Hey, You. You're Finally Awake

The problem with saying I've been playing Skyrim for just over a decade (since I bought a friend's Xbox 360 in 2013 and promptly picked up a copy of the legendary edition) is that it doesn't really accurately portray my relationship with this game.

I'd estimate (I don't have actual numbers here because I've played it on various platforms over the years so I don't have an official time-in-game tracker) that on average I've played about twelve hours a month of Skyrim over the last one hundred and thirty months. That's definitely an average, because there have been periods where I haven't played it for months at a time and periods where I've played probably four to six hours a night for weeks at a time. That means that (again, wildly estimating here) I've played roughly 1,560 hours of Skyrim.

Despite this exorbitant amount of time playing the game, I wouldn't say it paints an accurate picture of my experience of Skyrim. It would be more accurate to say that I've been restarting the game for just over a decade.

There are 17 quests in the main storyline (19 if you count a couple optional quests). I have only ever completed the first 8 of those quests.

There are 12 quests in the first DLC's main storyline. I've only ever completed 6 of them.

There are 7 quests in the third DLC's main storyline. I've only ever completed 1 of them.

Of the 7 side questlines in the base game, I've completed 2 of them.

My problem is character creation. There are so many different choices of playstyle in Skyrim, but not only that, there are also so many different choices of aesthetic in Skyrim. You can choose for your character to be from one of ten different playable "races"; each of which has a different culture, history, and place within the world of Skyrim. That's the aesthetic. Each of them also has a different set of skill bonuses and special abilities, which lend themselves to different playstyles. You can use heavy armor, light armor, or spells that toughen your skin against blows. You can use one-handed weapons (with a shield, a spell, or another one-handed weapon in the other hand), two-handed weapons, bows, or spells. You can try to sneak past enemies (or sneak attack enemies), or you can charge in with your weapon swinging. You can cast spells that summon allies to fight your enemies, or turn your fallen enemies into zombies to fight against their former friends, or cast a spell that magically calms your enemies so you can walk past them, or cast a spell that turns enemies against one another so they kill each other for you. You can make potions to give you various benefits, or sharpen your weapons and improve your armor, or place enchantments on your equipment. The sheer amount of variety is overwhelming.

I don't choose that word lightly. I get overwhelmed by the number of character choices, and to try to compensate for that overwhelmed feeling, I try to optimize my character: pick the numerically best option. But which is the best option? What is easiest in the early game? What is best in the late game? What is theoretically the most efficient combination of weight carried and damage dealt? What can deal the most damage per second? What can take the most damage per second without dying? I'm sure there are answers to this: there are whole wikis dedicated to analyzing the math of Skyrim combat and talking through how to exploit gameplay loops to create armor that makes you invincible or weapons that will kill anyone in a single hit. I could (and have) spend hours poring over these blogs, planning out in meticulous detail how overpowered my character will be, how to never worry about dying, how to get the best gear as quickly as possible; i.e., how to win Skyrim.

The problem is that that's not why I like playing Skyrim. I like the world of Tamriel, the story of the various characters and factions that fill the world, and the marvel of inhabiting an imaginary character in an imaginary world that still manages to look and feel somehow real in spite of its age and its well-documented glitches.

My cycle of playing this game typically goes like this. It's been a bit since I've played, so I'm excited. I think up a character who seems cool. I go based on aesthetics: "Ooh, a super strong orc who's basically a walking tank and can take out people with a two-handed weapon super easily!" Then, I look up the optimal way to build that character, make a plan, look up Elder Scrolls orc names online. I start playing the game. I have a good time, until at some point, I bump up against something that would be cool to do but that my character isn't designed to do, and that's where everything falls apart.

