Narrative and Storytelling in the Elder Scrolls Franchise
The concept of choosing your own paths in narrative isn’t a new concept. They were invented decades ago in the form of books that split the story up into different paths. The reader would get to a spot in the book where they had to make a decision, leading them to a different page for each choice. They might die or they might live, but that’s the product of their choice. More recently, this concept has been applied to video games, where it has flourished into a main feature of the story of most games we play today. Most notably in my opinion is the Elder Scrolls franchise. In this series of video games players are thrust into a living worldspace, where story is fed to them through their choice of action. They can speak to citizens of the world, explore and find interesting locations with unique lore and backstories, or find books and notes in the world that start quests to go on. It is also to be done at their own pace and choosing, deciding how the story will go in their own world. This type of storytelling, one that involves an interactable worldspace where story can be found nearly everywhere, is very unique to the Elder Scrolls series, and it is important because it warps our perspective of what a narrative is. It is no longer a linear path with few to little choices, it is an entirely unique form that changes the narrative with each action the player takes. The player’s experience in the game becomes their own narrative as well, the order of completion of storylines becomes that character’s story in the world.
In old choose your own adventure books, the reader has few decisions that drastically impact the narrative. In horror versions of these books, the reader’s choices are often to either progress the story, or die. The narrative in the Elder Scrolls games is told through many different kinds of quests. There tends to be a few major stories, told in the form of questlines related to different factions in the game. For example, in the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there are 5 main factions that have quest lines. This ranges from guilds of wizards to secret assassins who murder the wealthy to help the poor. The questline for thievery involves the actions of a secret collective of thieves, known as the Thieves Guild. The narrative of this guild involves the player participating in more and more dangerous and risky heists, leading up to the final one, where the player must steal the Elder Scroll. It is, admittedly, a pretty standard and linear narrative, but what makes this unique is that the player could partake in this before, after, or at the same time as any other story line in the game. They can do anything in any order they want. If the player wants to be a master thief and then stumbles onto the lair of the Dark Brotherhood assassins, they can choose to become and assassin as well and go down that story line whenever they want, if they even want to at all. When story is presented in this manner, where it can be consumed or not consumed at will while still affecting the overarching narrative of the game, it becomes something more than just a choice of adventure. It becomes a worldspace in which the player can essentially create their own narrative by the choices they make. Narrative becomes less of something you consume, and more of something you can create and alter at will.
In this worldspace, narratives aren’t just factions the player can join and be involved with. They come in many other forms, such as side quests that don’t warrant multiple hours of in depth story. Some come from notes found around the world. In the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim there are many written notes the player can discover around the world that gives the player a bit of lore. For example, when going through a dungeon for the Thieves Guild questline, the player may come across Anders’s Message. It turns out to be the confessions of a bandit who came to the dungeon for riches and has been trapped after killing his partner. It doesn’t start a quest and the people related to the note are never interacted with, but it is still a narrative. Many don’t even come in the form of a quest given to the player, or a note found on the ground. A lot of stories are told by the environment. Most of the time it involves skeletons, often laid out near treasure chests and traps, telling the story of old adventurers who attempted to seek riches and died trying. A more specific and unique example would be from the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, when the player encounters a wizard who dies in front of them. Just outside the town the story begins in, the player hears an unseen character frantically yell, and not long after a wizard falls from the sky and dies from the impact right in front of the player. When the body of the wizard is searched, many scrolls of flight are found. There’s no quest involved with the wizard dieing, but him flying and falling tells the story of how he died in his efforts to develop a spell that allowed flight. When these smaller quests and environmental stories added to our worldspace, the concept of the choice-heavy narrative gets changed even more. Now if they choose to seek out smaller stories or interact with the environment of the world, the narrative will overall change with what the player chooses to do, furthering the idea of the player having the power to alter the narrative through what actions they take.
As previously mentioned, choosing your own story isn’t anything new, in fact it has become quite mainstream in the gaming world. The Elder Scrolls does something different with it’s narrative than other games, which is creating a worldspace full of different stories that the player must travel to and interact with. The player has the choice of when and how to progress the narrative by choosing which factions to become involved with, and progressing through the stories they tell at their own pace. They can play through the questlines of multiple factions at the same time, while also exploring the world and finding smaller quests and stories to interact with. This method of creating a living worldspace that players interact with warps how we interact with narrative. Normally we see a narrative as a linear path or set of choices in an order that has one or two similar outcomes. In the Elder Scrolls series, in game stories and the order at which they’re completed change’s the world’s narrative. Interacting with the world a certain way makes that become the world’s story. The player’s character could become a famous hero by completing the main storyline, then directly afterwards work with the assassins, and gain notoriety amongst the citizens of the world. That then becomes the lore of that world, the narrative turns into a story of betrayal as the world’s most famous hero turns into an evil assassin.
