I found this recently. Blew my mind completely. I've been playing TES games since Morrowind, and have sunk hundreds of hours into each game. I knew that they had some serious history and lore, but I had no idea that it ran this deep. This is some uber-geeky stuff, delving into the lore and philosophies of the game and cracking it open to get to a theorized gooey center. It's very long, but very fascinating, and you might have to use some sort of illicit mind-altering drug to really get it.
I give you, The Metaphysics Of Morrowind, in which the Elder Scrolls series, as the author puts it, "does very strange things to the fourth wall, not so much breaking it as morphing it, moving it, twisting it, painting it purple and sitting on top of it laughing."
One little point to mention, and I'm genuinely not sure if the author didn't pick up on this at all, or if it was so obvious, the author left it out because he assumed the reader would get it. He discusses the in-game concept of "Chim", which is the Godlike power of being one with everything, and yet also maintaining the self, and how it's metaphysical binary. The author focuses on the Chim concept of the Tower, which he calls the self, and relates to binary as 0 = the self does not exist within the whole, and 1 = I myself an aware that I exist.
Yet never does he touch on the fact (other than naming the book in a passage) that the book this comes from is called "CHIM, the Tower, the Wheel and all things fun – A Beginner’s Manual". He gleans all of the binary metaphors from the supposition of self and lack-of self, but at no point mentions the pretty blunt metaphor in the title. The TOWER (1) and the WHEEL (0).
Again, maybe I'm smarter than I thought for figuring that out, or maybe I just think I am when the author is going "Well good, I'm glad you caught up with the rest of the class."
As a fun little side note, HERE you can find the texts of every single in-game book from the entire Elder Scrolls series. I personally have the Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim collections as e-books on my iPhone so if I get bored, I can just pull up a copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid... *ahem*
The author even subtitles a section "One's and Zero's" but never discusses this very basic fact and metaphor of binary as the creator of the TES world. He argues the Vivec knows he's in a video game, but I would argue that Vivec know he's just binary assembled into the shape of a game.
ReplyDeleteI also think he's got the maths wrong. The opposite of 1 is not -1, but zero (one=being, 0=nothingness, -1=being less than nothing). In his equation(1+ -1=0), 'Zero-summing' causes one to vanish, to "un-be" which is literally impossible, regardless of the physics engine. In my equation, the sum of being and nothingness(1+0=1)is enlightened being.
Woah, did I just add a dash of Sartre?