On the internet, games live forever.

The video game community is unique from other cultural sectors because more than that of film, TV, or music, the video game community operates under an unofficial consensus. When a AAA game[1] is good, most gamers will buy it. When a game is bad, most gamers will ignore it, and even fewer will come to its defense. The result is a community that operates on the closest thing pop culture has to a hive mind. Maybe one gamer prefers sports games and another prefers shooters, but they’ll agree on which games within those genres are worth playing[2].

There are a number of contributing factors to this consensus—the demographics of gaming are still somewhat homogenous (though improving, particularly in the realm of gender diversity), video game criticism is still finding its place in the media side of the industry[3], and what constitutes “real gaming” still excludes mobile games, which is how most people play games now regardless—but what’s more important here is how the gaming community’s hive mind affects the way gamers interact with developers, the people who make games.

If you’ve read the chapter on Grand Theft Auto V, you’ll remember how Electronic Arts’ disastrous release of Star Wars: Battlefront II in 2017 defiled the company forever in the eyes of gamers. That generalization might seem extreme, but that’s how the hive mind works. The gaming community’s backlash against EA was so all-encompassing there’s no need to make room for holdouts. Gamers hate EA now. That’s pretty much the story.

Similar uprisings have happened against other companies—Mass Effect: Andromeda was a huge blow to developer BioWare (that game was published by EA, too), and Sega still hasn’t revived the Sonic franchise after the blowback it received for the execrable 2006 reboot Sonic the Hedgehog—so developers are in a place now where they have to take the desires of gamers very, very seriously. Maybe it seems like a no brainer—just give the people what they want!—but developers can’t play it safe for risk of releasing carbon copies of games they’ve already made. They have to keep trying to innovate within their existing franchises, establish new IP, push the boundaries of tech, and pursue personal creative fulfillment, so there’s a balancing act. The big challenge of a gaming company today is making something that shakes up the formula but still pleases the masses.

That was why Skyrim’s developers let players turn the game into anything they wanted.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls fantasy series from developer Bethesda Game Studios and publisher Bethesda Softworks. It’s a sword-and-shield open-world adventure game that took a leap from “awesome” upon its 2011 release to “one of the most-played and most-acclaimed games ever” by the end of the decade. Skyrim is a better game now than it was when it came out. It’s a near-unprecedented concept in media or entertainment, let alone video games.

The link between video games and technology means gaming is the only cultural medium that objectively improves with time. Consider Super Mario Bros. The Nintendo classic is still fun and challenging and it pulls impressive mileage from a simple run-forward-and-jump concept, but 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy makes it look prehistoric. Galaxy has zero-gravity physics, 3-D planets, seamless motion controls that let you run and spin and jump and grab things by literally moving your hands, and a series of challenges so creative and joyous and inspiring you’re hard-pressed not to open-mouth grin at the audacity of them. Bros. is a technical marvel for 1985. Galaxy is creative brilliance.

This isn’t a knock against Super Mario Bros.; it’s a case study in how technology limits the creative expression of video games. It’s reasonable to say Nintendo had the intellectual and artistic capabilities of making a game like Super Mario Galaxy in 1985, but they couldn’t do so because the tech at their disposable would have fucking exploded at the very mention of zero-gravity physics. When video games make technical advances, it allows developers to make better games. That’s how Mario goes from stomping goombas in one game to riding Yoshi through a sea of stars in another.

This relationship to technology means video games don’t age well and date themselves quickly, but Skyrim has aged better than any game in history. That’s because the game was built with the long-term in mind, not in a Grand Theft Auto V-style, “milk this thing for as much cash as possible[4]” sense, but in a creative sense. Skyrim was meant to continue growing and continue serving players even after Bethesda was done with it.

Skyrim didn’t start small, either. The base game players could access out of the box was enormous. Players assumed the role of an archetypal fantasy warrior and explored the land of Skyrim, a place full of elves and dragons and magic and runes and skeleton monsters and, for some reason, a shit-ton of books to read[5]. The game’s overworld—its surface-level map[6]--stretched across 16 square miles, and beneath that overworld were over 150 unique dungeons to explore. On top of these were 244 individual quests and over 300 marked “points of interest” on the map, which in and of themselves didn’t include the innumerable unmarked points of interest. If the player looked at all of this and somehow found none of it interesting, they could a) read books[7], b) level up their character to learn new skills like blacksmithing or sorcery, or c) study the game’s literal text: Skyrim has its own made-up language[8], alphabet, and series of competing religions. It’s huge.

