What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
I’ve actually put enough into Skyrim to enjoy it. I’m not the gamer in my family, my brother-in-law is. I started with Fallout 3 on a whim, and Skyrim is made by the same company. The gameplay is fun, but what makes it so enormous it’s hard to take in is the story and the score.
Oh my God. The score. I could listen to the Skyrim soundtrack for 12 hours straight, and other people agree with me because there are 12 hour Youtube videos that play it for background noise.
Skyrim also takes place in the equivalent of Scandinavia, and it’s fascinating learning how the gamers portray characters living in that amount of snow. Even the architecture changes as you go, and you can spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards and mods to make Skyrim look like you’re literally walking through it. Just photorealistic. The great part is that even the vanilla game is gorgeous. You just have to tweak it to run on Windows 10/11. That’s actually the hardest part…. being able to sort through all the memory managers to find one that works.
My character is a wood elf, because they’re archers and it boosts my natural ability there. She has gray hair in a short asymetrical haircut, purple makeup accents, and purple war paint. I wear Orcish armor not because it’s the best you can get. It’s the sharpest I can dress.
I set it on stupid easy level because the story and puzzles are the best part. Killing things gets repetitive and doesn’t move anything forward. I have also added a ton of mods that extend the storyline and let you collect cool things so that the game is less about fighting overall. In fact, I use an alternate start so I can go to Windhelm first and book it to Solstheim. That way, I can get the first Black Book, and the power that allows your companion to stand in your wake and not get hurt. This has been the theme of my life, finding that particular enchantment. I also enjoy wielding Bloodskaal Blade because of the energy that pulses through it. Then, I go on the quest to get the warhammer with the chaos damage enchantment…. mostly because it’s fun to destroy it and enchant a bow. Arrows are so much cooler when they also shock, burn, or freeze the victim.
Those three things set me up for the rest of the game. You’ll be ridiculously overpowered and one shot kills are really fun, particularly at long range. As ESO would say, “get wrecked, sir.” I also make a point to collect everything in the game at one point or another because there’s a spectacular mod called Legacy of the Dragonborn where you become an employee of a museum dedicated to yourself. It’s ridiculous and also makes sense in the context of the story. So, the game is more balanced that way because I’m not willing to be the bad guy without significant reward. Checking items off that list is crack.
My favorite storyline starts out with becoming a thief, because I had to set beehives on fire and get out before anyone noticed. It’s fun being able to test your smarts at deception without your life depending on it. I am not Jack Ryan, but I will never admit it.
In the vanilla game, my favorite player home is a toss-up. I have bought all of them except Hjerim. Windhelm sucks as a place to live because the people are coded as particularly hostile even though you’ve just saved their lives. So, obviously I work for the government.
Ironic because I think that’s actually the house I’d love the most. The best thing about the vanilla houses is that everything works. There’s not going to be a glitch where if it says a relic can be put there, it will hang upside down or something.
The mods make it where you can store everything you collect, so I also like my safehouse in the museum.
That’s because in addition to tools like a forge and a workbench, I have archaeology tools there as well. If I want to display something in my home, I can make a fake. That way, I still have all my stuff and the museum fills up simultaneously.
I love that Skyrim feels so pristine and beautiful even though my computer was top of the line in 2014-15. I didn’t have to spend more than $60 for a graphics card that would play the hell out of it. I am sure that if I’d beefed up the graphics card more, I could play more recent games. But I haven’t played Skyrim enough to see all of it and I finish one story before moving on. I don’t really have time to game, so I don’t until I’m truly out of things to do.
Explaining my level of gaming is important because I don’t want people to assume that if they’re in a relationship with me, that means they need to know gaming is a huge part of my life. I play Skyrim when there’s nothing good on TV. It’ll keep.
Being able to Shout is a tremendous power, and something we don’t do nearly enough in our daily lives. We just have to manage how worthy the target is of that shout. If you don’t address something, it shows where your priorities lie. We’re responsible for telling you we’d like something to be higher priority, because if we’ve never expressed a need we’ve become part of the problem (that was Bryn’s idea). Whether you care about the outcome should mean less, because you’re not responsible for what someone else does, says, or understands.
