Virtual Hearth Return

It's November in Ontario, Canada. Or December. (Sometimes the snow is fashionably late.)

People everywhere bemoan the frost, the slush, the tire swap. They socialize less and leave home sparingly. In cities, between string light displays, artificial Christmas trees, and bedazzled garlands, bundled silhouettes trudge through sleet and snow, hopefully on their way to warmer interiors and even warmer company.

Now picture 2011. Specifically November 11, 2011. In Canada, this day is Remembrance Day — an important national ritual in itself commemorating the nation's fallen soldiers and civilians during World War I. But November 11, 2011 is special for another reason. It was the release date of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Skyrim is an open-world role-playing game published by Bethesda Softworks. It's named after the fictional northern province in which it takes place. You play as the Dragonborn, a figure prophesied to restore peace and balance amid a dragon scourge, civil war, and petty civilian infighting. The land teems with bandits, vampires, cultists, and all manner of creatures eager to kill you. Ultimately, it's incumbent upon you to singlehandedly fix it all.

I'd been obsessed with the game's predecessor, Oblivion, for years prior to Skyrim. You can imagine, then, that my anticipation for this release bordered on the unhinged. It was a more newsworthy occasion than my birthday, the Second Coming, or literally anything else that might have happened that year. I still remember the ecstatic rush I felt that day picking up my copy at the local game shop.

Notably, Skyrim is a northern province — meaning it's cold and rugged and fairly inhospitable. Crops struggle to thrive and death by frostbite (the spell, not the real-world injury) is a fairly easy way to go. Its aesthetic inspirations draw heavily from Nordic cultures. Winter is thus woven into the game's code.

Launch day was a Friday. It was cold out to the tune of 5º C. My friends and I gathered around a laptop in our go-to basement hangout after school. The 2011 graphics had stunned us. We watched in awe as our friend navigated the lush and detailed game world. It's funny to look at the graphics now thinking we'd once considered them "realistic", but regardless, the game was unbelievably immersive. When I started playing it that year, I had no clue I was priming myself for a ritual that would come to mark half my life’s winters.

So from 2011 onward, winter began with snow, sure. But it mostly began with the swell of the Skyrim title screen. The season didn't announce itself as much as I announced it. "it's snowing..." I'd text my friends. "u know what that means!! *sends picture of Skyrim title screen*"

Sometimes I'd continue an old save. Sometimes I'd make a new one. But every boot followed the same formula: the low and resonant horns of the title theme melted into the loading screen when I hit "Continue", and then gave way to mountains, half-explored ruins, some random NPC's house, or wherever I'd last left off. Then and only then did it truly feel like winter had arrived.

For all its beauty and serenity, real-world winter can be depressing. The sun sinks below the horizon as early as 5pm and sunless skies tint the city grey. Seas of smooth white snow get tarnished by tire cover and footprints as quickly as they'd fallen to the ground. Across the population, vitamin D levels run perniciously low, and seasonal affective disorder (aptly shortened to SADS) abounds.

In Skyrim, winter is beautiful. It's a comfortable, lived-in season where you, the player character, can prance along the harsh world without feeling so much as a feather of cold air. You can strip your digital avatar down to a loincloth and start precision-shooting bandits with a lightning-enchanted bow. And that, too, is beautiful.

I had just started university when gaming assumed a less pronounced role in my life. You know how it is — we go to school, get jobs, see friends, take a stab at love. But even then, and despite any other circumstance, without fail, I still played Skyrim every single winter. It's hardly ever a conscious choice. The decision pathways are hard-coded in my brain.

The logic to determine my first play for the year is extremely simple:

–

if (firstSnowfall) {

if (isAtHome) {

GetBlanket();

GetHotBeverage();

LaunchSkyrim();

} else {

GoHome();

GetBlanket();

GetHotBeverage();

LaunchSkyrim();

}

}

Playing wasn't always sunshine and rainbows (sunshine and snowfall?) though. Sometimes the game world consumed me. Daily hours of screen time on a large 1080p monitor likely took years off my lifespan. The display threw a sickly blue glow onto my skin, disturbing my circadian rhythm in the process. At times I'd get headaches that throbbed like how I'd imagine poison damage might feel. I roughed it all out. The payoff felt worth it — odd as it sounds, Skyrim was like a second home. In a way, it still feels that way.

Setting aside the pitfalls of game addiction, I maintain to this day that Skyrim helped me preserve my sanity during a sensitive time in my adolescent life. It gave me a place to "explore" outside home and school. It gave me missions and goals that existed untethered from the life I was trying to escape. At times the experience was nearly meditative. And at the foreground of all these offerings was a stunning visual and sonic aesthetic that I adored. As a young person who felt stuck searching for themselves in the real world, I used the game world as a mirror for my own ambitions, desires, and values.

Video games are art in motion. "Telling" a story is just the surface of what they do. Games invite you to improvise and collaborate with the medium itself. You, the player, are a planned participant whose inputs shift the course of the story itself. For a nihilistic adolescent, having that affordance was like having training wheels for a renewed sense of wonder.

I’m not in Canada this winter, and it doesn't typically snow in this part of Italy. I’m alone in a modest apartment in the mountains, where the humid cold creeps under every door and the dark comes very, very early. My desktop computer is across the Atlantic. My PlayStation 4 is also across the Atlantic. I have my MacBook, but I don't have the time (or the mental/digital bandwidth) to emulate Windows on this thing. Which means for the first time in 14 years, I've broken my ritual of playing Skyrim at first frostfall.

It feels ridiculous to feel any kind of sadness about not playing a video game while I'm in a place like Italy. Here there are real churches, real ruins, and real mountains. Some parts of the country could passably be likened to Skyrim environments. But that's too logical. Rituals aren't necessarily logical.

It's worth considering why this ritual was ever valuable to me in the first place. Yes, it's always been about a passion for gaming and storytelling. But it's also about agency. The symbol of agency, at least. To be in control of a character (who is, in a way, a mirror of the self) means a lot when you've got little to no handle on anything else in life.

This year I'll have to learn how to find that specific brand of warmth a bit differently. But in writing this piece, I'm discovering how the ritual is evolving in real time. Or at least how it can evolve. Was the act of playing the game ever really the point? In a way, yes. But in a way, no.

Maybe next winter, I’ll return to Skyrim twice as eagerly. For now, I'll be here writing on my trusty MacBook. I know the snow is falling where all my loved ones are, and I miss them far more than I miss Skyrim. But in my mind's eye, I can see the childhood apartment where I spent most of my early winters. I see myself there, inventing rituals where none existed.

I hope another child is there now, creating seasonal rituals of their own.