Inheriting Traditions: Hero Construction and Landscape in the and Skyrim Video Games

Thomas Brassington, Lancaster University The Video Game Format

• ‘[video games] are “played” rather than “read”, “watched”, or “listened to”’ p. 25 Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

• ‘in this active relationship, something crucial happens to the human subject’ p. 94 Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London & New York: Routledge, 2004) Oddworld

• Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus are both set on the planet Oddworld, specifically on the continent of Mudos. They are largely set in massive industrial complexes laid out in the platformer game style. • In both games, your primary objective is to shut down (blow up) RuptureFarms (Oddysee) and SoulStorm Bewery (Exoddus). Second, you should save at least 51% of your fellow mudokon slaves from the various industrial complexes that you navigate. Skyrim

• Set in the province of Skyrim, you are about to be killed when a dragon attacks. This allows you to escape from Helgen, and after a short amount of time you discover that you are the legendary ‘Dragonborn’. • Largely, the main plot of the game is not important. What’s more important about Skyrim is its sheer size and how you can easily become every single legendary character in myth and folklore there. It very much exists in its own legends.

Inheriting traditions: Oddworld

• Oddysee and Exoddus inherit from a multiplicity of traditions. Importantly, they inherit from dystopia, science fiction, and post modern satires of traditional hero narratives • The game’s are highly politicised and informed by anti-, gothic modes are present, but used sparingly, as well as frequent allusions to pop culture, American history, and contemporary global issues: • Soylent Green and SoulStorm Brew; • Abe and Abraham Lincoln; • Over farming as an example of out of control capitalism • ‘dystopian fictions are typically set in places or times far distant from the author’s own, but it is usually clear that the real referents of dystopian fictions are generally quite concrete and near-at-hand’ M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) Inheriting Traditions: Skyrim

• Skryim functions very much within its own established world, and in-game mythologies. • These are clearly constructed from traditional ‘High Fantasy’ narratives (i.e. Tolkien and Norse/Greek warrior mythologies). • Even then, these have been filtered through phenomena such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and other Role-playing games rather than their original sources. Examples of inheritance: Oddworld

• ‘The Gothic mode emerges readily in science fiction that explores power, anxiety, resistance and capital’ p. 1 Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, ‘Introduction’ in Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010, ed. by Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press)

• ‘The great defining texts of the genre’ (We, 1984, Brave New World) Booker, Dystopian Impulse Examples of Inheritance: Skyrim

• ‘Fantasy seems to have, like the folk talks from which it sprang, a restricted number of recurrent motifs and elements: there are young, questing heroes, wise controlling sages, irredeemably evil monsters’ p. 2 Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds’, in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, ed. by Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (London: Continuum, 2001; repr. 2003) • ‘the world of [skyrim] seems to be at root a ritual: everything is done for the sake of song and legend – characters are living out gnomic predictions, or consciously writing themselves into future history-books’ p. 33 Hunt, ‘Introduction’ The Dragonborn

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