Internalized Possibility Spaces in TES

Long time lurker, first time poster, et cetera.

A couple of months ago, I based a final paper for a university class on "Possible Worlds in Literature and Video Games" on TES's unique embrace of many mutually counterfactual timelines, most notably (to my mind) over the period of the Warp in the West. This subreddit provided almost all of the inspiration and information for the piece, and I'm curious what all y'alls might think of the finished thing.

First, though, a couple of disclaimers: please do note that I wrote this piece for an audience (my professors and peers) that knows nothing about TES, and so tried to keep references to the lore as generic and non-esoteric as possible. In a now-reversed context, I realize that some folks might not have a huge background in literary possible worlds theory; it'd really take a whole other essay to provide that, but, if you're interested, I've retained my list of sources down below. Last, I realize that I make a number of authoritative, highly debatable lore interpretations for the sake of the argument; but, in my estimation, that's kind of necessary to say anything useful from an analytic standpoint. With that said, here it is!

The Broken Dragon: Internalized Possibility Spaces in Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls

Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, like many role-playing video games, ends with a world-changing choice: the player character can deliver control of the Numidium, a titanic mechanical golem and deified force of denial built by an extinct race of nihilistic elves to escape mortal existence, to an ancient lich, a martial Orc king, a sect of Imperial special forces agents, any one of a number of local warlords, or an ancient necromancer. Who gains control of the golem vastly alters the game world; the lich passes on to his eternal rest, the Orc creates a kingdom of Orcs, the special forces pacify the game region and add it to their Empire, each warlord respectively conquers all of the others, and the necromancer becomes a god. In the process of reconciling these apparently mutually exclusive endings for future entries in the series, Bethesda internalizes and justifies the fact that games provide not single possible worlds, but possibility spaces within which players instantiate discrete worlds, embracing player agency and the unique characteristics of the video game medium within their game narratives.

In his “Time, Possible Worlds, and Counterfactuals,” Matt Hills addresses the ideas of counterfactuals as they relate to alternate timelines, contending that science fiction, which instantiates hypothetically possible (in many cases) future worlds draws from alternate historiography, which diverges from our own, accepted history at some point to produce a set of conditions counterfactual to those present or past in the “real” world. Though Hills uses the term mostly to refer to worlds differing from a “real” or “factual” world, it is equally applicable to other worlds; all a “counterfactual” requires is that some world, whether the one we inhabit or not, be posited as “factual;” Hill refers to fictional worlds diverging from one another as “counterfictional.” The idea of counterfactuals and counterfictionals is important to serial narrative video games simply because, unlike other forms of media, video games contain not a single possible world or possible timeline, but a multiplicity of fully instantiable and mutually counterfactual ones.

A defining feature, perhaps the defining feature, of narrative video games as opposed to any other narrative medium is the player’s authorial agency. That is to say, the player is not merely the observer of a set of states of affairs, to borrow Lubomir Doležel’s definition of a “world;” instead, the player is ostensibly actor and agent in those states of affairs, capable of acting to produce any one of a number of possible outcomes. Unlike static media, video games do not merely contain empty spaces that the reader or watcher can fill in by inference; instead, they contain open spaces that the player actively fills in play. Though the player is constrained within a certain space and a certain set of actions, this fact still distinguishes a game’s multiple worlds from a piece of static media’s single; if a world is, as Doležel tells us, a set of states of affairs, then the world in which the Daggerfall protagonist grants the Numidium to the lich is one world, the world where the Orc king gains Numidium another, and the world in which the protagonist was killed by some minor opponent fifteen minutes into the game still a third. Games, unlike all but the most esoteric of static texts, contain within themselves the potentiality for many mutually counterfactual or counterfictional worlds; and unlike the cases of all static texts, it is the player who instantiates each one.

Every game is a god game, in the sense that players wield the power to instantiate and abandon worlds, each a different interpretation of the game’s possibility space, at will. The fact that each player’s game-texts will likely differ from one another renders Hill’s distinction between counterfactual and counterfictional states of affairs difficult to maintain. All playthroughs might be counterfactual to the “real” world but counterfictional to one another. This is an important fact; it demonstrates that games contain within themselves a multiplicity of discrete, mutually counterfictional possible or fictional worlds. This fact, in turn, presses back on some of Lubomir Doležel’s conceptual framework regarding the nature of possible worlds in text.

