A Lydia tree (click to see details)

This is Lydia. Lydia is a character in the digital fantasy role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Fictionally, Lydia is a Housecarl, someone sworn to serve and protect the Thane, an honorary title granted by the reigning lord to a person of importance in a city or Hold. She is one of many followers that players can “obtain” in the realm of Skyrim. Followers will literally follow player characters around, fighting hostile enemies, carrying equipment and items, getting stuck behind various obstacles, falling off cliffs, and running into the player’s line of fire whenever she tries to attack.

Yes, there are Lydia memes

Lydia in particular is known for such unenthusiastic remarks as “I am sworn to carry your burdens” (a reply to the player’s request to trade items) and “I have never seen anything quite like that.” As one of Skyrim’s most famous and beloved/hated characters, she has been the subject of many a tale of adventure, heartache, and loss, as well as numerous live-action videos, and even a song or two.

For all the countless hours players have spent with Lydia by their side, most are unlikely to see her in quite the way I have laid out here. This is a pieced-together view of Lydia from inside the Creation Kit, the software Bethesda used to build Skyrim. The Creation Kit was made available to all players with a copy of Skyrim (and Windows) in early 2012, and can be used to create Skyrim mods (modifications that add to or alter the game).

The image is composed of cropped screenshots, which were taken in the Creation Kit and pasted into GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). The lines show the relationship between the windows (which represent objects) and the various categories and references that are used to sort content in the Creation Kit. While the Kit’s object window displays data in the form of a tree (see below), many of the windows also contain data entry fields that refer to other objects, creating a network of interdependencies. I’ve drawn out some of these connections in part because I think they help to demonstrate the extent to which tree diagrams hide or abstract out the messy connections that are almost inevitable in a game as complex and convoluted as Skyrim is.

In effect this represents only a small portion of all the information that is required to create a character like Lydia. On top of that is all the data that players have added to the Lydia-assemblage in the two years since the game’s release (and possibly even before that), some of which I’ve linked to above. If we consider that Skyrim has hundreds of NPCs, not to mention all the other components of the game, we can begin to get a sense of just how much labour was required to construct something of this scale—and it’s far from over. The game is being replayed and remade, narrativized and modified, each and every day; it is a living, breathing, growing and decaying thing. While this makes it all but impossible to represent each aspect of it at the level of detail I’ve included here, these micro-views may still help us to identify or explain patterns that would be difficult to decipher otherwise. If the code is the DNA, think of this as a diagram of the cellular structure of one part of one cell in a massive redwood tree. It’s scary, but also beautiful, in an awe-inspiring sort of way.