Outis In Tamriel's tamriel
Pain. Iambic pain. With every letter comes the pulse of an iambic line. da-DUM. Straight to my wrist tendons like a hypodermic needle to the wrong vein. Wonderful, just fucking wonderful. That's what I get for spending the last month obsessively trying to beat Daggerfall and Morrowind instead of producing actual content for the website I suppose. It was not all for naught though. Through my obsessive labours, I discovered that The Elder Scrolls games from Daggerfall onwards contains these interesting nested narratives in the form of in-game books. Some like the Lusty Argonian Maid contain worlds which interests the masses to the point of superseding the original via fan content, while others such as the Invocation of Azura rewards their reader by intergrating its narrative into gameplay. (For example, in Daggerfall, this book was the only way you could figure out the right summoning dates!). Reading these books was a pleasure as I never bothered with doing so up until now. After all, there's nothing more immersive than cracking open ABCs for Barbarians and pretending to read it out loud to soothe some angry naked Nord barbarian (Before you taunt him into attacking you so you can legally acquire his sweet sweet axe guilt-free, that is). Or reading Warp in the West and realizing "Huh, so that's why Orcs are playable now...". My most favorite book however, is The Eastern Provinces Impartially Considered for the sole reason that it's all one giant scathing critique of the War on Terror, alluded through the voice of a disgruntled, suspiciously American-sounding Imperial scholar... Indeed, one may argue that the inclusion of these books was to create this sense of immersion. To read a book through the simulcra of such inside the simulation nears the opus of The Matrix after all. However I find it more interesting that the nested narrative, or the story-within-the-story — creates the unique opportunity of providing mutliple mini-worlds to an already existant game-world. The short story to the digital adventure. The author and the gamer. All this creating a network of fiction, coalescing into a media gestalt. Such a phenomena deserves the right to be named. I think I shall call it "The Elder Scrolls Cinemtaic Universe". "Nobody calls it that!" says the weird smoker dude who hangs around my local Shoppers Drug Mart; bumming cigarettes from listless high school kids while swearing he was Jim Morrison's bastard son. Well, excuse me Polyphemus but not everyone comes from a lineage bearing the weight of history. I came from a family descended from dirt-poor peasants. Cut me some slack will ya? Jeez, maybe It'd be better as a movie than a manifesto. So dear reader, was it worth the carpal tunnel to learn all of this? I cannot say, as even now I am still immersed in the oh-so-delicious experience machine. Can you ask a butterfly if they still dream of being man? Maybe when university forces me out of the LCL will I finally be able to gain the courage to acknowledge how stagnant the waters within my embryonic vat has become. But until then, I think I will continue to swim in my cerebral fluid and delight in the joys of being a nobody.