Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Gendering Discovery (Part 2)

“There’s no chance anyone in authority approved this [excavation of a Nordic burial site],” complains Onmund, an NPC from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. “Our ancestors should be allowed to rest in peace.” As a Nord, himself, Onmund voices the sole objection to the College of Winterhold’s entry into Saarthal, a Nordic ruin and tomb. During the “Under Saarthal” quest, you assist the College with its search for artifacts to add to their collection. Although Onmund’s trepidation constitutes the minority view of the group, it tinges the player’s forthcoming descent into the tomb, as well as their likely combat with its restless inhabitants, with bitterness and  doubt. You should not be here.

You should not be in this sacred place of rest, reserved for honorable Nordic peoples, but you are. You should not loot the burial urns littering its halls, filled with gold, gems, and armor meant to ease the Nords’ journeys to the afterlife, but you likely will. By this same logic, you should not pick the barrow’s locks or traverse its traps—the express intent of which is to keep outsiders out—but you most certainly will. Thus, “no” in the burial tombs of Skyrim does not mean “no.” Rather, I argue that the “no” imparted by the game’s resistant landscapes fuels the fire of the player’s rapacious “yes.”

Critical gender analyses are never freed from the risk of inadvertently naturalizing the very systems they intend to critique. To focus on binary gender in Skyrim, for instance, comes at the expense of sufficient attention to its representation of nonbinary and other identity formations, including the all-important intersections of gender with race, class, and ability. However, I insist that value abounds in a critical analysis of Skyrim’s dominant gender representations, particularly its portrayal of femininity as a concept that exceeds the category of the human and guarantees bodily violation. 

As Alexander Galloway insists in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), those who play such video games as Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise are not merely passive consumers of media. Rather, they become “actors” who,

learn[], internaliz[e], and becom[e] intimate with a massive, multipart global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus, to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’). […] In fact, in their very core, video games do nothing but present contemporary political realities in relatively unmediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with the entire game, and in this way video games achieve a unique type of political transparency.¹

By considering Skyrim as allegorithmic, or a political rather than neutral media object, I suggest that its players “learn, internalize, and become intimate with” the binary gender system while navigating its tombs and pursuing its quest objectives. Galloway’s method trains my gaze at the game’s subdermal gender structures, or the way(s) that binary gender undergirds not only its NPCs but its level design. Whereas Galloway tags global resource management games like Meier’s Civilization as media which “fetishize control,” I insist that Skyrim’s allegorithm similarly fetishizes, and implicitly genders, the act of discovery itself.²

In their relation of early modern European travel narratives to Nintendo games, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins define the former by their “time-honored representation of [early modern] English voyages [as] a confident, masculine ‘thrust outwards’ and expansion of, among other things, an enlightened English rule.”³ This same ethic, they suggest, drives players of games like Super Mario ever onward into “the frontier” of successive game environs:

“[W]hat never loses its interest [in these games] is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground. […] [An] increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physics of the different [game] worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spot and move further into the frontier.”⁴

At the heart of the “promise” that players will gain mastery over game environs, I argue that desire rhythmically pulses. In Skyrim, players’ increased ease of entry into hostile game environments, filled as they are with rewards (e.g. gold, armor, books, etc.), builds the anticipation of future such ease. Cyclically, ease begets action. To plunder a barrow or traverse an earthen cave, to extract their resources and quell the uprising of their opposing inhabitants, is to “play” at self-perpetuating colonialism. 

After fighting their way through the bowels of a tomb, players earn a reward that may initially appear a mundanity: the word “Cleared” permanently appends the location of the “dungeon” (i.e. the barrow, cave, ruin, etc.) on their map. However, this word signifies players’ domination over the environ, marking its transformation from an unknown space into one which has been seen, touched, “mapped,” and thus irrevocably “known.” To refer back to Ulfric’s gendered metaphor, “Cleared” signifies that the player has traversed once-virgin soil and made it theirs.

Returning to Ulfric Stormcloak’s relation of ore extraction to “the raping of Skyrim’s silver mines” (mentioned in part one of this two-part series), the age-old relation of nature and femininity underlies both his metaphor and, by extension, players’ journeys into subterranean space. In her expansive survey of feminine representations of the natural world, Carolyn Merchant explains that, as the West shifted into the Enlightenment era, dominant images of Earth concomitantly shifted from a “nurturing mother and womb of life into a source of secrets to be extracted for economic advance.”⁵ Even centuries prior to the Enlightenment (which spanned the late 17th through 18th centuries in Europe), the Roman poet Ovid charts a similar shift relative to man’s degradation from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. If Earth flourished with freely given abundance during the Golden Age, the Metamorphoses poet suggests, then the Iron Age conditions Earth as a victim of humanity’s rape:

men began to bound

With dowles and diches drawen in length the free and fertile ground,

Which was as common as the Ayre and light of Sunne before.

Not onely corne and other fruites, for sustnance and for store,

Were now exacted of the Earth: but eft they gan to digge,

And in the bowels of the ground unsaciably to rigge,

For Riches coucht and hidden deepe, in places nere to Hell,

The spurres and stirrers unto vice, and foes to doing well.

Then hurtfull yron came abrode, then came forth yellow golde,

More hurtfull than the yron farre, then came forth battle bolde,

That feightes with bothe, and shakes his sword in cruell bloudy hand.⁶

With “cruell,” “bloudy” hands, the poet explains that Iron-Age peoples exhibited an insatiability (“unsaciably”) while tearing into the “bowels” of “[t]he Earth their mother.”⁷ To return to the beginning of this essay, Onmund, it seems, would accord with the poet’s tangible disgust at Iron-Age peoples’ violent, forced entry into Earth’s bowels to extract her veiled “Riches.” Regardless of in-game counterpoints, Skyrim’s dominant script nevertheless trains players in the same sort of rapine practice decried in this centuries-old poem.

1. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 90-2. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 93. ↩︎
3. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Stephen Jones, (Sage Publications, 1995), 70. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 62-67 ↩︎
5. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (HarperOne 1990), 165. ↩︎
6.  Ovid, 43 B.C.–18 A.D. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Dry Books, 2000), 1.151-61. ↩︎
7. Ibid, 1.180 ↩︎