Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3
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Paper Fetishes: The Place of the Book in a Digital Ecosystem / Joshua King
Abstract:
This article studies the form of the electronic book as part of a complex digital ecosystem, and it finds that the remediated book's environment fundamentally alters its form and meaning. The article examines the remediated book's place in one digital ecosystem in particular: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011). Skyrim's books, at first glance, are simply a part of the game's environment, but on closer inspection, the game's recreated books reveal much about how electronic texts operate in a larger digital system. The game-created book is different from both of its real-world cousins, the physical codex and the e-book, and this article studies how environmental and systemic conditions alter the game-created book's form and function.
Based on pressures from game mechanics and technical limitations, the game-created book takes on four unique functions: it decorates the game-world, it provides use value to players, it underscores a tone of nostalgic fantasy, and above all, it serves as a fetish. The article draws on Christy Desmet's argument that web pages are fetishes, hybrid objects combining the sacred and the profane in one compact space, and this article finds that Skyrim 's books follow the same general rule. They are at once decorative and utilitarian, valuable and worthless, modern yet ancient. Skyrim's books are joints that bind opposites. The article reads the game-created book as a parallel artifact to the real-world e-book. Both are products of larger digital ecosystems, and both are sites of interaction between form, information, and environmental pressures. Ultimately, this article puts forward the Skyrim case study as a sample analysis and an encouragement to other scholars to pursue environmental and systemic analyses of electronic books.
Keywords: literature; media; visual culture
1. Introduction
<1> In 1982, Robert Darnton published his now-famous "communications circuit," a simple diagram that charted the progress of a book through a series of industrial and cultural groups. A book moves from an author to a publisher, then on through printers, compositors, shippers, booksellers, and so on, until it finally reaches the reader. Scholars today still talk about Darnton's diagram because it represents a key concept in bibliography: books do not exist in a vacuum. Books are part and product of a complex system of production, transportation, consumption, and economic response. Just like physical books, electronic books are also ensconced in their own systems of creation, distribution, and consumption, yet, strangely, most scholars interested in electronic books only study the books themselves.
<2> Paul Duguid's article "Material Matters," published in 1996, lays the foundation for my analytical work. Duguid's ostensible task is to analyze two sets of human responses to the rise of the electronic book: the supersessionist, which believes that the book will be superseded by the computer and lost forever (what D.T. Max and Simon Gikandi both fear), and the liberationist, which believes that the computer will free information from its paper prison, best exemplified by Jay Bolter's Writing Space (65). The supersessionist camp is well represented by D.T. Max's article "The Electronic Book," which laments that the e-book "will make relativists of us all. Looked at this way, the e-book may represent an unprecedented and even dangerous innovation… the e-book will knock a key strut out from under us all" (18). Simon Gikandi's fear is more moderate; he senses that his interest in the form of the book may have come too late, since he has "an almost apocalyptic dread that an epoch is ending" (208-9) at the same time that he hopes in the promise of the e-book. Both authors fear that the electronic book will eat the codex form alive and take its place. On the other hand, Duguid gestures to Jay Bolter as a strong voice from the liberationist camp. Bolter's optimism toward the electronic book is relentless. He enthusiastically places the image- and network-ready e-book alongside the physical book, and he finds the physical codex a simplistic monolith when compared to the shimmering potential of the electronic text (68). In Bolter's understanding, the electronic book promises to do what the paper book never could: liberate information.
<3> Duguid finds, however, that neither of those categories are quite satisfactory. Instead, he insists that "if books can be thought of as 'containing' and even imprisoning information, that information must, in the last analysis, be understood as inescapably a product of bookmaking" (66). The form, in other words, cannot be separated from the content it contains, and, moreover, the book as a form/content hybrid is inseparable from its environment: "Books produce and are produced by the system as a whole" (79), electronic books included. Finally, Duguid suggests that "to offer serious alternatives to the book, we need first to understand and even to replicate aspects of its social and material complexity" (66). My article will investigate a set of digitally "replicated" books in order to understand a third kind of response to the codex format, not from human commentators, but from a digital environment that plays host to the replicated book. Alan Galey, writing in 2012, adopts a similar approach.
