As the first year of IMMERSe begins to wind down and Year 2 lies on the horizon, it seems like a good time to reflect a bit on what our node has been up to–at least, the aspects I can speak to directly.

As I’ve written about on this site before, the Skyrim mods project began with us sitting down to discuss a low-level research question, going off and spending a few months reading, experimenting, and otherwise researching (some of us collaboratively, others, I assume, on their own), and then coming together again in the winter. We began in September, and by December some of us were beginning to find points in modding culture that interested us specifically, so we all met again formally and mapped out a few projects and potential papers that we could work on. Stephen Yeager, for example, decided he wanted to put something together on lore-friendly mods and scribal culture and generally gave himself his own marching orders. Rob and Carolyn and I each had little passion projects we wanted to work on as well, and collectively we felt the need to direct the flow of at least one of them into a proper journal article.

To stimulate the writing process, we built a panel for CGSA titled “Playing, Bugging, Breaking: Modding & Skyrim.” Chaired by Skot Deeming, the panel followed each of our interests on the common grounds of mods and The Elder Scrolls. Carolyn’s paper, titled “Playing Bodies, Modding Bodies, Breaking Bodies,” focused on body mods and the interesting questions of gender and identity that arise from them. Rob paper, “What We Talk About When We Talk about Bugs: On Modding and The Poetry of Patch Notes,” took a look at linguistic mediation in the massive amount of writing produced around mods and patch notes. And my own piece, “‘Disruptive’ Mod Glitches and Player Immersion: Mod Installation as Game Design in Bethesda’s Skyrim” examined the use of mods to glitch gameplay as creative and productive practice. The panel was, I think, quite well received. We each had the opportunity to field a number of questions and I think what struck our audience more than anything else was the amount of work we’d done with mods: the three of us spent a great deal of time sitting together and running mods over the last year, and consequently we ended up with an extremely well synthesized panel with papers that complimented each other. The sense I got from the Q&A was that our audience was fascinated with the approach we’d taken. Most literature on mods focuses on questions of playbour, exploitation, and intellectual property. These were not question we chose to take up, instead orbiting our work around the concept of how mods are and can be produced and used. That struck home with the scholars attending our panel, and I think we showed mod literature and scholarship can look like a lot more than it does right now.