Journal | Samuel Joshua Pe's Writing

Private journal entries selected after the fact. Does not include all journal entries.

November 17, 2025

Skyrim: Tyranny and Therapeutic Beauty

The tyranny of sitting down and playing Skyrim for the first time and the beauty of doing so. There is a kind of tyranny once you finally stop after 41.7 hours in a little over 3 days not because of a lack of productivity but because while it is a state that most closely resembles being younger and being so excited and adventurous, it is exactly due to that that it can be a kind of "retrospective torture," where it only hits you once it's done, even if throughout the time that I was playing, it was incredibly therapeutic, because I was clearly going through so many different emotions and memories that I could not so easily access if I was just writing down constantly, even if the writing is autobiographical.

The beauty is that it was very healthy for me to do it, notably because I haven't played video games much at all in a while and truly immersed myself like I did in those 41.7 hours. It activated the default mode network, and it was very novel which was strong enough to captivate me the whole time, even if I had issues with feeling that life was "repetitive and useless" for over a year now. But there's also the detail that it's been three months since I've reached a closure end point in my autobiography-journal project, ending a phase that went on for 2 years and resulted in 3.5 million words. So that plays a critical role in how I'm feeling, approaching things, and responding to things.

It is very healthy, but the entire time, you're basically freeing your mind to go through everything in your mind and life. This is especially the case because I played Skyrim in Survival Mode and couldn't just fast travel so easily since I had to keep in mind the cold, hunger, and sleep. The friction opened lots of space and time spent where I could just focus on menial tasks and lots of travel time where I could just have all these thoughts passing through my head.

When you're writing, you're not following a quest. You're trying to make sense of a world that never yields to you no matter how much you try to detain it. I saw just now how the face of Roblox consist only of games that are so new that I have no idea what they are. Early 2010s Roblox and all of its games just feel so absent in cultural consciousness that you wonder where the hell you are anymore. That kind of feeling is omnipresent whenever I write. That is what it feels like to write.

So both turning off (letting everything pass through your mind) and turning on (tackling the critical questions and putting them down in a thought-up framework for the moment, even as one builds upon previous considerations, angles, conclusions, and unfinished business). In the end, what can I say but that question that encapsulates what it feels like and how doing those 41.7 hours helped me a lot in tying things together alongside writing?

The fun of video games is that you can meta-game it and find ways to abuse the AI's coding. But that's also its torture. Real life isn't about abusing the AI's coding. It's about a lot of decisions that you make, own, and take responsibility for, especially in one's own writing. You're not making a number go up simply with "using only Rhodok Sharpshooters during sieges since the melee enemies never leave the wall" solutions. One could look at everything that I've written and say that I have that. I have that abusing-the-game. Privilege, specifically, and the ability to express yourself and the talent, drive, and skill to do so in a way that may be impressive, forceful, or compelling. But to make that result, you're not playing a video game. You're digging yourself a hole and then digging farther and farther down. This time, it's real life. You get soaked, and rainwater drains into the hole, so this ain't Minecraft where you can just keep digging. The inner walls collapse and fill the hole. You need structure, stability, and frames. And even with them, it's very tricky and limited, so more often than not, you accept physics and find workarounds not by defying physics, but by learning to accept the limitations psychologically. We live in a world where you have to accept a reality psychologically, when in a video game, you don't necessarily have to do that in the same brutal life-long way.

"I've invested a lot of me inside these lines, I'm just protecting 'em." —NF, from the song Real

This isn't open world Skyrim. You choose one, you lose another. Time is not stopped for this one quest until you actually finally do the next step. No, you prioritize, allocate, choose, and make decisions. You deal psychologically with the lack of a load/save. You deal psychologically with the consequences of your actions. You accept that you can't know everything beforehand like you would with walkthroughs and a wiki to tell you what's the next step in this specific thing, because the world is constantly updating at an unstoppable rate. What happened once will not happen the same way ever again, because everything is changing and bouncing on top of each other.

So even if one might look at what I made and call that "abusing-the-game," really, it's just making a choice with the things that I have. It's a lifestyle. I'm not saying it's hard work or anything. But more than anything, it's something that you do, and when you do something that much like that, you choose it. And I'm not saying everyone has a choice. I'm saying that it's not winning any more than it is just someone going about and along. It is a mundane reality, where things happen and you look at what came before and what came after, and that's all you can really add to all of it.

One of the worst parts about life is that no one's one-dimensional. If one thinks someone is, it usually is a consequence of lacking perspective. So you get to appreciate someone for what they are in this world of permanent choices and permanent deaths, and you get to see who they are throughout all of it, which makes it simultaneously the best. This is not iteration number 2, or draft number 3. This is person number 1 all the way. He's his own person, from start to end, no resets. When he rides a plane and it sucks, he rides all the way, from start to end, and that's all that one can say about that. Can you blame him for staring out his window and seeing that he is a person living in this particular house and looking through his particular window? He is what he is, no matter how much one tries to escape it. He is there.

But again, that's the beauty of it. Writing validates that, at least for me. There is no perfect currency, no perfect price, no perfect decision. There is only a heap of decisions and the people that lie affected therewith.