While CGSA brought us a number of great insights, we quickly redirected our energies toward working together on another conference presentation, this time for the Game History annual symposium here in Montreal. This paper, “A History of Happy Accidents, or Who Wrote The Elder Scrolls?”, stepped back and took a broad view of the history of Bethesda and their flagship franchise. Tracing the company’s life from its beginning making sports games through to its current state of only working on a couple of massive properties in-house, we tried to match up Bethesda’s own mythology with the unofficial and alternative histories we could trace through the developer’s modding communities, questioning the linear, romantic, and evolutionary slant of the official story without trying to decry it.

In order to write this paper, the three of us built a workflow using Trello boards and emails while all composing and editing collaboratively on a shared Google doc. Instead of writing a conference presentation, we strode to put together a full-length journal article draft and then cut it down to fit 20 minutes. Writing was the easy part: before long we had more than 6000 words and a comprehensive history of TES and how modding has shaped it. The hard part was editing: collating and transitioning sections, erasing overlap, building a clear theoretical throughline–this aspect we’re still working on. Difficult too was the process of cutting the paper down for a conference, determining what was relevant and what kind of argument we might want to make (after all, the argument made in a conference paper is always different from the argument made in that paper’s full-length analog–or at least a microcosm of it). For some processes, we all just needed to be in the room, each of us looking at the shared document on our own screens and watching our collaborators’ cursors jump around as we tightened and cut. In the end, we pulled it together and then spent another four hours navigating our differing tastes in Powerpoint presentations. Carolyn presented at the symposium and Rob joined her onstage for the Q&A (I was unfortunately unable to attend due to a prior commitment to sit in on a two-day workshop on IP).

Now the conferences are both over and done with, our little micro-team’s goal is to whip the history paper into shape over the next month and start submitting it in the fall. A meeting set for next week will tell just what other knowledge our node has produced from the Skyrim mods project.

And what of the node itself? A year into IMMERSe and my own job is still somewhat hazily defined, but I’ve been observing the way things appear to be done nonetheless, and I’ve got multiple ideas for improving our internal structure and strengthening our ties to the rest of the network. The three places where we need the most improvement is communication, organizational clarity and diligence, and I’m ready to put together a more detailed report on these issues as soon as I’m given the word (as a graduate student, I’m always trying to walk that fine line between initiative and presumptuousness. Specific critiques, unless explicitly called for, strike me as potentially being perceived as extremely presumptuous). While there’s much room for improvement, our node and the network itself are still quite new, and some growing pains are to be expected. However, our work came together regardless and one thing that can’t be argued is the quality of the research produced–our reception at both CGSA and Game History attests to that.