<4> Galey's "The Enkindling Reciter" considers the materiality of the electronic book as held against the physical codex. He argues that bibliographers and textual scholars ought to consider the material form of the e-book, and that humanistic methods of interpretation can be used to better understand "questions about how texts change in transmission through different material forms" (211). Galey considers the conversion of the printed codex (in his case, the novel The Sentimentalists) into an e-book format, and he finds that the material conversion takes a heavy interpretive toll on the reading experience. The Sentimentalists' small publisher made very intentional decisions about typefaces, epigraphs, and page spacing, but when converted for the Kobo e-reader, many of these decisions were reversed, ignored, or ruined with simple errors. The e-book edition, for instance, retains a note on the original edition's typography, when the e-book itself uses the device's standard typeface, not the typeface created specifically for the book. Galey's methods and interest in material forms and their translation into different media closely resemble my own, as I will also consider the translation of the physical codex into a digital form and the ramifications of that translation. Galey, that same year and working with a group of other scholars, also wrote "Imagining the Architectures of the Book," an article considering the book as part of a broader material and social system. The book, they argue, must be understood as part of an environment, and "new reading environments challenge us to understand the role of material forms in meaning making, and to situate e-books and digital reading devices within the changing history of books and reading" (20). My article follows from this same line of thinking, and I too will study the various impacts of a remediated electronic book within a specific electronic reading environment. My article will study the place of the codex form in a digital environment, highlighting how the exigencies and pressures of that digital ecosystem shape the form and function of the electronic book.
<5> This article will study the books and environment of the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011). [1] I have chosen this virtual ecosystem for its financial and critical success, its popularity, and its large, immersive fantasy setting. [2] Skyrim is an ideal case study because although books are common and important factors of the game, they are not the game's focus. They are, instead, simply a facet of the game-world, created not to make a statement, but to fit in with a larger digital ecosystem. In other words, Skyrim allows us to ask the question "What happens when you ask a digital world what it thinks of books?" My goal to examine not the Kindle or EPUB format or even the skeuomorphic [3] e-book interface. Instead, I hope to use a video game environment to demonstrate how the exigencies of a digital ecosystem (in this case, the pressures and limitations of a game and its virtual environment) as a model for studying the digitally recreated codex form as it participates in a larger system.
<6> Skyrim 's digital world reproduces books with four primary functions: the codex form is decorative, useful, nostalgic for an unreal past, and, above all, fetishized. Skyrim recreates books as integral parts of a vibrant digital ecosystem, inseparable from the game's mechanics and aesthetic. Books in this digital ecosystem bind together disparate elements and in the process become hybridized. They are at once decorative and utilitarian, simultaneously oral and literate, both high-status and worthless. Skyrim uses books as fetishes that remind players of their own physical world while they indulge themselves in the digital world's exotic unfamiliarity. These hybrid electronic codices, produced as working parts of a larger virtual world, show that the codex form is a cultural idol able to validate and familiarize digital text. An understanding of the electronic book as fetish provides another lens through which to view our contemporary proliferation of electronic books, both as hardware and software. In the following section, I will discuss Skyrim's books in general, focusing on their appearance, their prevalence, and their part in the wider structure of the game. From there, I will consider the four primary traits of books within Skyrim's ludic ecosystem: decorative, useful, nostalgic, and fetishistic.
2. Books in the Digital World
<7> Skyrim is an immersive, open-world role-playing game, built from the ground up by Bethesda Softworks. The player journeys through the country of Skyrim in first-person perspective, viewing and interacting with a lavishly rendered fantasy world inspired by a mix of standard fantasy tropes and ancient Norse mythology. Skyrim is also littered with books. Players can find them on game characters' shelves, in palaces, fortresses, dungeons-even in tombs and caves. The game encourages players to read books by occasionally offering skill points or new quests, and many players collect and display books on bookshelves in their virtual homes. Skyrim's designers lovingly rendered the books with paper textures, page-turning animations, illuminations, different typefaces, and varied sizes and bindings. The player can find anything from small quarto-sized volumes to massive folios, some tattered, some richly embossed, some bound in simple leather. Perhaps most impressive is the sheer volume of text available for players to read. Each book is fairly short (generally around a thousand words), but the game contains more than three hundred unique books (Shoemaker). The game includes a wide array of genres: fiction, drama, epic poetry, romance, history, satire, travel literature, the essay, even the cookbook are all represented in Skyrim. Some books increase player's skill points ("Thief," as one might expect, raises the player's "Pickpocket" ability score), some initiate quests, and some teach spells. Most books, however, confer no benefit at all, apart from the player's entertainment or understanding of the game world.
<8> The game, of course, did not literally create or write its own books. Bethesda's developers designed, wrote, programmed, and animated them, so claiming that we can interrogate Skyrim on its views of the codex is technically inaccurate. But it does provide a useful metaphor. Skyrim's developers and programmers probably never intended to evaluate the use value or cultural position of the bound book. They were populating a fantasy world with props and artifacts, and the book happened to be an important type of artifact. Bethesda's developers built systems and interfaces for that artifact in order to fit it into the virtual world they had constructed, probably not to make statements about book history or the value of digital texts. Instead, the designers tailored the recreated book to fit the needs and desires of the user and the thematic and ludic systems of Skyrim's game-world. Bethesda designed the aesthetics of Skyrim's books to fit it into a larger ludic ecosystem, and because the needs and exigencies of that ecosystem drive Skyrim's books' aesthetics and functions, I feel safe in arguing that these remade digital books can be read as a video game's-and not a developer's-commentary on the book. The digital ecosystem finds a place for the book.
