Dragon debate: what The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim tells us about ideology
I’m not writing this in an attempt to enjoy Skyrim more – I’d be much better off dropping my as-yet-unconfirmed future pay cheque on a new game. Instead, I’m writing it because, in my ramblings around the game’s vast and lore-filled world, I’ve encountered endless similarities between Skyrim’s world and our own. I refuse to believe that the game’s writers, developers, and designers really put as much thought into its motifs as I’m about to imply; assume from here on out that the author has well and truly died. Todd Howard doesn’t strike me as a mastermind, especially given the PR furore Bethesda has endured ever since people started to doubt their tried-and-play-tested RPG formula. So he probably isn’t much for political science either; I’m here to do that job for him. Without further ado:
“When a dragon uses a breath attack like fire or frost, it is speaking in an ancient and powerful language. A battle between two dragons is actually a deadly verbal debate”.
- Elder Scrolls V, Loading Screen
Skyrim is a game about dragons. Or at the very least, it’s the part of the game that won it so much praise upon release. These dragons have come back to life in mysterious circumstances, after disappearing for thousands of years. It is up to the player to handle these raggedy flying lizard monstrosities and figure out how to get things back to normal. Or not; the dragon business is optional, as is almost all of the game’s content. But dragons are an excellent place to start. The in-game lore (the narrative offered through interactable objects, non-player characters (NPCs), and visual cues) states that a dragon’s breath of fire or ice is not simply some violent egress but a manifest of the “dragon language”, in which the player character is fluent. This is the player’s unique advantage: they are entitled to take part in the “deadly verbal debate” in a way that is simply not open to the rest of the world. However, like everything in Skyrim, the opportunity to develop a motif through gameplay is squandered by how much it is pared down and oversimplified. Dragons’ attacks rarely move beyond the aforementioned fire and frost and, while player characters have more “shouts” (attacks performed by speaking dragon language) there is no relationship between the actual words and the outcome. Things could have been taken in a direction similar to how spells seem to work in Harry Potter, or even a rock-paper-scissors style where, for example, “force” could be beaten by shouting “balance” back. But alas; Bethesda’s shouts are indistinguishable from other attacks in the game.
To assert that dragons engage in “verbal debate”, but then totally fail to cash this cheque in gameplay terms, is a reflection of a complete ignorance of the value of debate in public life. It reflects an inability to conceive of arguments beyond binary positions and personal attacks. It reneges on simplicity and denies nuance. And to claim this is outside the scope of games is a fallacy. While 2011 seems an age away, Spec Ops: The Line, a game with a complex, thoughtful story that blurred the line between gameplay and narrative in building its themes, came out only 6 months later. But can we blame Skyrim for this lack of complexity? The truth is that, in our world as much as in Skyrim, the scraps of “debate” we see in the public realm have indeed been pared down to this dichotomy of fire and frost, extremes from either camp that prove anathema to the other.
Skyrim also has some more literal political elements. One of the optional questlines is focused on the province’s “civil war”: the feud between the Imperial faction, think a European Union-style federative entity looking to maintain peace on the continent, and the Stormcloaks, a nationalist, obscenely patriotic band of individualists that brand the Imperials as authoritarian milk-drinkers in the pockets of the Thalmor (a shadowy group of elves controlling immense economic and military power).
Both groups tarnish each other with a similarly unrelenting critical brush, but a glance at the lore proves that both sides speak a version of the truth: the Stormcloaks are indeed racist against anyone who’s not a Skyrim-native Nord, and they are without a doubt sowing discontent within a continent already in turmoil. Meanwhile, the Imperials are indeed kowtowing to the overwhelming strength of the Thalmor, and they are also a tad authoritarian, scuppering Skyrim’s autonomy at every turn.
What does this tell us about the themes of Skyrim, and how Bethesda sees opposing political camps? In the eight years since Skyrim’s first of many releases, the world has become far more polarised, and one of the most popular characterisations of those poles is the “open/closed” dichotomy. Some people close themselves off to the world, favouring protectionism, nationalist and individualism, and others open themselves up, favouring globalisation, multiculturalism, and communitarianism. This is an extreme generalisation, sure, but it’s interesting for two reasons. First, it totally eschews any idea of “left/right”, (you can get open/closed versions of both), but, more pressingly, this dichotomy was a pipe dream in the West in 2011. Barack Obama was storming his first presidency, the United Kingdom had a vaguely stable if frail coalition government, and the European Union was undergoing unprecedented eastern expansion. It might seem unfair to generalise world affairs from this narrow a selection, but these countries include the overwhelming majority of the people who play Skyrim, and therefore, one would expect, the cultural references of its writers.
