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Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article studies the form of the electronic book as part of a complex digital ecosystem, and it finds that the remediated book's environment fundamentally alters its form and meaning. The article examines the remediated book's place in one digital ecosystem in particular: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011). Skyrim's books, at first glance, are simply a part of the game's environment, but on closer inspection, the game's recreated books reveal much about how electronic texts operate in a larger digital system. The game-created book is different from both of its real-world cousins, the physical codex and the e-book, and this article studies how environmental and systemic conditions alter the game-created book's form and function.

Based on pressures from game mechanics and technical limitations, the game-created book takes on four unique functions: it decorates the game-world, it provides use value to players, it underscores a tone of nostalgic fantasy, and above all, it serves as a fetish. The article draws on Christy Desmet's argument that web pages are fetishes, hybrid objects combining the sacred and the profane in one compact space, and this article finds that Skyrim's books follow the same general rule. They are at once decorative and utilitarian, valuable and worthless, modern yet ancient. Skyrim's books are joints that bind opposites. The article reads the game-created book as a parallel artifact to the real-world e-book. Both are products of larger digital ecosystems, and both are sites of interaction between form, information, and environmental pressures. Ultimately, this article puts forward the Skyrim case study as a sample analysis and an encouragement to other scholars to pursue environmental and systemic analyses of electronic books.

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