3. Books are Decorative and Decorated
<9> In Bolter and Grusin's terminology, Skyrim offers a remediated version of the book. They "call the representation of one medium in another remediation" (45, emphasis original). Skyrim represents the medium of the book in a video game format and strikes a very careful balance between immediacy (the state in which the medium can be ignored, or looked "through") and hypermediacy (in which the medium becomes more obvious) (9). It might first appear that Skyrim's books are purely immediate, but certain aspects of their presentation hypermediate the experience of reading. Skyrim pays a great deal of attention to the physicality of the book. Covers are worn in places, decorated with gilt or embossing, pages' edges are uneven, and the parchment appears weathered and spotted by imperfections. Page turns are animated and accompanied by the sound of a sheet of thick paper turning over. Letters take on an antiquated, perhaps Scandinavian cant, and illuminated capitals are common. Skyrim's books are a hodgepodge of historical trends. They feature twenty-first century spelling and punctuation and mostly contemporary diction (apart from the occasional "'tis," "thee," or "thy"), but they also share space with illuminated capitals and illustrations. It's unclear whether Skyrim's books are, within the game-world, manufactured by printing press or by scribe. The letters appear too uniform for a scribal hand, but the game lacks a single print-shop or type-setter (this is noteworthy, since nearly every building in the game can be entered and explored). None of Skyrim's books share other features with medieval manuscripts. There are no rubrics, no manicules, [4] no marginal doodles. Its books are timeless, belonging to no historical period in particular. They are meant to feel both familiar and ancient, archaic, but also readable.
<10> Skyrim 's books, in addition to providing a sense of familiarity to players, often signal status and sophistication. They offer players a measure of ownership of the digital world and a sense of cultural sophistication. The bookshelf is a common organizational device in digital media. Consider the interface of iBooks in iOS6 and below. The virtual bookshelf has a golden-brown wood grain and projecting three-dimensional shelves. Even the banner across the top has a wood grain. The bookshelf interface puts objects on display. [5] The reader opens a book by touching its cover, rather than a plain-text title in a list. Apple wanted to reinforce that the user owns books, not simply coded documents. The iBooks interface relies on a common cultural understanding of the book as a status object with certain analog accessories (the wood-grained virtual shelf, for instance).
<11> Skyrim presents the book in a similar light. Houses in Skyrim are expensive, and outfitting them with furniture and goods is even more so. Even once a player has purchased decorations for the house, filling it with books is another task. Houses come with food, weapons, and alchemical ingredients, but not books. Books can be found in shops, dungeons, and other characters' houses, and once the player owns a house and a bookshelf, she can transfer books from her inventory to the shelf. This gathering and transportation takes effort, and because books' effects are triggered immediately upon opening them (and because taking books requires opening them), the books preserved in the player's inventory have already been emptied of their use value. To decorate with these empty containers, then, is a mark of accomplishment, a reminder of the player's dedication to and residency within the game world. In Laura Mulvey's terms, the book in this capacity functions as a Freudian fetish which "ascribes excessive value to objects considered to be valueless by the social consensus" (2). The player assigns personal value to books that the game system's consensus considers essentially worthless, both in economic and use value.
<12> Outside the player's home, books serve as easy shorthand. The wizards' college, predictably, is littered with books. Kings and wealthy citizens have well-stocked shelves, while gathering places of the poor, like inns, usually have food or cooking implements instead. Skyrim's books are signs of wealth and culture. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Skyrim's books are typically inexpensive. Where a sword might cost between a hundred and several thousand gold (the game's currency), most non-magical books sell for a few dozen gold. [6] At these prices, surely the shop keeper could afford a few dozen books at least, but books remain predominantly a luxury good. This breakdown in the game's internal logic suggests that Skyrim's books' decorative function is important. When the player does find a book outside of a high-class or dungeon environment, it frequently illustrates the personality or occupation of the character in whose dwelling it's found. So the book "Three Thieves" found in a thief's house might not signify wealth, but rather occupation. The book remains decorative.
<13> Skyrim contains another class of book that is literally nothing but decoration. Ruined and burned books provide environmental cues to the player, instructing her in how to play the game, and how to interpret the game's environment. Ruined books are liberally scattered throughout the game's dungeons, but they can't be read, or even opened. They can be taken, just like nearly any other object in the game, but they lack worth or practical application. They have no function except as props within an environment. But, as props, they convey a tone of age and ruin. A shelf of ruined books in a burned-out fortress suggests age or disaster, and perhaps a pang of regret that these books can no longer be read or resold. Ruined books' lack of utility also serves to drive a player forward through the dungeon. Books may decorate the scene, but the player cannot lose focus on the dungeon by reading them. Ruined and burned books, then, are the limit case for Skyrim's recreated books: they are things, and nothing else. But even Skyrim's interactive books are very carefully thing-like.
