There is only one entrance to the city of Solitude. Its gates are set in a colossal stone wall that lies across the summit of a steep stone path amid a forest of fir trees. Arriving this way suggests nothing of the grandeur beyond. If you approach via the Karst river to the south or its swampy delta to the east, a mandible of buildings is visible, stretching high across an arching stone bridge. To the right, flashes of sunlight reflect off the windows of the Blue Palace. A cluster of sloped roofs, a windmill and turreted towers lie along its breadth. Far left and higher still, mountains covered in snow and pine trees spire into the clouds.
The city of Solitude hugs the far north-west coast of the fictional region of Haafingar, a land in the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Like the rest of Skyrim, it is a place created to wander and explore at the pace of your choosing. Inhabitants initiate conversation, sometimes leading you to quests, other times just enriching your experience. Despite being nearly a decade old, the game still hosts millions of players a year, and remains one of the most beautiful and intricately detailed destinations accessible from the couch.
One hackneyed answer to the question of why we travel is the wish to broaden the mind. If this is true, then each traveller leaves home looking to satisfy some kind of curiosity about the world and how they might be changed by being in another part of it. Outweighing the expense, the stress and the tedium of the literal act of travelling is the visceral thrill of the new. It’s a feeling that can be more easily found when the traveller is led by chance, responds to new knowledge or trusts their intuition.
Exploring Solitude, the player as a visitor can experience a version of that newness, even on repeat visits. Residents move through their day, responding to actions made by the visitor and other characters, making each return subtly different. Even after this has faded to familiarity, new characters can be met, secret passageways and underground labyrinthine realms discovered, and new quests taken on. The design of the game ensures that the world can never be exhaustively explored.
Since the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011, other games have taken on the challenge of creating an open-ended world with similarly captivating results.
For the housebound hodophile, there are few more vivid experiences than visiting the old west of Red Dead Redemption 2. There the player’s character of Arthur Morgan can ride his horse over vast and ever-changing prairies for hours, ignoring the signposts to nearby towns and their attendant gunfights, bounties and outlaws to chase. Instead Arthur can forage for food, build a campfire and marvel at vivid sunsets, the air empty except for the occasional cries of birds and the nickering and snorting of his steed.
The meditative qualities of both Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2 have been written about at length, but in 2020 this sense of boundlessness takes on new and nourishing depths. From the couch, the visitor to these worlds is an active part of their environment, in which many reasons for travel – experiencing the new and unexpected, the possibility for self-knowledge – can be satisfied, while border closures and lockdowns prevent it in real life. Even something as ordinary as the changes in light and passing of time anchors the traveller who may well be experiencing a strange sense of temporal contraction and expansion in day-to-day life.
Virtual worlds are typically dominated by the sense of purpose with which they were built. In other hugely popular games such as the meticulously constructed The Last of Us, The Witcher, or the Call of Duty series, your character is almost constantly under threat, and your time is spent fighting, killing, scheming, gathering power and exerting influence. In Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, while these aspects are imaginatively rendered, both games fill the screen with beautiful imagery and are transportive in a way few others were ever designed to be. Exploring the city of Solitude is a compact example of a technological and artistic achievement that hasn’t been reduced by nine years of exponential growth in gaming technology.
Leaving Solitude for the wilderness outside its walls once again reminds the traveller of one of the most appealing aspects of travel: the feeling of smallness in a vast world. It’s a feeling that the game amplifies again, once it is switched off.