Todd Howard was Skyrim’s director[9], and while his fingerprints are all over the game’s story and atmosphere—the dude’s a gigantic nerd—they’re also all over its design. Howard’s one of the most respected designers in games. Before Skyrim, he worked on past Elder Scrolls titles Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion before making his directorial debut with Fallout 3, another beloved Bethesda franchise. Gamers love this guy.

Howard has three rules of game design, and they show up in a major way in Skyrim. Here’s how they break down:

1)     “Great games are played, not made.” Howard’s primary litmus test when developing a game, he says, is how the design feels when interacted with through the controller. There are lots of great game concepts in theory and on paper, but the only thing that matters, according to Howard, is how it plays.

2)     “Keep it simple.” Role-playing games like Skyrim are heady and complex. There are tons of skills to keep track of, meters (health, stamina, magic) to balance, gear to sort, and an armful of intricate crafting systems and customization features. Mastering Skyrim means mastering all these individual systems, and while in total it makes for something complex, each system on its own is straightforward and intuitive. Howard describes this notion like this: “Simple systems acting together create complexity that players can appreciate.”

3)     “Define the experience.” This is similar to the first rule, in that a game’s success should be marked by the feeling it conjures in the player, not the fluidity of a certain mechanic or the invention of a new mode of gameplay. The thesis statement of the video game should center on how the player connects to the experience of playing it.

Each of Howard’s rules are player centric. He wants his games to play well, he wants his games to feel accessible, and his goal is to conjure specific emotions rather than pull off a technical achievement (those achievements are means to the emotions).

Skyrim embodied these rules, and that’s why it was such a hit at launch. The game received universal acclaim from critics when it released, with the consensus being it perfected the Elder Scroll series’ established systems[10] and immersed the player in the game’s world. The game was easy to play but still rewarding to master, and the whole, massive experience created a feeling of total possibility. Here was a game where you could become anything you wanted to be.

And for a few months following Skyrim’s release, that freedom was the center of how people talked about the game. By 2011, social media was a common hub for gamers to share their experiences, and among Skyrim fans this meant telling stories about secret dungeons, twisty side quests, and permutation after permutation of the game’s highly touted, much-anticipated dragon fights.

It demonstrated one of the magical, unique dynamics of the video game community: Everyone watching a movie or a TV show has more or less the same experience, but in a game you can recount a particular battle, interaction, or journey like it happened just to you (and sometimes, thanks to open-world gaming’s possibilities, it did!): The frost troll had me down to my last bit of health, but then, dude, a dragon showed up! I saw its shadow on the ground and I looked up and it was flying overhead and it landed and started fighting the troll on its own. Completely incinerated it. I was dodging fire and frost blasts and I barely made it out alive. And the worst part is, I have to go back up that mountain because I still couldn’t open the treasure chest!

Skyrim is full of moments like this. It’s fantastic. It makes you feel like you’re living in it. That’s what Todd Howard is talking about with his third rule: Lots of games are just games, but Skyrim is an experience.

Bethesda’s player-first approach to game design saw huge rewards for the company in terms of both sales figures and community reception when Skyrim was released, but they didn’t rest after putting out the base game. In tandem with Skyrim, Bethesda gave gamers something called the Creation Kit. It was a downloadable package of the game’s files, the code your computer or console[11] read to make the game work. The intention was players could access this code and change it to make modifications—mods—to Skyrim itself.

Mods have been part of the video game world for decades. The concept of cracking into an altering a game’s code to make changes to the game itself has been around since the 1970s, but the 80s and 90s saw modding turn from a niche activity into a full-blown subculture. Back then, modders were seen more like hackers or pirates, and in those days, the criminal labels made sense, given the propensity for modded games to be illegally distributed and downloaded.

Things changed with the release of id Software’s Doom in 1993. The game itself was a huge influence on the industry, but among modders, it holds a special place as the first game to publicly release its WAD file specifically so programmers could take a look at it. A game’s WAD file contains all the code that makes it look and play the way it does, from graphical textures to character designs. For programmers, it was Christmas.

id Software had one request for modders upon the release of Doom’s files: If you were going to create new or alternative Doom content from the WAD file, do it only for registered versions of Doom. Gamers were encouraged to stay away from bootlegs and illegal downloads so id Software could distribute the best mods themselves. And here’s the wild part: The modders said okay.