To refresh, Doležel defines a world as a contiguous set of states of affairs, where a state of affairs is the state of a world or universe at any given moment; it would contain all available information about that world in that discrete moment. Doležel further distinguishes between fictional and possible worlds in that the former contain finite amounts of information and may survive paradox or impossible states of affairs, whereas the latter contain hypothetically infinite amounts of information and cannot survive paradox or impossible states of affairs. Typically, in this model, a single text (where “text” is a novel, short story, or, more recently, a movie, television series, or graphic novel) takes place within a single world, which some theorists subdivide into smaller settings. Games’ vast potentialities make it difficult to interpret them through a scheme assigning a single fictional world to a single text; moreover, it makes Doležel’s language of fictional and possible worlds difficult to use. A video game’s world is not a single set of states of affairs, but a space containing potentiality for multiple mutually counterfictional states of affairs; moreover, games constructed as living texts maintain the potentiality and promise of constantly broadening and shifting understandings of the game-world or game-worlds. As of such, unlike book, movie, or television series creators, game designers do not create possible worlds; they create possibility spaces, constrained areas within which the player then charts the actual fictional or possible world to be instantiated. I switch between the language of fictional and possible worlds because it is not, indeed, clear which games include; though they are, technically, finite, corresponding to Doležel’s fictional worlds, many game-worlds, The Elder Scrolls in particular, position themselves as containing potentially infinite amounts of information, supporting vast quantities of interpretation and speculation on qualities of their universes unaddressed in the game-texts themselves. The fact of player authorship, too, permits a truly vast number of potential permutations for each game’s possibility space and possible world. That is to say, static texts contain open spaces that readers might fill in their minds; dynamic game-texts contain open spaces that players fill in the game-texts themselves.

This unique feature of the video game medium, the fact that games are living texts, only complete once a player has instantiated one of a potentially vast number of possible states of affairs or possible worlds, creates an inherent tension for the narrative game designer. On the one hand, the designers of a narrative game want to convey a specific experience to the player; there is some story that they want to get across, and allowing the player too much free rein makes it impossible to reliably produce that specific experience (in addition to requiring a vast temporal and monetary investment in the nuts-and-bolts business of game making). On the other, a great part of the video game medium’s power to immerse and invest the player comes from the idea, implicit or explicit, that the player has the power to shape the game world, or, in this analytic scheme, to instantiate a specific possible world within the possibility space. Should game designers constrain the possibility space to such a degree that the player has no meaningful agency in shaping the world, they have forfeited the great strength of the medium; at this point, the player might as well be watching a movie, since events are set anyway and movies don’t require one to punch buttons to keep the plot moving. Too often, game designers seeking to produce a deeply engaging narrative experience instead produce a world that the player has no ability to shape and therefore less motivation to care about.

This difficulty is only further compounded in the case of serial narrative video games. Somehow, the game designers must craft some sort of coherent narrative while accounting for the vast numbers of possible worlds, possible histories in the case of a succeeding entry in a series, that a player may have instantiated in past games. There are a number of possible solutions to this dilemma; some designers declare a single playthrough, a single world, the true one, and all others “counterfictional;” others simply constrain the player so heavily in the first place that any playthrough would have produced a very similar world; some simply place a sequel so physically or temporally remote from the precursor that the earlier game’s events are irrelevant; and some try to code in an inter-game save data transfer that permits a sequel to read in variables from a precursor to change certain aspects of the sequel game’s possibility space. Each of these strategies carries its own unique problems. The first and second disenfranchise the player as a creator of the world, potentially damaging player investment (it’s not my world!); the third makes the player’s previous actions irrelevant by its very nature, again potentially damaging investment; and the fourth places the magnitude of the player’s agency and the game designers’ actual technical and financial resources at loggerheads; it must either limit the player’s actions to relatively small choices or present a titanic technical challenge to the game developers, forcing them to spend time and money developing many separate possibility spaces, of which most players will only ever see one or two.