In Skyrim, this shows up in aggression towards other characters. You absolutely get to decide how much shit you’re going to take from people and damn the consequences. What you have to decide is who is worthy when they state their own boundaries in return, and notice when they aren’t being set.
In short, if you kill undead soldiers long enough, you realize that everything and everyone is a spectrum. You have perspective on what matters. You will accept consequences from your partners, family, and friends. That’s because you can’t be vulnerable to the whole world. Protecting your energy enough so that you can fly under your own power is key. Getting too spread out is enormously frustrating. I am an empath fixer/pleaser, which makes me even more likely to shoot someone in the face to deal with my wallflower nature. I do the same things that other people do when I play violent video games and listen to rap. It’s just to blow off some steam. I can let them be angry enough for both of us. I can also let my character be braver and more dedicated than I am and let my character rise to meet theirs.
The more I write about myself, when I get some distance from a situation I actually love my character here, and I’m not saying that because I think of myself as fiction. It’s that to you, my audience, I am fictional because you live in India and I don’t. You’re falling in love with a story, not a person.
It is not lost on me that a huge part of falling for my beautiful girl was reading my own blog entries when I wanted to spend time with her while she was away. I didn’t just fall for the person she was, I fell for the person I made her in my mind and poured onto the page.
It is not unlike what I would do in a video game. I create a character, and then I read good or bad depending on the decisions I’ve made in my past.
My beautiful girl is not Supergrover, they’re the words I would use to describe her, and the actions I would have taken to make a future that had room for both of us. I am writing down everything I didn’t get that I wanted, not to guilt, goad, and provoke but to be able to come back later and read the story of what happened….. like all moms and sisters read baby books.
Trying to find the child in everyone is the only way to improve relationships. We all need to be sensitive to the fact that we are still the people we were in first grade, covered up by an enormous amount of scar tissue. If you take the time to reclaim your inner child and work from that place of vulnerability, your reactions will go back to what they once were…. when the troubles of the world seemed so small because you didn’t have to adult so hard.
Skyrim is a way to find out what that inner child really wants, and can choose all of it. It’s a do over for your life if you follow the story that way. You can choose to be a villain, but you also have to live with it. Living with those consequences isn’t the flex you think it is.
Yesterday’s entry broke me.
I sobbed all the way through writing it, and made myself cry several times on the train while I was reading it. Such a beautiful goodbye and “peace be with you” that even if nothing more happens, something did.
If I’d been at home, I would have played Skyrim to stop the tears. As it so happens, it was date night with Zac. We had the best conversation I’ve ever had about my blog tied only with my conversation with Bryn. I’d already been crying over my writing earlier, and Zac isn’t a fan yet. He’s said that he needs to be a die hard because it’s important to me, and yet it’s not. I am perfectly happy for him to be a fan, but I also love having someone who is oblivious because they haven’t already read what I wrote today so my conversation is fucking boring and they don’t know how to tell me. That’s my own interpretation, but it is not untrue because I can read microexpressions so easily.
He said something interesting, because he summed up everything I believe. He said, “if you come after me, I know you’ll only go after the parts of our relationship that are bad. You’re not going to come for me professionally because you know what I do.” I have not let myself get close enough to Zac to have bad parts of our relationship, therefore it was a very theoretical conversation. It’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s that I don’t trust me. I don’t trust me not to become lost in him, and to a certain degree giving up my drive to do and be more. It’s not that I would fall so in love I was blind. It’s that my personality is dedicated to helping someone understand themselves, and I would be so busy doing that because it affects my life directly that my audience might dwindle. As a person writing a book I hope to *sell,* that is a very bad thing.
One of the reasons I post so much is that it’s the best way I know to heal myself. I cannot speak for others, I can only let them read my experiences and decide if they want what I have. I’m offering peace for people who’ve been through a lot. I’m showing you how to get there because as I get happier, my writing does. Light begets light.
My only job in life was protecting Paarthurnax, and I found out that sometimes I’m Alduin. However, I would not have learned to accept the angel and the demon I am as one being without them.
But hey.
It’s only a video game.
Stories That Are All True 