A precedent was established: If developers made their games’ code available for modification, modders worked within legal systems to mess with the game’s code and the developers in turn promoted the mods they found worthwhile. The hive mind of gaming has huge upside here: When developers prove they’re considerate of the community, the community rewards that consideration, and mods are a huge way the community can make those rewards tangible.

Jump forward again to 2011. The release of the Creation Kit saw huge rewards for Skyrim. Not only did the modding community fix various technical issues with the game—Skyrim was plagued with glitches and bugs upon launch (normal for games of its size)—but the modders created tons of new gameplay tweaks and expansions that became available for download by any other Skyrim player. Some of the mods were fun and silly, like a mod that turned all of the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage (complete with catchphrases), but others were almost essential, like one that revived most of the content Bethesda had cut from the game[12], or one that merged the Skyrim map with all the past Elder Scrolls games, giving players three to four times as much land to explore.

Today, Skyrim is the most modded game in history. You can add guns to the game. You can download a Skyrim postal service or a fishing minigame someone built from scratch. You can download the ability to pray and practice the game’s made-up religions more fanatically, or you can download a new arena combat gameplay mode (a call back to the original Elder Scrolls game, Arena). One mod, called a “total conversion” mod because it uses the Skyrim code as the basis for an entirely new and separate game, resulted in Enderal: Shards of Order, a fantasy game based on Skyrim anyone can play for free, right now, just because a few computer geeks felt like making it. As of May 2019, Skyrim has over 60,000 mods.

This prevalence wouldn’t be possible without the internet, which makes modding in Skyrim an almost mandatory part of playing the game, if only to streamline some of the game’s clunkier mechanics. Bethesda encourages even non-modders to go into the Creation Kit, “shop” through the mods people have uploaded, and download them onto their version of the game; it essentially extends Skyrim’s lifespan. As a bonus for gamers, this expansion doesn’t feel nefarious: It’s making a great game better, and it’s coming at no extra cost.

Because Skyrim was built from the ground up with player consideration in mind, it’s inspired an embrace by the gaming community that’s unexpectedly harmonious and passionate. Todd Howard has made some mistakes since Skyrim[13], but he has a lifetime pass among gamers because his approach to design is so obviously in service of the players.

That means the culture of Skyrim is bound to the internet in a positive way, a beneficial relationship that’s rare for both the internet and video games. Great mods, whether necessary or impressive or just plain funny, are circulated to the game’s entire community of players and unpacked and reviewed online. Goofy gameplay ticks, like off-kilter lines of dialogue or funky animations, are turned into well-worn memes (Skyrim’s most famous is “arrow to the knee”). Highlights of the game are made into gifs and videos, and as aforementioned, there are all kinds of niche podcasts and YouTube series about the minutiae of Skyrim, from its literature to its history to its languages. The internet took Skyrim from a niche-genre geek fest (because again, it is really geeky) and made it one of the most tinkered-with, respected, and well-thought-of properties in gaming history.

Bethesda has responded to the warmth in kind, too. In a way that’s both charming and a little bit concerning, they just won’t let Skyrim die. Since the game’s release in 2011, it’s seen an unholy amount of ports and rereleases. The “Legendary Edition,” which included all of Bethesda’s in-house downloadable content[14], came out in June 2013. The “Special Edition,” a remastered version of the game for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, came out in October 2016 (these games also put the Creation Kit and modding on consoles), a Skyrim port for the Nintendo Switch released in November 2017, a PlayStation VR version released in November 2017, and in April 2018, a standalone virtual-reality Skyrim port was released. It’s almost not okay[15].

But even if Bethesda’s commitment to Skyrim sometimes feels excessive, their level of support for the game persists among fans as wholesome, endearing, and ideal for how developers should interact with not just their most beloved properties, but players in general.

The internet has given fans a delusional level of ownership over the things they care about. More often than not this decade, that’s been poisonous for both fan communities and the things they love, but when it comes to Skyrim, the game’s connection to the internet has been nothing but rewarding for players and developers alike. Bethesda set out to make a game that had room for an online community inside it from the very beginning, a game that could live forever because not only was it built to encourage player support, it was good enough on its own to incentivize that support. At the end of the day, the internet turned Skyrim into its own subculture because Skyrim deserved it. The game was everything people wanted, and just in case it wasn’t, it had room to accommodate what people wanted, so long as someone was willing to build it.