For the makers of Daggerfall, it is too late to constrain the game; inter-game save data was infeasible; and they had already established a precedent of a continuous setting (world). So, faced with the dilemma of choosing a specific possible world as created by Daggerfall’s different endings, so doing disenfranchising their players as narrative agents, they choose a perhaps banally simple solution: they declared that all of Daggerfall’s mutually counterfactual occurred, so doing encapsulating a possibility space of many possible worlds within the broader world of their setting. Daggerfall’s direct sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, confirms that aspects of all of Daggerfall’s endings take place during a bizarre event referred to as the “Warp in the West,” when the divine, draconic incarnation of time, AKA, is broken by Numidium’s deific denialism. This “Dragon Break” permits multiple mutually exclusive timelines to spring into existence, only to be jammed back into a single world when AKA regained control. So doing, Bethesda fulfills the promise of the series’s eponymous Elder Scrolls, arcane scrolls covered in constantly-shifting text and symbols. These writhing texts ostensibly contain accounts of all possible futures, only solidifying into a single account as events occur—a fine metaphor for the possibility space of a video game solidifying into a single fictional world as the player moves forward. Rather than crafting a single, rigid fictional world, Bethesda embraced the possibility space created by player interaction with developer creation. They expand the concept in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with in-game texts referencing Daggerfall’s “Dragon Break” and noting other times the world had split and rejoined, while three of Morrowind’s most central supporting characters, as becomes clear in the out-of-game text The Trial at Hogithum Hall, had taken advantage of a divine crisis to instantiate an entirely new timeline—yet another linked fictional world—wherein they had a long, mythic history as gods. One of these characters, the god-king/queen Vivec, eventually demonstrates a path to recognizing one’s place as a character in the “dream” of a dreaming entity, interpretable as the player, and to dream one’s own, separate dream, moving from being a co-actor and creator to a full creator in one’s own right. This act, it may be argued, permits even fully player-created content to count as “in-universe” to the Elder Scrolls world.

In short, the fictional world of The Elder Scrolls is not a single, linear pathway but a multiplicity of branching and rejoining arcs, sometimes linear between games, fanning out into player-determined possibility spaces over game periods, and then rejoining, with arcs like Vivec’s alternate divine history merging in and back out as examples to particularly creative players. Bethesda writer Michael Kirkbride, in his “Loveletter from the Fifth Era” and other out-of-game texts, entreats in-universe readers to become Amaranths, “awakened dreamers” with the power to not only shape Bethesda’s possibility space into discrete worlds but to create novel worlds all their own. Kirkbride’s attitude is not so different from Margaret Cavendish’s appeal in The Blazing-World, inviting to readers to craft their own worlds in lieu of living solely in hers.

The point of all this rambling on The Elder Scrolls’s intricate, and, at times, bizarre “lore” is not simply to recognize some of the weirder and more obscure things that popular video game writers have built into their worlds’ backstories. No, the point is that The Elder Scrolls, in story and world-building if not always in mechanics, fundamentally embraces the player’s power as co-author and agent of the world. It is the player who charts a fictional world through Bethesda’s possibility space, the players who instantiate all the myriad timelines encompassed by Daggerfall’s Warp in the West. Instead of seeking to enforce a single fictional world in the vein of much classical static media, Bethesda internalizes and acknowledges the possibility space; they invite the player to come and write their own world, not merely to observe the one Bethesda has made. They go beyond, inviting player-created content through both their lore and their heavy technical support for modding, and finally encouraging players both to add to The Elder Scrolls’s worlds and to craft their own. Though their implementation may be imperfect, certainly in gameplay and, for many, in lore—not everyone is interested in digging through hundreds or thousands of pages of mutually contradictory in-game texts to understand a dual-natured, murderous god-king’s endorsement of player creativity—they set an example that many creators of narrative video games could do well to follow. They allow games to be games, embrace player agency within the possibility space, and so doing allow video games’ greatest strength to flourish.

Video games are an immature medium—not in the sense of their pursuit being a childish endeavor, but rather in the sense that they haven't been around for all that long and are still developing rapidly. They have not yet found the best and most compelling ways to take advantage of their unique dynamism, to speak to players in a way that no other medium can. Many games still ape movies or television shows, rather than seeking to stand on their own ground and make use of their own advantages. This is not to say that it’s wrong to do so—all mediums, especially young ones, can always learn from one another—but rather to emphasize that the idea of multiple possible worlds is central and internal to video games as it is to no other medium.

Put simply, video games allow us not only to visit and interpret other worlds, but to shape them in our own image. They let us observe and live out experiences we might never hope to live, and never wish to live, in real life, not only as audience, nor even as actor, but as scriptwriter and director too. Games are collaborative storytelling, where the player’s remote collaborators are the game designers, the ones who laid down the possibility space the player has to work with. And like all created worlds, game-worlds reflect their creators. This is the power of fictional worlds, after all: to reflect what we cannot see in “reality’s” mirror, to lay bare our selves and our worlds by letting us view them anew, at once familiar and strange. Books, television shows, movies, short stories—all of these let us look in their authors’ mirrors. When we play games, we become authors ourselves; we gain the power to shape our own new mirrors, in concert and contention with our fellow players and game designers. Through this co-authorship, we produce worlds both uniquely alien and uniquely our own.

