My character in Skyrim was a werewolf. The way this works is you can choose to turn into a werewolf at any time. This gives you super combat powers for a short period, like 5 minutes. To me, this felt disingenuous to how werewolves work in fiction. It’s not a bonus, it should be a horrible disability.

One Christmas when I was back home amongst brothers, I told them that at any time they saw me playing Skyrim, they could come in and tell me they wanted to go werewolf mode. I had to leave the room so I wouldn’t remember what happened. They could call me back once werewolf mode ran out.

This happened several times over the holiday. When you’re a werewolf, most NPCs in Skyrim attack you on sight, so sometimes my brothers would need to try multiple times as they died and needed to start over before calling me back. Sometimes it was over an hour.

When my brothers called me back, the game would be on the pause screen. My experience was to unpause in a random-ish location, always naked. Sometimes I’d recognize the location. Half the time, there’d be a few dead bodies near me. And then I’d just play the game as normal, except for these interruptions where my brothers forced me into werewolf mode. I had no idea what happened during werewolf mode. It was just an interruption to the normal game flow.

Sometimes I’d come across a little settlement that was purely dead bodies. This is normal in a game, it’s good environment storytelling. Sometimes I’d come across a settlement like this that I swear had had living people at it before in the game. Maybe there was some lore worldbuilding event that happened. This is a bit TOO subtle for modern game design, but I didn’t feel suspicious.

And then I came across settlements where NPCs attacked me on sight. There’s a few places like this in Skyrim, but they’re very rare. It was becoming more and more common as I played. One time I entered one of these and one of my brothers happened to be in the room, and chuckled. He explained one of the previous Werewolf Mode phases they’d gone to this settlement. In Skyrim, turns out that at least one of these is true:
– if someone sees you as a werewolf, that memory attaches to you as non-werewolf, and they consider you hostile
– if someone sees you commit a crime, it attaches to you whether you’re in werewolf mode or not.

So, over the course of my game, the entire world was slowly being killed, or turning against me, without my memory or involvement. Now, imagine that I didn’t know about this whole werewolf mode mechanic I set up. Imagine I was just the character, who sometimes woke up extra tired and naked and with blood under my fingernails. This isn’t core to my lived experience, so I’d just assume I was an alcoholic who gets into bar fights.