<14> As decorated objects, books use a hypermediated virtual physicality to reinforce the importance of the paper and leather codex, which in turn underlines the diffuse sense of nostalgia that pervades most fantasy fiction. By downplaying real-world issues associated with books' physicality (manufacture, marketing, distribution, cultural associations, censorship, etc.) while simultaneously highlighting the (virtual) physicality of the book-object, Skyrim presents an idealized book form that could never exist in the real world. The game's recreated books exist in a timeless, liminal world full of copiously writing authors, historians, travelers, and adventurers; but that world lacks any sign of printers, publishers, editors, or dedicated booksellers.[7] The game's ecosystem has space for player nostalgia and engagement with familiar book trappings (authors, genres, bookshelves and so forth), but no room for real-world production or distribution systems. Christy Desmet points out that "In Capital, Karl Marx used the term 'commodity fetish' to describe specifically the reduction of labor's products to meaningless items for capitalist consumption" (61), and Skyrim's consumable books, separated from any labor process, are easy examples of a "commodity fetish." Books in Skyrim resemble most American consumers' experiences with books: they are available for purchase, reading, or collection, but their manufacture and distribution are largely invisible. [8]
4. Books are Useful
<15> Skyrim 's books are more than decorations or emblems of an imagined world of commodities without labor; they are also useful. The game gives its players motivation to seek out and open its books. A book in Skyrim can perform one of four tasks: it can give the player a skill point, it can initiate or progress a quest, it can teach a new spell, or it can have no effect. [9] Different books do different things, of course, and their functions are frequently suggested by their titles. The in-game novel [10] "Warrior" adds a point to the player's "Block" skill, while "Three Thieves" adds a point to "Sneak" (Skyrim). Books which contribute to quests are usually less obvious. "The Legend of Red Eagle" begins the quest of the same name, but players would be unlikely to know that without prior knowledge ( Skyrim). Spell tomes, like ruined and burned books, can only be taken, not opened or read. When activated in the player's inventory, spell tomes add a new type of spell to the inventory, then disappear. Spell books cannot be opened or read, only used. Skyrim is full of useful books, so let us turn to a mechanics-based reading of the in-game effects of books, demonstrating that the game imagines books as reliable containers of meaning, quickly and easily consumed, which leave behind either purposeless props or nothing at all. In other words, there aren't many re-read books in Skyrim. The game's book mechanics make a powerful statement about the role of the book in the virtual environment: books may be useful, the game suggests, but reading can be an awful chore.
<16> The most curious thing about the in-game benefits of reading books is that the player doesn't actually have to read the book to reap the benefit. The skill bonus or quest is automatically applied as soon as the book is opened; the player doesn't have to read a single word. In my experience of the game, this typically leads to me to close the book as soon as I've received the bonus-even though I am an avid reader in real life. While playing the game, I am likely to be more interested in finishing the dungeon, looking for other items, or continuing the quest, than in reading the exploits of Eslaf Erol. But if this is the case, why should I be rewarded for "reading" a book I never actually read? The mechanic suggests that, by reading about Eslaf Erol's thievery in "Thief," the player-character learns tips for thievery, thus gaining a skill point in "Pickpocket" (Skyrim). But if the player (who is, after all, role-playing as the player-character) closes the book as soon as he opens it, the logic falls apart. It is as if the skill point was trapped between the front cover and first page, freed once the book was opened. There are any number of ways the game could have given out skill points, rather than simply rewarding the player for opening a book. The developers could have programmed a short cut-scene and awarded the point after the scene finished playing. The game could have awarded a percent of a skill point for each page read or for each minute spent reading. Or, most simply, the game could have awarded the skill point when the player reached the final page of the book.
<17> Bethesda's developers must have known that players would quickly tire of flipping through pages of each book (more than three hundred of them), hoping for a skill point or a new quest at the end. Programming three hundred cut-scenes was clearly out of the question, and offering portions of points for each page read would present a similar problem to setting the end of the book as the trigger for point-giving. The exigencies of the game again suggest an understanding of the book cued by Skyrim's complex ludic ecosystem. Books are containers of knowledge. The closest in-game approximation of "knowledge" is the skill point, so by receiving skill points (which are generally gained only by practicing the skill in the field; shooting arrows increases the "Archery" skill, etc.), the game substitutes reading for practice. Reading a book about a thief has the same effect as practicing pickpocketing. The reader's interpretation of the text, that is, the reader's particular performance and understanding of the words on the page, is removed. Even if the game required players to read to the end of the book before being rewarded with a skill point, the act of interpretation would mean nothing, because the player-character would receive the point regardless of the reader's interpretation. Given that the game has no way to judge readers' responses to books, apart from perhaps requiring a quiz at the end, it must treat any interpretation as valid since the game can have no knowledge of the reader's response. If the reader's interpretation of the book is removed, then the only measurable, volitional action which could be rewarded is the act of opening the book. Removing the need to read the book by awarding the point or quest at the beginning, then, is a matter of cutting out an inessential element, a matter of streamlining.[11] Books, for Skyrim, are defined by what Richard Lanham would call their "fluff," their aesthetic styling. The "stuff" of the books' textual content is entirely optional. In Lanham's terminology, Skyrim has shifted the typical figure-ground relationship of form and content by making the form of the book more significant, more real, than its content (7-8).