See, there's this problem in games in The Elder Scrolls (which Skyrim is part of) called underleveling. Or overleveling. I'm not sure which. It takes different forms in different games, but in short it's when suboptimal character decisions when playing the game and leveling up makes you too weak compared to the enemies you're facing, leading to a much more difficult experience than you'd otherwise have. Here's an example: when you're low level and travelling the wilderness in Skyrim, you periodically get attacked by wolves. As you level up, that switches over to sabertooth tigers (basically), which are significantly more dangerous. In Skyrim, every skill that you improve contributes to your leveling up, even if it doesn't contribute to your being able to fight enemies. You might be really good at picking pockets and picking locks and selling things for a good price, but terrible at fighting with a sword. That means that when you fight something that's ostensibly a good enemy for your level, you don't actually have the fighting skills to handle it. That's underleveling. Or overleveling.

So maybe I get excited about creating a sneaky character who uses poisoned arrows to kill enemies with a single shot, and I have a great time doing that right up until I run up against something that I can't shoot from afar that can kill me in one hit. And I think, "Well, I messed up my character optimization. I'm not powerful enough. I'd better start over."

It's a bit of a brutal cycle, compounded by the fact that there are lots of cool questlines that seem pretty niche: a guild for warriors? I'd better make a dedicated warrior! A school for wizards? I'd better make the optimal mage build! Which would be a fine way to experience the game, except there always comes a point where my optimized character is very good at a specific thing, and I want to do something that's not that specific thing, and so I start over to make a character who's optimized for that specific thing.

It's not a very fun way to play. I essentially math all the fun out of an activity I enjoy, and I end up stressed, burnt out, and done with the game. I try to optimize a character to be good at something, and end up hating playing that character.

So here I am, back at the start of this cycle, and I'm done. But not with Skyrim. I want to play Skyrim. I want to finally finish all these questlines I've been starting and restarting and restarting countless times over the last few years. I want to discover what happens in the end! There are whole areas of this game that I've never experienced, never gone to, because I keep starting over.

So this time, I'm not going to optimize the character for the game. I'm going to optimize the character for myself.

See, I've played hard games. I don't mind trying again and trying again and figuring out new tactics and trying again. The problem is that if I have tried to make the perfect character to "win", and then I don't "win", what's the point? So no more of that. I'm going to play the game doing all the different things I want to do: magic! fighting! potions! enchantments! And I'm going to plan to be underleveled (or overleveled). It's going to happen, because I want to use well over half of the skills in the game. I like using well over half of the skills in the game. A jack of all trades is a master of none, right?

This might sound like I'm just setting myself up to do the same thing again: get frustrated, start over, eventually quit. But the key is that I've finally identified why I like Skyrim and what I want out of it. There was a tagline on the box of Morrowind (an earlier Elder Scrolls game): "Live another life in another world." I have always been excited about that promise from The Elder Scrolls, and I have always been disappointed, because you can't do it. Not really. You can't change the course of the imaginary world except in the specific pre-designed ways. You can't say, "Hey, I want to join you with the werewolf hunters instead of becoming a werewolf." You can't say, "Hey, I think the colonized natives in this region have a point. I want to help them retake their home from their oppressors." In my all-or-nothing way, I chafed against those restraints on my creativity, and I thought, "If I can't actually choose anything I want, then I'm not going to engage with this imaginary world as anything other than a game to win," and if you recall, that's not what I love about playing Skyrim.

So here's my character: he's an Altmer, also known as a High Elf. His people are aggressive and expansionist, and their religious zealots (the Thalmor) are among the most hated and feared groups in Skyrim. He used to be one of them, but now he wants out. While on a mission, he fled, hoping to start a new life, but was captured by the Empire and sentenced to execution, until a dragon attacked. He escaped in the confusion, teaming up with a Nord freedom fighter who actively hates the Thalmor and Altmer in general. His name is Bel, named after Belteshazar (or Daniel) from the Bible because it has a book called Bel and the Dragon and Skyrim is about killing dragons and I thought that would be cool.