References

Doležel, Lubomir. “Possible Worlds of Fiction and History.” New Literary History 29.4 (1998): 29-44.

Doležel draws distinctions between possible and fictional worlds, positioning the former as “maximal,” necessarily internally consistent worlds containing potentially infinite information and the latter as potentially internally inconsistent “miniworlds” containing finite amounts of information. Video game worlds do not necessarily fit neatly into either category, as they contain a hypothetically finite but potentially huge possibility space of unrealized potentialities, which brings the analytic utility of Doležel’s distinction relative to video games into question.

Hills, Matt. "Time, Possible Worlds, and Counterfactuals." Routledge Companions: The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, and Adam Roberts. London: Routledge, 2009.

Hill summarizes multiple analytic frameworks for possible worlds theory relative to science fiction, positioning speculative fiction as closely related to alternative historiography and noting its potential for containing counterfactuals, paralleling Doležel’s address of impossibility in possible worlds. His suggestion of branching possible worlds suggests the structure of many narrative-driven video games, including the Elder Scrolls series, and strikes at the “possibility space” model I mean to advocate.

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Bethesda Softworks. 1996. Video game.

The player character stumbles into knowledge of how to reassemble the Numidium, a titanic mechanical golem and constructed god of reality denial. Daggerfall is primarily important for the impact of its multiple different endings, in each of which a different party gains control of Numidium and uses it to pursue their ends, on the future of the Elder Scrolls universe. Elements of each ending are confirmed to have occurred in future series entries.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda Softworks. 2002. Video game.

The player character becomes the reincarnation of the ancient Dunmer (dark elven, roughly) war leader Indoril Nerevar, slaying the self-made god Dagoth Ur, foiling his attempt to overtake the island of Morrowind, and preventing him from constructing a second Numidium. Morrowind is important for its introduction of the ALMSIVI Tribunal, Nerevar’s former counselors and murderers, who used the heart of a dead god to transform themselves into gods who had always been gods. This forging of alternate timelines is further explored in The Trial at Hogithum Hall.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bethesda Softworks. 2006. Video game.

The player character helps to combat an invasion of daedra, rough analogues to demons, from another plane of reality. Oblivion is important to this analysis primarily due to an in-game account of the events of Daggerfall, “The Warp in the West,” which confirms that several of Daggerfall’s mutually exclusive endings all occurred. The full text of “The Warp in the West” is available on UESP at <http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Warp_in_the_West>.

Kirkbride, Michael. Loveletter from the Fifth Era. C0DA. 28 Apr. 2016. <http://c0da.es/t/loveletter>.

Bethesda writer Michael Kirkbride, through a bevy of in-character fictional philosophy, encourages readers in-universe and out-of-universe to learn to create their own worlds.

Kirkbride, Michael, et al. Compiled by /u/Prince-of-Plots. The Trial at Hogithum Hall. Google Docs. 28 Apr. 2016. <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HMTlozPtQr9uKSp6nyRu8z7JsF7ECkTEFEYckvdvUjI/edit?pref=2&pli=1>.

Kirkbride and a host of Elder Scrolls developers and community members roleplay the trial of the fallen god-king Vivec/Vehk for the murder of his war-leader, Indoril Nerevar. Important primarily for its description of the “Red Moment,” an event wherein Vehk instantiated a separate but convergent history wherein he and his fellow conspirators had always been gods. This account solidifies and illustrates the presence of multiple timelines within the Elder Scrolls universe.

Lore: Dragon Break. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, 11 July 2015. 28 Mar. 2016. <http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dragon_Break>.

Elder Scrolls community members summarize the concept of a Dragon Break and catalogue known Dragon Breaks throughout the Elder Scrolls universe’s history. As Dragon Breaks almost invariably correspond to a disruption of linear time, they instantiate divergent series of events that are smashed back together when the Time Dragon reasserts control. From an in-universe perspective, these are fully instantiated yet mutually contradictory possible worlds that are haphazardly welded back together at the Dragon Break’s end.

edits: formatting & typos