<18> Yet if we accept the game's implicit explanation that skill points are a stand-in for knowledge, putting aside the player's optional interpretive engagement for a moment, the mechanic still suggests a hyper-simplified understanding of textual transmission. A fictional author (really the Bethesda staffer tasked with writing the book) has encoded knowledge into his or her written text, [12] and by interacting with that text, the player-character receives that encoded knowledge. The process of acquisition is at the forefront of Skyrim's books. Players are encouraged by the game system to seek books by the promise of skill points, quest rewards, and new spells. Once the book has given its reward, it either disappears or loses its use value.
<19> Skyrim 's books are consumed, sometimes figuratively, in the case of skill-books, and sometimes literally, in the case of spell tomes. The game ecosystem which produced this mechanic is steeped in a consumer capitalism in which objects are found or purchased, their functionality extracted, and the objects themselves discarded [13] or consumed. There were, of course, alternatives. Take the spell tome: when the player "uses" it, the book disappears and the spell it represented appears in the player's inventory, ready for casting. The developers could have retained the book and had the player cast spells from the relevant spell-books. This mechanic would have changed relatively little for the spell-casting system. The fact that the game's developers chose to embrace a "disposable" spell tome suggests that the book's disappearance after imparting its spell is important. It carries an unsettling consumerist interpretation: the things consumers obtain become part of the consumers themselves. One does not simply own a book; one internalizes the book's knowledge. One does not simply buy a how-to guide; one buys the knowledge and makes it part of oneself in the act of reading. Skyrim's book-based game mechanics look even more starkly nostalgic and consumerist when held against two other video games' books.
<20> By studying The Sims and Myst, two other successful and influential games, we can learn a great deal about the specific way Skyrim privileges the book's consumerist function. In The Sims, books allow the virtual reader to practice his knowledge by applying time, attention, and energy to the task of reading. The Sims' book mechanics privilege the reader's dedicated engagement to a relevant text, suggesting that the reader, not the book, is responsible for meaning creation and apprehension-quite the opposite of Skyrim. Bolter and Grusin's reading of Myst's books is more complex. They point out that "the player discovers that the two volumes that contain the brothers are incomplete: their videos are faulty because their pages have been scattered. So the player must hunt for these pages throughout the Myst worlds" (95). From this game mechanic, they determine that "the book as a text should be replaced by the book as a window onto a virtually realized world. Books operate best... under the logic of immediacy, but computer graphics are more immediate and therefore better," and further, that "Myst is also affirming the book's great rival in the twentieth-century: film" (96). If anything, Skyrim's books do the opposite. They are hypermediated objects, aestheticized and functional items in much larger ludic, economic, and symbolic systems. In 1993, Myst suggested that "computer graphics are more immediate and therefore better" (96), and fourteen years later, Skyrim demonstrated that the question was closed. By creating hypermediated books which function as supporting parts of a much larger ludic and economic system, Skyrim argues that the immediacy of the digital environment can relegate books to a position of nostalgic appreciation-for a reasonable price, and a clear benefit to the consumer.
5. Books Enable Secondary Orality
<21> As the previous section demonstrated, books are useful things in Skyrim. But books can only go so far. The game offers other modes of communication that far outstrip books in power and potential. Skyrim introduced an ability called the Shout to the Elder Scrolls series. Magic, learned from books and cast by hands, has always been a part of The Elder Scrolls games, but Shouts, while similar to magic in some ways, are a different type of ability, available only to the player character and a select few other non-player characters. Shouts create magical effects like fireballs or bursts of speed. Some distract enemies, while others turn the player character incorporeal. The game explains that Shouts are words from the language of dragons, whose speech is powerful enough to alter reality. Books' offerings of skill points and quests seem humble by comparison. On the surface, Skyrim seems to prefer orality to literacy-perhaps a sign that digital texts truly are post-literate. In this section, I connect Skyrim's peculiar fusion of oral and literate cultural markers with Walter Ong's concept of "secondary orality," and I find that its varying takes on orality all serve to make the player nostalgic for a fantasy past. Reading Skyrim through the lens of Ong's Orality and Literacy is an interesting exercise; parts of Ong's commentary on primary orality seem tailor-made for Skyrim's Shouts. For example, Ong points out that "The fact that oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven" (32). Words in Skyrim's dragon language do have clear magical potency when spoken, and Shouting these words calls their effects into being. A recent update allowed Xbox 360 players with Kinect devices to activate Shouts by literally shouting the words of power aloud at their televisions, encouraging players to engage orally in a way they ordinarily wouldn't (Hinkle).