For what it’s worth, despite the often jarring, thoughtless simplicity of how Skyrim builds the Stormcloak/Imperial dichotomy, it was incredibly prescient. Which is why it’s sad that, beyond the lore, the storyline here is simple in both senses of the word. It’s just “some battles” with the strategic fidelity one would expect of an open world game (very little). Military strategists would be disappointed, but so would political scientists. There is no discussion of ideology, and the argument there is limits itself to personal attacks and perceived errors of judgement. This is hardly Game of Thrones (if we’re using the books as an exemplar); it’s more like Baby’s First Civil War.
How it all ends is equally jarring; whichever side wins, the victory is violent, but not in the traditional sense; it all seems so sudden. The war ends and it hardly engenders a single change – some people play musical chairs on Skyrim’s various individual thrones, but that’s it. No conversation about where the province goes next. No discussion on how the ideology of each faction might affect the world they now govern. An Imperial victory won’t stop the Nords of snowy Windhelm from berating their Dark Elf neighbours - refugees from natural disaster - simply for looking different. And Stormcloak victory won’t pull the Thalmor away from their embassies and forts. Nor does anyone have the tact to ask about whether anyone did the right thing; how the player character ought to feel about their call. No, it’s all “well fought, soldier!” Skyrim fails to alter the player’s place in the world beyond a very base level.
There's one part of Skyrim's storyline that feels particularly jarring. In an aside from the main questline, the player is actually forced to stop the war once and for all, if they haven’t already. The leaders of each faction are invited to the highest peak in the land, to discuss a peace treaty so one of the bit-part meme-generating side characters feels prepared to safely trap an entire dragon in his house. I am not exaggerating.
In any case, this quest progresses as a light talkathon - the player character is required to choose from a series of dialogue options to attempt to forge a truce. The one problem is thus: Skyrim is a god game. It wants to make the player feel like the centre of the universe, even when this proves totally incongruous. So the player can act the arch-anti-Ban-Ki Moon, stumbling over platitudes and insulting both sides of the prospective peace, and it’ll still work out. The quest must go on. The player’s personal ineptitude can’t stop the war from resolving; talking politics is a triviality, a box to tick so the main quest can continue; trap that dragon in that house and so forth.
Not only is this situation absurd, but it does an excellent job of highlighting something else about the maddening picture Skyrim is painting: politics is perfunctory. Performance politics is a small fry when it comes down to the true challenges of our time. Like a the protagonist of a Marvel film, the player in Skyrim is the ultimate arbiter of dragon genocide, and politics could never change that. In fact, while the main quest – to kill all the bleeding dragons – is accidentally decisive in stopping the civil war, the reverse is impossible. Winning for either the Stormcloaks or the Imperials has no impact on the dragons overhead. It could never be pivotal, because it’s politics; dragons exist whether the civil war does or not. It is noise, background chatter, a pithy period full-stop.
Skyrim doesn’t think politics changes much about the world, but political intrigue sounds like something that fits in the fantasy genre, so Skyrim features it anyway. The fact that our current political climate sees incredible division but a completely unsatisfactory response to global problems is, somehow, a vindication of the way Skyrim’s game systems express total apathy to its political ones. The civil war questline is optional, and, like all quests in Skyrim, ignoring it changes nothing.
So, there you are. Examine Skyrim carefully and you realise that it has three things to tell us about politics: debate has become toxic, polarised and painful; identity politics has infuriatingly little impact on the great challenges of our time; and engagement with all this is still frighteningly optional. I think this was all a total accident. The systems of Skyrim lean into temporal dissonance, where problems can be put off for another day. Because of this, claiming that Skyrim shows us how “politics is optional” is just as reasonable as saying it shows us that “joining a guild of mages is optional” or “saving the world from total crisis and collapse of humanity from a calamitous global event brought on by giant lizards is optional”. It’s all left up to the player if they can be bothered. The fact that an end to the political squabble doesn’t alter the main quest is, again, down to systems and scale, what Bethesda could be bothered to add and what they couldn’t. Some extra polygons on the fir tree textures probably pipped “real, nuanced, cross-pollinating politics” to the post. And honestly? The stuff about dragons shouting at each other? I sincerely believe that Skyrim’s writers thought themselves clever when they came up with that “deadly verbal debate” line. But they weren’t. If anyone genuinely attempts to read Skyrim as an adequate political allegory, they are all the worse for it. And I’m sorry to say that’s exactly what I did when I first played this game, almost eight years ago. But hopefully, a degree later, I can do a little better.
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