labeled as environmental or ecological. Vella cites Minecraft as an extractive, destructive game and holds up Proteus as an alternative. But in Proteus, the player can really only observe—there are very few actions to take, and none which provide a typical gameplay experience. Proteus and other environmental games often seem to suggest that the solution is position of ­non-action, especially ­non-interaction, wherein the human player is unable to influence the natural world. This certainly has its appeals, as the majority of human interventions that come to mind are destructive. However, as I have stated above, a position of inaction is untenable in the real world. Nor can real human bodies remain inert in their physical surroundings, as avatars can. Vella in fact states that “the systemic foundation for [the] sense of inhabitation is the capacity of the avatar to act as the player’s embodiment within the virtual environment, […] the process by which the gameworld becomes intelligible

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