I played for a couple hours last night before bed and this morning before work, and I spent most of that time hanging around the first town, eating food even though it has no mechanical benefit, getting a good night's sleep even though it doesn't really do anything, and chopping wood so that I can get the money to buy gear so I can go adventuring because I didn't loot any armor off the soldiers we fought while escaping because I imagined myself in Bel's shoes: hurrying to escape, scared for his life, not wanting to stop and take the time to go through anyone's pockets for change. I also hid the rebel armor I got in the escape in a cupboard in the house I'm staying at because the freedom fighter I escaped with said, "This isn't Stormcloak territory. We'll have to lay low."

I know that none of this matters in the game. I know I could walk up to an Imperial soldier in Stormcloak armor, and they wouldn't bat an eye. I'm still only level 1, and I know that the choices I'm making are actively making the game slower and less efficient and therefore harder. But I don't care. To quote Sofi Tukker's "Good Time Girl": I'm not winning, but I'm having a very good time.

What am I doing?

In the past, I've tried to stick with sharing thoughts that I thought were profound enough to be worth contemplation. This is, admittedly, ironic, given the title of my blog, but I supposed I've adopted a sort of pedagogical approach to blogging, which explains why I've not really written anything here recently. I feel like I have increasingly more questions than answers about most of the deep things that matter in the world (especially in the categories of theology and philosophy and ethics). So since my blogging has been contemplative, trying to drive at some sort of ill-defined point in a more-or-less roundabout sort of way, I haven't had much to say.

But I have all sorts of things I'm interested in thinking--and blogging--about, even if they are of no real import or interest to anyone except me. I've been silent for the last year or two because I've self-censored, essentially editing into nonexistence what I've initially been excited about writing. I've bought the lie that to be worth writing, something has to be important or meaningful or thought-provoking or otherwise somehow great.

It doesn't.

Writing, like all other art, is at its core an act of self-expression. People shouldn't be judged by whether they're important enough or meaningful enough or thought-provoking enough or great enough. Who gets to say whether what you choose to spend your time on is worthwhile? I'm sure there's some sort of objective standard out there, and there are all sorts of different religious philosophies aimed at trying to define the "good life", but even if we take that into consideration, I ask you: if someone is living a good life, does that make them valuable? Or are they valuable because they're a person, regardless of whether they're living a good life? I'd say it's the second one.

So it follows: if a person is valuable for being a person, and self-expression is a way for a person to communicate some part of themselves, whether to the world or just to themselves, then that self-expression is valuable for its providing a window through which to see some aspect of the person. Thus, writing is valuable as writing.

I'm not writing any of this to justify to anyone who happens to be reading this why I'm giving myself permission to write about stupid shit that I think might be fun to write about. I'm writing this to give myself the permission to not care anymore. I haven't seriously written fiction in over a decade because someone I looked up to gave me feedback that they probably don't even remember that made me feel very silly for even wanting to write fantasy fiction. I'm sick of caring what other people think about my art or my hobbies or my interests or my beliefs. They're mine. Not anyone else's. So I'm going to write whatever I want, and who gives a fuck whether anyone reads it or thinks it's good? It's self-expression, and that's good enough.

Loving the Art, Not the Artist

When I was in fifth grade, my best friend was a kid named James. I'm not sure if I was his best friend, but we hung out often: I would bike over to his house of an afternoon and play with him (back before any of the kids my age had learned that you had to call playing together "hanging out" to be cool). Sometimes James and I would play in his backyard and his treehouse with his kid sister. More often, we would play video games. It was James who introduced me to Assassin's Creed and who reintroduced me to the Halo series by way of Halo 3. (An encounter several years earlier with the original Halo: Combat Evolved when I was way too young to handle its midpoint horror twist had left me mildly traumatized.)

More importantly for my life than any of that, however, is that James introduced me to a game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (the predecessor to 2011's wildly successful The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). James and I haven't spoken in fifteen years, but to say that he transformed my life by introducing me to Oblivion would not be an exaggeration.