<22> Skyrim 's Shout system also falls neatly into several of Ong's psychodynamics of orality. Shouts are "additive rather than subordinative" (37), since a Shout is built from three additive word-syllables which can be Shouted individually or together. [14] Grammatical subordination doesn't even exist within the system. Nearly all Shouts are, very literally, "agonistically toned" (43). They are almost uniformly designed for combat. Shouts are also "Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced" (45). Players nearly always see the results of their Shouts, forcing them to engage with their targets. Of course, most players will feel little empathy for the attacking bandit they just shouted down a chasm, but the point remains that Shouting is anything but "objectively distanced." Finally, Shouts are all "Situational rather than abstract" (49): Shouts are always chosen for use in a particular situation. Breathing fire does little good when the player needs to pass harmlessly through a spinning blade. But in spite of these similarities, Skyrim could never portray the kind of primary orality to which Ong applies these categories. There are just too many books.
<23> In fact, even the Shout system, apparently so powerfully oral, relies on the written word. Players receive Shouts not by hearing them, but by seeing them first as objects. Most of the game's Shouts are acquired through so-called Word Walls. When the player approaches the Wall, which is covered in unreadable words, [15] the screen blurs, and energy swirls from the glowing word into the player. Just as spells are unlocked by consuming spell tomes, Shouts are unlocked by literally consuming words. Even when other characters give new Shouts to the player, they do so by manifesting the magic words on the ground, in writing. Skyrim's orality is inseparable from literacy, with good reason. Ong reminds us that "Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, 'out there' on a flat surface. Such 'things' are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection" (32-33). Word Walls manifest this tendency very literally. Dragon words exist as actual objects, carved into the flat surfaces of walls, and they are bodily assimilated into the player-character. Unlike Ong's summary of the typographic mindset, however, Skyrim's written words (at least those words written in dragon language) are associated with magic, and are physical actions. Reading and learning the magic word "Fus" allows the player to take the action "Fus." Skyrim can't help but ground its supposedly oral Shouts in typography. The written word is a necessary anchor, a way for players to understand what they're obtaining. Without the written shouts to "get," how would players know that they had gained a new ability? As members of a deeply literate culture, players rely on visible signs to confirm their progress. If nothing marked the acquisition but the sound of the word, players might not believe they had gained that word.
<24> Skyrim's Shout system is an example of Ong's hastily-sketched notion of "secondary orality." Secondary orality is "both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality" (136). For example, "where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing" (137). In Skyrim's case, where primary orality imbues words with magic power because of their symbolic connection to the lived world, secondary orality makes its words magic because it wants to evoke that symbolic connection and give the player a feeling of primal power. Just as its not-quite-manuscripts hearkened back to a fantastical medieval past that is both comfortably modern and enticingly exotic, Skyrim's secondary orality gestures at a mythical Scandinavia where words are still powerful things, somewhere between physical and metaphysical reality. This evidence of a digital secondary orality offers the best of both worlds: words are utterances that can be manifested through the Shout, but they can also be mastered and owned in the book. Skyrim presents an orality which "is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well" (136).
<25> Skyrim's secondary orality demonstrates that books occupy a contested space in which they are always primary, and yet still subjugated by the "spoken" word. The printed word, which manifests most apparently as the book, is the background against which orality can stand out. Skyrim is a fundamentally literate text-magic spells and Shouts would both be impossible without the written word-but to create its intended atmosphere of nostalgic fantasy, it employs secondary orality to evoke a fictional semi-oral society, a time when bards told tales in taverns, when dragons debated with magic words made real, and when the word itself was a transcendent, powerful entity. Skyrim's brand of fantasy has much in common with Western fantasy fiction since Tolkien; fantasy tends to long for a nonexistent past. Fantasy relies heavily on nostalgia, and Skyrim plays with nostalgia in its representation of media. To create a sufficiently nostalgic atmosphere, Skyrim must downplay its reliance on the book. But in order for that nostalgic fantasy to be functional in our hyper-literate society, the printed word must be present, and it must, to paraphrase Ong, "provide the equipment" for the game's secondary orality. The game, in other words, must pay lip-service to books.
