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# Skyrim punishes you by wasting your time.
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/skyrim-punished-you-wasting-your-time/
- Published: 2012-08-16T14:30:09.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T14:57:49.000Z
- Description: Academic journals are often awful about accessibility. If you don’t have access to a university library, it’s almost impossible to know what’s going on in the academic community. Fortunately, “open-source” or free, online academic journals are gaining in popularity. Mediascape, UCLA’s journal of cin
- Author: Rachel Helps
- Tags: News, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/-3_80RsiCtok/T0jV7p6_T4I/AAAAAAAAAMc/UqEjXx99lKQ/s640/skyrim-giant1.jpg)

Academic journals are often awful about accessibility. If you don’t have access to a university library, it’s almost impossible to know what’s going on in the academic community. Fortunately, “open-source” or free, online academic journals are gaining in popularity. *Mediascape*, UCLA’s journal of cinema and media studies, recently published a piece on punishment in *Skyrim* by Cliff Galiher that anyone with English literacy and Internet can read.

A “punishing” platformer is one where you have to start all over if you get hit once, or sit through a boring cooldown. As [Jesper Juul](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/i-dying-lot/?ref=killscreen.com) has noted, punishment often involves replaying material we’ve already seen, or waiting to heal/recharge. With the option to save anywhere, the punishment in *Skyrim* becomes re-doing battles over and over.

> The additional effort (and tedium) of obligatory replay is the universal currency of failure in *Skyrim*. In the end, every failure is reversible, and the only thing permanently lost is time.  
>  

Since the game is non-linear, players who take on harder challenges are essentially punishing themselves, which may make such punishment more tolerable (enjoyable?). Punishment in *Skyrim* takes on a masochistic tone; if it’s so hard to defeat the lich lord, maybe you should just come back later when you’re stronger.

Galiher ends on an experimental note:

> What if a game were to penalize a player by transporting him or her further along in the narrative, depriving the protagonist of engagement with a sizable chunk of the narrative?