The first album I purchased was Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to Oblivion. When my sisters teamed up to buy me The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I learned how to make hidden folders visible on Windows so I could locate Morrowind's music files (also composed by Jeremy Soule) where they had been installed on the family hard drive. The first two discs I burned (back when we still burned CDs) were the soundtracks to Oblivion and Morrowind.

They are still my favourite soundtracks of all time. Over the course of the last decade and a half, I've spent more hours than I could possibly count listening to them. I recently purchased a car with a CD player, and almost the first thing I did was fish out my old burned discs of Oblivion and Morrowind, which I've been listening to daily on my half-hour commute. I never tire of them, and even when I find other amazing scores, I keep coming back to these two soundtracks.

Naturally, I have also loved and admired Jeremy Soule for just as long as I've listened to his music.

Of course, the title should tell you that this doesn't exactly turn out a wholly happy story, but if you know anything about me, you know that sometimes I have to ramble to get to a particular point, so let's take a detour and talk briefly about memory.

I don't remember most of my childhood. I have very specific images of moments in my childhood, but I cannot conjure more than a static snapshot of much of anything before I was a teenager. I haven't spoken with any professionals about this phenomenon, but my layman's opinion is that it's the result of some relational trauma I experienced in middle school that resulted in an addiction to self-harm that I didn't manage to overcome until near the end of my time in college.

I also have had interpersonal conflict over the years with people who've told me that I am misremembering something. Due to my lack of most of my childhood memory, I have previously been especially vulnerable to such assertions because I've viewed my memory as flawed. If I remember someone saying something to me or doing something and they claim not to have said or done it, then surely (I tell myself) I must be the incorrect one.

Naturally, this has led me to be fascinated with the concept of memory. I read an article years ago about how researchers showed subjects pictures of their childhood and subsequently asked them to recall stories of growing up. The pictures included doctored photos of an invented hot air balloon ride that the subjects' families never went on, but the majority of subjects told stories about that hot air balloon ride, believing that it happened, even though the researchers made it up. The subjects invented a memory that didn't exist to explain the false photographic evidence they had been presented.

There are similar documented cases of suspects in criminal cases being bullied by police officers into believing they were guilty of a crime they did not commit. (This is one of the reasons torture is now generally considered an ineffective way to get accurate information from someone.)

These examples dovetail with the Mandela Effect, so named for the widespread false memory that Nelson Mandela had died when he was in fact still alive at the time. A similar occurrence of this effect is in people's false memory that the Berenstain Bears are in fact the Berenstein Bears. I myself am an example of someone who remembered the series as The Berenstein Bears, and I can hardly believe even now that it has always been The Berenstain Bears.

This question of reality and memory become especially interesting in the context of the internet. Kids and young adults are often cautioned that anything they say and do online is permanent, but this warning is not actually as true as the sages giving it believe. I frequent the social media site Reddit, where it is a frequent occurrence to see comments and users which have been deleted, their contribution permanently removed unless someone thought to take the time to screenshot them. I have previously visited detailed hobby blogs that have suddenly disappeared because the owner let their ownership of a website lapse or lost interest in maintaining their online presence.

One specific example is worth noting. Several years ago, there was an online piracy website called The Remuz RPG Archive. It retained a collection of thousands of bootleg tabletop roleplaying game products. When I was in college, I happily utilized it to get into a hobby that I could not otherwise afford to access in my cash-strapped state. It was taken down (presumably by outside intervention as a result of copyright violation), but after a bit of digging I uncovered a new version of the same site, rebranded and revamped as The Trove. It persisted for a couple years before it, too, was taken down. In its wake, an entire online community sprang up, doing their best to salvage the huge repository of files that were available on The Trove and the Remuz archive before it, which was only able to be accomplished by massive amounts of effort from numerous folks essentially crowd-sourcing information.