Skyrim’s mods and memes have expanded its offerings beyond what gamers pulled off the shelf in 2011, and the best parts of the internet have married the best parts of the game’s design to make something that embodies not just the strengths of gaming’s collective conscious, but the strengths of the internet as a connection tool, community builder, and innovation machine. This is what happens when good-intentioned creatives serve a passionate community: a game becomes not just a touchstone of its generation, but the inspiration for gaming’s future.

[1] These are games produced and distributed by mid-major to major developers and publishers. Blockbusters are to movies as AAA games are to gaming.

[2] Gaming is also unique in that the concept of a “cult classic” doesn’t really exist in the same way a cult movie or TV show does. A game earns cult status by way of being under-covered or under-distributed before a small corner of the gaming community stumbles upon it and tells everyone about it, not when some gamers enjoy something the majority cast aside. This means most “cult” video games become hits later, like Portal or Spec Ops: The Line or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Another way of saying this is that very, very few games are “underrated.” Some are just under-played.

[3] With the success of gaming media outlets like Polygon, IGN, Game Informer, and Rooster Teeth, it’s sort of baffling why gaming hasn’t found its Roger Ebert, Alan Sepinwall, or Emily Nussbaum, the person all gamers rush to for reviews, reactions, or takes. Some might say this is because gamers don’t consume gaming journalism (not true) or don’t want criticism from gaming journalists (also not true), but it’s more likely because a commentator hasn’t come along to critique video games in a way that captures everyone’s collective consciousness. Writing about video games is still stigmatized as lower-class entertainment journalism, a place for yucksters and internet bros rather than quote-unquote critics. This isn’t true, of course, but it is true that the best writers still think they should go into TV, movies, or music rather than games. It’s a shame. The gaming discourse could use more sophistication.

[4] Again, read the Grand Theft Auto chapter. Why didn’t you read these in order? We put these in order for a reason. Do you even care? Are you skimming this?

[5] The player can pick up and interact with just about any object in the game, including books, many of which you can literally read cover-to-cover. On the one hand, it’s an impressive amount of world-building and lore establishment. On the other hand, playing a video game to read books is pretty GD stupid.

[6] This describes the game’s basic world, and excludes places you can access via the overworld, like houses, castles, dungeons, etc. You usually know you’re leaving the overworld when you enter a doorway and you hit a loading screen.

[7] I know, I know, but seriously. There are whole podcasts and web series in which people participate in legitimate Skyrim book clubs.

[8] The language and alphabet were mostly the work of Skyrim designer Emil Pagliarulo. Skyrim’s main theme, “Dragonborn,” is sung by a 30-person choir in this made-up language, and as corny as this all sounds, the song is actually pretty dang good.

[9] Just like in the movie business, a video game’s director runs production.

[10] Quick note about the RPG elements in Skyrim: What made them so accessible was the Elder Scrolls’ unique approach to experience points, a common role-playing game mechanic. Many RPGs award the player with experience points for completing quests and reaching certain checkpoints, but Skyrim gave you experience in certain areas just for doing that given action. If you shot a bow, you received a little archery experience. If you made a potion, you received a little alchemy experience. It’s so simple: In Skyrim, practice literally makes perfect.

[11] Xbox and PlayStation users didn’t have Creation Kit until 2016, five years after it became available for PC gamers. For the sake of this essay, know that mods are now possible across most Skyrim platforms, but in the game’s early days, it was only a feature on PC.

[12] Often games will have “deleted scenes” of sorts cut from the surface-level experience but still buried in the game’s code. It’s now a common mod practice to dig up this deleted content and make it active in the game again, often with some extra work being done on top of that reinsertion to make the deleted scenes seamless with the game’s standard iteration. When modders did this for Skyrim, it added dozens of hours of bonus missions and additional quest content.

[13] We won’t go too far into it, but 2018’s Fallout 76 was a huge miscalculation by Howard and Bethesda. Fallout 76 was an online-only Fallout game that put a bunch of players in the same world and tried to encourage them to build a post-apocalyptic society among themselves (basically GTA Online in the Fallout universe). Naturally, given the behaviors of the average online gamer, it didn’t work.

[14] Yep, in addition to all the mod support, Bethesda put out a handful of expansions for Skyrim on their own. These were full-on additional quests, too, not just extra armor sets or game modes.

[15] The availability and pervasiveness of Skyrim became such a running joke among the video game community that at E3 2018, Bethesda released a fake announcement for Skyrim: Very Special Edition, a version of the game for Amazon Alexa, Etch-a-Sketch, Motorola pagers, and Samsung smart refrigerators. Keegan Michael-Key starred in the ad, and lemme tell ya, the bit killed with geeks.