College research - Books in TES [!]

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Joker341 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

Greetings!
A couple of my colleagues and I are conducting a research on the lore/books of The Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind-Skyrim) and as a task we need to explore how people read the books within the game and their experience with implementing that into the gameplay. So, if anyone could help us regarding this, either by telling us about your experience or giving some hints regarding other active TES communities/forums, that would be greatly appreciated! For example, you could tell us how often you read the books you come across, or how much attention you pay (or do you just skip over sentences etc.), are they well-written or if they could pass as legitimate works of literature etc. etc. Everything is appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[tim]

Not sure if you have seen this video but will be worth a watch with your topic at hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVdTZhmsGsU

[Leeux]

I remember the first time I played Oblivion when I was totally new to the Elder Scrolls series... finding books and reading them was an amazing experience at first, it blew my mind how many books there were, how long and how good some of them were too, so I read several of them in full on that play through... but I had the time to spare to do that at that time, nowadays it's different, sadly.

The thing with the books is, when you first find them and they are new, you don't know if they can have story significance or not, so erring on the safe side is better to read them... once you realize that they are only side things, just to make the world more believable, it doesn't make sense anymore to spend a bunch of time reading them (IMO at least!)

So nowadays, I only read books that seem to be related to the stuff I'm doing for the character I'm playing... or, if I know that a book is related in someway to some trait the character I'm playing has, or, if it needs some info to proceed with his/her story.

EDIT to add: Also, I normally always read Notes, Diaries, Journals or other kinds of clues related to quests I'm doing, makes sense in-character to want to find more info about what you're doing, after all.

The thing with Elder Scrolls lore is, unreliable narrator not-withstanding, some of the books are considered as fiction writings in-world... so there's little you can extract from them lore-wise and have to be careful of how much importance you give to them when using them to decide whether something is true or not, lore-wise.

Still there are really cool stories that are fun to read and help to give the world a more tangible feeling.

EDIT: typo

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Joker341 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

Thanks for the replies :) *bump*

[Patriot03]

I like to walk to a tavern, get me a beer and read one of the books in my inventory. Books in games like this definitely serve the purpose of advancing lore and immersion.

They also give the player something to collect so that one day they can decorate their house with them.