My feelings on content piracy have changed over the years, and I have since deleted or legitimately purchased what I once downloaded from those sites. The question of piracy aside, though, I share those examples because it demonstrates the transience of information online. Just a couple weeks ago, I read about a cryptocurrency trading website that had altered its terms of service to remove a misleading advertisement only after it had already collected large sums of money from investors based on that misleading advertisement and filed for bankruptcy. In an age where the public record can be altered by those who most stand to obfuscate the truth and where the internet can serve as a false witness for whoever has the ability to alter it, it's no surprise that conspiracy theories and utter falsehoods have come to have such a rabid following that it's now commonplace to hear people talk about "competing truth claims" and "alternate facts" and "doing your research" as if any old blog or mailing list can be just as authoritative as official government publications, peer-reviewed journals, or news media.

The website where I purchased Oblivion no longer exists. Online versions of the soundtrack are, for some reason, missing the final track of the copy that I purchased, which I listened to in my car yesterday. That song is in the game, so its exclusion from the current available recording is somewhat puzzling to me. When I purchased Oblivion, I purchased a soundtrack that was not by Jeremy Soule, but by the brothers Jeremy & Julian Soule. Morrowind was also listed as the product of the Soule brothers. Nowadays, Oblivion is listed on Spotify as composed by only Jeremy Soule. Morrowind's soundtrack isn't available at all.

Jeremy Soule's soundtrack for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released in 2011. Soule did not return to compose any music for either The Elder Scrolls Online or The Elder Scrolls: Blades, and he issued a statement in January 2019 that he had not been invited to return for the highly anticipated The Elder Scrolls VI (which does not yet have a release date).

In August 2019, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual assault by multiple women he had worked with in his musical career. His social media accounts were subsequently deleted, and his website has shut down. He has been essentially silent since then.

I only recently learned of the sexual assault allegations and the fact that Soule defrauded over four thousand people of over $120,000 in 2013 for a symphony he never composed. My initial reaction was to try somehow to rationalise these events or excuse Soule for his misdeeds. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that I don't gain anything by trying to hold on to a positive image of Jeremy Soule. I've never met the man, nor do I interact with him in any way. I don't know him.

And that makes me wonder: why did I ever have a positive image of him? It has to be wrapped up in my love for his music. It has meant so much to me for so many years; is wrapped up in my most formative experiences for over half my life, including the only portions of my life that I have actual memories of (more than the snapshots I described above); is, in many ways, integral to my life. It's only natural that I would unwittingly expand that affection for the music that means so much to me onto the person who composed it. After all, this beautiful thing I love came from him, so surely he must also be beautiful, right?

In a perfect world, that would be true. I'm not a professional theologian, but the first thing I see Yahweh doing in Genesis at the beginning of the Bible is creating art. If humans are made as pictures of Yahweh, then there is something of the divine in our feeble, faulty, fleeting imitations of his awesome creativity. To create something beautiful is to be, in a small way, like Yahweh. Yahweh himself is beautiful, so those who are like Yahweh must also be beautiful. I would also argue, as an aside, that turning from the art to love the artist is the right thing to do. The art is just a thing. Though it is powerful and meaningful, it has no life. The artist is the picture of Yahweh. The artist lives. The artist matters. Even more so, to love the artist for their art is a microscopic version of loving Yahweh for his creation: worship.

But like I said, that's only in a perfect world. In this world, morally ugly people make aesthetically beautiful art. People who do not deserve admiration make admirable things. If I knew Jeremy Soule, I would be faced with the prospect of seeking to love him in the same way that Yahweh loves me despite my many sins and failings, seeing them all and acknowledging them as evil but embracing me nonetheless. However, I do not know Jeremy Soule. I have no relationship with him. I have only his music, which I love, and a desire to love him for that music even though he is a thief and allegedly a rapist.

Do his moral failings somehow taint his music? I don't think so. Instrumental music is about emotions and aesthetics, not about meanings or propositions. You can't communicate information or ideas through instrumental music. You could listen to a beautiful piece of instrumental music and never know that it was written by a mass murderer and never have the artist's chosen pastime detract from your enjoyment of that music.