6. Books Are Fetishes
<26> Christy Desmet's 2001 article "Reading the Web as Fetish" discusses digital texts as twenty-first century fetish objects, compact metaphorical/metonymic bridges between the written word and the visual image. She claims that "Fetishes are hybrid objects, suspended between sacred and ordinary realities and often between cultures" (59). Her article focuses on the hybridity of web pages which combine images and text organically, but I argue that Skyrim 's books are also objects occupying a hybrid position. Laura Mulvey tells us that "Fetishisms, like the grain of sand in the oyster that produces the pearl, create social and sexual constructions of things at intractable points that trouble the social or sexual psyche" (3). [16] With regards to Skyrim's fetishized books, we might imagine the "intractable points" as the intersections of real and virtual text, of consumer culture and fantasized nostalgia. In other words, the book-as-fetish model locates Skyrim's books in a vulnerable place between use and decoration, between familiarity and exoticism, and between orality and literacy. The recreated digital book binds "intractable points" together; it becomes a fetish.
<27> Skyrim goes to great lengths to make its books believable looking and sounding-but this gesture toward believability only goes so far. When the player interacts with a book (by aiming the cross-hairs at it and pressing a button), a strange thing happens. In-game time stops, the background darkens slightly and blurs, the book glides in from the top of the screen, and opens to the first page. As the player reads, the book remains suspended in mid-air in the middle of the screen. Pages turn themselves. The player's hands, nearly always visible, are nowhere to be seen. In a game with such heavy emphasis on immersion and physicality, interactions with the book are a noticeable exception. When the player interacts with an alchemy laboratory, the camera moves to third person and shows the player-character grinding something in a mortar and pestle. Players watch themselves forging metal, enchanting items, and sharpening blades-but not reading. Why? The interaction of the player character's model with the refined shape and form of the book would certainly be more difficult to animate from the third person (much harder than showing the player character hammering something on an anvil), and even from first person, deciding how the player's hands should hold the book and how they should turn the pages would be a minor nightmare for an animator. This game-system exigency places the book in its own symbolic sphere.
<28> The book becomes a bridge between the decorated physical commodity, seen in the page textures and other physical details, and the interpretive, non-physical element of the text. By separating the reading experience into the time-stopped otherworld of the book, the game suggests that reading-that assimilation-enabling experience through which players gain power, knowledge, and tasks-is a mystical activity, different in a significant way from forging or brewing potions. Desmet tells us that "As a sacred item designed for everyday use, the fetish performs its cultural magic by operations of metaphor and metonymy" (59). The book's decorative physicality suggests its "everyday use," but the otherworldly time-stopped reading environment insinuates that reading is a kind of cultural magic, the same practice that opens spells and teaches dragon Shouts. The game-created book is a metaphor for acquisition, a metonym for knowledge and empowerment. This knowledge and empowerment, however, is packaged and used as a commercial commodity, wholly separate from any means of production. The decorated book is, in other words, a commodity fetish.
<28> Skyrim's book is a useful physical gateway to learning spells, improving skills, and completing quests, and yet the game mechanics of the book actually serve to prevent players from reading. This process reflects Mulvey's statement that "the fetish very often attracts the gaze. In popular imagination, it glitters" (6).[17] The fetish is a dual-stage artifact. On the surface, the digitally remade book attracts. It is decorated, animated, beautifully rendered in special fonts, with special textures and sounds. It covers its surroundings in positive cultural associations. Its potential game value attracts the attention. It glitters. But, simultaneously, "It has to hold the fetishist's eyes fixed on the seduction of belief to guard against the encroachment of knowledge" (Mulvey 6). The very same features which attract attention also "guard" it- they keep players' attention on its physicality and the new acquisitions it offers, and away from its content. Skyrim's book-mechanics are a game-constructed "guard against the encroachment of knowledge" (6). The fact that the game guards its own knowledge-its own entirely ancillary knowledge-suggests that this is a function of the fetish at work, without intentionality from the game or designers. After all, developers have little reason to guard the knowledge they're supposedly transmitting. But knowledge in Skyrim exists on two levels, and the book fetish allows the substitution of one kind of knowledge for the other. The game's mechanics establish that "knowledge" is equivalent to skill points-in other words, the player character gains knowledge, represented by skill points, by opening books. But the player herself gains knowledge, not from skill points, but from reading. Skyrim's books substitute the ludic representation of knowledge for actual human knowledge, thus guarding "against the encroachment of [actual] knowledge" (6) by offering instead a game-created knowledge stand-in. These two types of knowledge are united in the hybrid form of the book-fetish.
<29> The book-fetish offers comfort and familiarity to players in an unfamiliar, secondarily oral game-world by providing a low-priced, useful, familiar-looking anchor to their hyper-literate home culture. The physical artifact connects players to their lived experience through the size, physical form, and even the content of books even as it stands in for a host of cultural and economic implications. Skyrim aestheticizes its books at the same time as it universalizes them, making them stand in for print and literate culture. The game-created book is a token of familiarity, a necessary background for both written and oral communication. In other words, the digital book is a nostalgia fetish.
