The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: Dennis Jansen

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Published on November 11, 2018 4:20:21 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEvlrOLN4A

Game:

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)

Duration: 16:20

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Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.

Dennis Jansen (MA student of New Media and Digital Culture, Utrecht University)

Interpreting the Fictional Past: How Fans of the Elder Scrolls Games Deal with “The Battle of Red Mountain”

Though an interesting and relevant question by itself, we should not only ask how games deal with the past, but also investigate how their audience deals with it. How does the fandom of games deal with the history that is presented to them in those games? I explore this question for one particularly prominent fictional historical event: the Battle of Red Mountain, introduced in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind . By studying fan-written texts and forum discussions relating to this event, housed in fan-made archive The Imperial Library (https://www.imperial-library.info/), I aim to uncover how the fictional past is archived by fans, and how fans use pseudo-academic research and fanfiction writing to interpret that past. For this effort, I will use the Derridean conceptualisation of the archive, while taking Steedman’s critique of Derrida’s account into consideration as well. To understand the fan-scholarly practice of interpreting the history of the Battle of Red Mountain, I adopt Hills’ theory of “archontic fandom” (Derrida’s ‘archontic principle’) and other theories of fan-scholarship and fanfiction writing. I find that certain interpretations of the fictional past hold more prestige within the archive than others, and argue that these endeavours constitute a “performance of fan expertise” which is expressed in the form of fan-scholarly historiography as a way of obtaining and asserting knowledge-based authority within the fandom.

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