I've seen people online state that they will never be able to enjoy Soule's music again because of the allegations against him. I've tried adopting that mindset, but I find myself unable to. A work of art has its own existence separate from its creator. Though the artist might have some ownership over it in a legal and economic sense, they cannot control it: it affects its audience in its own way, beyond the artist's will. Beautiful art is beautiful for its own sake. Soule's music is still beautiful to me, even if Soule himself has done wrong things, because the music is not the man, the music is the music.

This post has gone on far longer than I intended it to, but I'll leave you with one last thought before I end it. I think in my heart I imagined Jeremy Soule to be a good man because I selfishly want being an artist by itself to make someone a good person. I write music. I write poetry. I write stories. I'm an artist, and I think, deep down, I want being an artist to somehow make me transcendent. I want to have keener insight into human character than others have, a special grasp of the poignant and meaningful, a unique ability to touch the heart and guide the mind. I want to believe that the artists who make the art I love are somehow special, because that would mean that I can also be special because of my art.

That's not the way the world works. Transcendent art is made by rotten people. Incredible, wonderful people sometimes never amount to anything in society's short-sighted estimation. The truth of the matter is that we don't get our value from what we make or what we do. We get our value from being human, from being made by Yahweh and from being pictures of Yahweh: not by nature of our action but because it's who we are.

It's kind of bittersweet, I guess: I am special, which is what I want. But I'm not special because of what I do. I'm special because of how Yahweh made me, and so I don't deserve any credit for it. I guess that makes me kind of like the soundtracks I love: they're beautiful because Jeremy Soule made them beautiful, but they don't deserve any of the credit for his artistic choices, nor any of the blame for his life choices.

Gone Is the Old Year

Today is Christian New Year: the First Sunday of Advent. I'm thinking of it as "Christian New Year" instead of "the start of the Christian liturgical calendar" because it sounds more outlandish, more foreign, like how Chinese New Year is a bit of an alien concept to those who aren't Chinese. Similarly, Christian New Year should sound foreign to those who do not belong to our nation: the Kingdom of Christ.

You see, for several months I've been wrestling with this notion of my Christian-ness as separate from — indeed, as opposed to — my American-ness. I was taught in childhood the myth that America was a Christian nation. My calling it a myth is not meant to make any historical claims about the American founders' faith or lack thereof; rather, regardless of the true religious status of the founders, America cannot reasonably be called a Christian nation, now as ever. What we Christians desire — peace on earth, self-destitution to provide for the poor, the welcoming of the refugee, the brotherhood of all nations, and the spread of the Good News to all by living as sacrificially as Jesus did — is antithetical to the American ideals of security, prosperity, supremacy, and exceptionalism. Living the American dream means setting aside your cross in order to build big barns and form political coalitions with the enemies of the Good News.

The irony of my saying this is not lost on me. I still have my streaming service subscription and my thousand-dollar board game collection and my fifty-dollar dinner dates and my dreams of buying a cushy house with a big yard. I haven't sold all I have to give it to the poor. I don't spend my free time in ministry.

But this isn't a "call-out" post or an indictment against anyone or a commentary on what the Christian life should or shouldn't look like. (If you feel convicted by my words, as I do, I recommend joining me in taking some time this Advent to examine Christ's words and life and consider what it means to be his disciple.) Rather, this post is a first fumbling at asking myself, what does it mean to be a Christian? Or, to put it more specifically, what does it mean to be a Christian in a non-Christian nation that nonetheless very vocally tries to misdefine what being a Christian means?

I don't have the answer, or anything close to the answer, but I'm excited to spend this new year exploring that topic. I'm excited to be in this season of waiting for Christ to arrive, wondering at his promises, and seeking to live faithfully even in the silence since he last spoke. Happy Advent, and happy new year.