<30> A recent New Yorker article investigating Amazon's bookselling practices quotes Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, who sighs that "Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value… It's a widget" (Packer). Johnson is right in two ways. Amazon's race-to-the-bottom prices for e-books could well be devaluing the format, but his comparison of the book to a widget-a small application integrated with a web page or operating system-is extremely accurate. Like the widget, the e-book exists as part of a massive system of information sources and artifacts, and like the widget, the e-book relies on its surroundings for attention and significance. The e-book may well be a widget, but that does not mean it is any less important. The e-book-widget, rather than being gradually forgotten, instead serves as a fetish, a hybridized object reminding us, on the one hand, of a familiar physical world of contained information, while still providing a connection to the near-infinite informational universe that is the internet.
<31> I began this study by asking the question "What happens when you ask a digital world what it thinks of books?" and I have provided a series of answers to that question. Many of those answers would probably fit real-world electronic books fairly well: the persistence of page-flip animations, book covers, and standardized paragraph-form pages suggest an abiding respect for the prestigious codex form, for example. But the point of this study has been primarily to gesture towards a mode of inquiry based on the twin assumptions that, first, form matters, and second, that literary environments create and are created by books. Going forward, more serious attention must be paid to the interplay between environment and object, between form and content. Interface matters, and environment matters. As scholars of the book, and the screen, and the game controller, we must learn to scrutinize the intersection between form, content, and context, not individually but as a bound-together and ongoing interaction.
<32> Duguid wrote that "information must, in the last analysis, be understood as inescapably a product of bookmaking" (66). To bookmaking we should add that information is also a product of online marketplaces, digital rights management, user interface design, subscription and pricing models, buttons and switches, touch pads and mouse pads. Books in Skyrim serve a distinct set of ludic and stylistic functions, and they can only be understood in terms of those broader systemic functions. Why should we imagine that e-books in our world are any different? To understand our digital ecosystems, and the artifacts they produce, we must engage deeply with the interfaces and environments of books, both physical and electronic.
Notes
[1] Although several expansions for Skyrim exist, this article will only reference the main game.
[2] The Xbox 360 version of Skyrim, which sold the highest percentage of copies, holds a critical score of 96/100 on review aggregation site Metacritic. As of December 2013, the game had sold more than twenty million copies and made nearly 1.3 billion dollars in revenue (Metacritic; "Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls V Statistics")
[3] Skeuomorphic interfaces try to look like their physical counterparts-notepad applications with virtual paper grain, radio apps that include virtual knobs or speakers, etc.
[4] William Sherman's term for the pointing hands sometimes found drawn in manuscript margins.
[5] This virtual shelf, unlike its real-world counterpart, displays books with their covers, not their spines, facing the viewer. Display is clearly paramount.
[6] Spell tomes are the exception, but in terms of the game's mechanics, they function more like equipment than books.
[7] The player can find the remains of a book shipper in a cave, so books are at least transported.
[8] Rare exceptions exist, such as a quest that tasks the player with assassinating the author of a particular cookbook, or the above mentioned deceased book shipper.
[9] There are a few exceptions to this rule. The "Oghma Infinium," for instance, gives multiple skill points.
[10] Since it is only around 1,000 words, "Warrior" is obviously not a traditional novel, but for lack of a better genre identifier, I will refer to Skyrim's books by the real-world genres they most closely resemble.
[11] Similar interpretations can be applied to quest-giving books as well, though these stretch the player's suspension of disbelief even further. Opening the quest book "The Legend of Red Eagle" instantly begins the quest, and even though the book offers no specific place names, the quest points the player to an objective at a specific location. In this case, the book as knowledge-container can transmit knowledge of a task to be completed just as well as an understanding of lock picking.
[12] Quite literally encoded. Reading the source document which contains all of Skyrim's books encoded by markup language is fascinating. It includes code for various in-game fonts, elementary markup language (<i>, </i> etc.), file locations for the illuminations, as well as amusing notes between programmers: "(...we don't care if this ever works)" (Skyrim_English.DLSTRINGS).
[13] While books can be retained in bookshelves, trying to keep every book-even every skill book-is nearly impossible. Most players sell or discard unnecessary or common books.
[14] The Shout "Unrelenting Force," for instance, consists of the syllables "Fus" (meaning "Force"), "Ro" ("Balance"), and "Dah" ("Push") ("Unrelenting Force"). The player can use one, two, or all of the words to create different degrees of impact.
[15] Skyrim 's dragon language, seen on the Word Wall, is actually translatable into English, but I suspect that few players are devoted enough to learn it.
[16] Mulvey's fetishes apply to gender issues whereas the fetishistic use of the book is not a gendered phenomenon. Here, I am working with the "intractable points that trouble the social... psyche," (3) but not the sexual psyche.
[17] Again, Mulvey's point is sexual and social, and I am applying her theory only to the social.
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