Bending Time in Skyrim

Original Post: December 20 2011 (Games.on.Net)

Time is a strange thing in videogames, especially in open-world RPG type simulations such as Bethesda’s Skyrim. A fair amount of scholarship has been undertaken examining time in games (Juul and Eskelinen are a good place to start, if you’re interested) although these tend toward explaining time with regard to narrative theory, rather than pertaining towards the more uniquely videogame experience of time. Time is also bound up in theories of space, so Nitsche’s work on videogame spaces is probably another important background to this present discussion, as is Adrian Forest’s recent post about Skyrim in particular.

"Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life"The fundamental problem of time in videogames is that the time flow a human player exists within is immutable and inexorable. Real-world time cannot be slowed down or sped up, it is non-negotiable. Time is ‘spent’ by people with the knowledge that they will never get it back. So every action has a ‘cost’ to the human. This is important because we generally want more experiences within the same real-world time while playing a videogame than would naturally occur in everyday life. We use games (and other artistic/entertainment media) to cram more action, drama or other experience into each real-world minute we engage with the work. Artists cut out vast stretches of down-time in most narratives in order to progress through various scenes without actually costing the viewer the same amount of time in the real world as passes in the fictional one. So we can read a historical account of World War I in less than five years, for example.

Obviously in this, we miss out on a great deal of detail. One of the great strengths of various narrative media, and our literacy with them, is the ability to abridge time and omit detail, and still make sense. This is not a trivial matter! Learning that time can pass between shots in a film is a terribly foreign concept, if one were to apply real-world literacy to the film. How does one jump forward in time by several hours? Linear media can also rewind time, to depict events from multiple perspectives, but having occurred at the same fictional time. This is another impossible feat to replicate in reality, humans can’t go back in time to see what was happening somewhere else.

Certain videogames operate on a similar temporal structure. That is, in a level-based, linear game, we might skip several hours or days between playable missions. In others, we may play as different characters, acting in different locations simultaneously (in fictional time). Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes to mind as an example of both of these techniques. In this we can begin to discern the relationship between space and time: the shifts in time often occur when the player-character is being ‘extracted’ and moved to a different location. So the game simply skips the long plane flight and picks up again at the insertion point.

Skyrim, however, is not like Call of Duty. In Skyrim there are (almost) no ‘cuts’ between which time can be shifted, not in the same familiar filmic way Call of Duty does.

Elder Scrolls games, and large RPGs in general, face a difficult problem. One of the reasons for a time-shifting cut in games or novels is to skip over a (tedious) journey. But for Skyrim (and the other similar Bethesda worlds) one of the primary ways of engaging with the world is travelling through it. Travel is so important that whole quest lines are built into caves and other locations that players are more likely to stumble across than be led to. One could argue that the point of building an open world as densely-packed with ‘stuff’ is to travel through it—so a travel-skipping cut would truly defeat the purpose of the game. Yet at the same time, travel takes a long time. So the point of an epic journey across Skyrim is to take an epic journey, but epic journeys are largely epic because they take a long time to complete. So how can an experience be designed that feels like an epic journey, but doesn’t take the same amount of real time as crossing a state, even a small one, on foot?

"The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours"One answer which is obviously not taken is to simply speed everything up. I mean everything. Put the game in fast-forward. But that would be unplayable, and certainly unenjoyable. Players would have no time to react to events, and it would just look stupid!

Another option, and this is the one that Adrian discusses at more length, is to make the world small but feel big. There are many ways to do this, and he goes through several in his blog post, so I will only summarize. The rendering technique makes the world visually look larger than it actually is, using different methods of fogging and reduction of detail to create a slightly distorted perception of distance.

The problem for me, though, is that even if the world looks fairly large, and feels fairly large, it still isn’t. This is where time-bending comes into play, and gets more complicated the more one thinks of it. What seems to occur is that there are at least two time scales in Skyrim: one for the player-character and one for the rest of the world. Certain quests in games such as Skyrim don’t make sense because of the strange time scales used. For example, NPCs will ask the player-character to take notes from one hold to another, and speak of the difficulty in making such a journey. The alchemist in Solitude speaks of Whiterun as if it’s a place so far away as to be inaccessible to her, so she’d need an adventurer to take a letter there. Yet, I can make the journey, on foot, in a few game-time hours. But even better, there’s a horse-drawn carriage just outside the city gates. Why doesn’t she just take that?

As a fast-travel system the carriage is diegetic, that is, it fits in the world sensibly and doesn’t look out of place. But no one but the player-character and the drivers of the carriages seem to know that it even exists. This weirdness goes farther than just the carriage though. It’s almost as if the player-character operates on this time scale where so much can be accomplished in one day, but the NPCs do not. So, for example, we have a College of Wizardry apparently conducting an archaeological investigation of a site not 10 minutes’ walk from their front door, which has presumably been there for hundreds of years, and yet is only just now being looked at. What have they been doing all this time?

There is also the obvious problem of the theoretically time-sensitive series of events driven by multiple-part quests. The sort where an NPC asks you to meet up with her so you can, say, assault a fort. Later can mean either immediately, going there right now, or after several days of game-time.

There’s the craftsmen NPCs who spend all their time, day after day, working on blacksmithing for instance. The player-character, on the other hand, can turn up and crank out dozens of daggers, armour and whatnot in an hour or two. Either Adrianne is hoarding a warehouse full of gear somewhere, or she’s just really, really slow.

Time isn’t just measured in minutes and hours. In fact, minutes and hours don’t exist—they’re totally made up by people, as the alternate speed at which minutes pass in Skyrim demonstrates nicely. A slightly more reliable way of measuring time is by how long it takes a regular person to do a thing like make a dagger, or walk to town. This is why space is important. Space and speed are pretty reliable measurements, and they are very familiar to us. We know roughly how far we can walk in a day because we know how fast we can walk.We know we couldn’t walk across the state in one day because of its size and our speed. The problem for Skyrim is that Bethesda need the big long things to take some big long time, but not so much that it becomes tedious in real-time, and yet not speed everything up so much that the little things whip by in an instant. So they stretch and contract time constantly, in order to cram all those events into a reasonable number of real-time minutes. The final problem with this is that in reality, the significance of events is often measured in, or at least influenced by, the time it takes to do it. Writing a novel takes time, months, even years. Graduating from school not only requires passing tests, but taking the time to go through each course, because after all, we can’t fit all the exams in as short a period as we might like to. Building a sandcastle takes time and therefore patience. Some things in reality can’t be rushed, so merely completing the task is meaningful in and of itself.

Sometimes, then, the achievement of arriving at that far-away city in the deep frozen North should take a lot of real-world time - or it risks feeling meaningless to the player regardless of how important a place it is in the game.