Playing video games is great and it’s my favorite hobby. I cannot spend enough time playing games.* But it does involve an awful lot of time staring at a screen and that’s not something my ageing eyes can always appreciate. It’s good to take regular breaks and look at something else for a change. Preferably something farther away or closer by.

When playing adventure games that’s not a problem. I can look outside and think about a particular difficult puzzle. For role-playing games I can think about different strategies I can take. But with a more action oriented game that I’m already very familiar with like Oblivion, I can’t really do that and time looking away from the screen is time I cannot play. And I want to play! So I thought of a really clever solution if I do say so myself: What if I can read all those wonderful books that are scattered everywhere in the game in actual physical books? Wait a minute: I can do that! I have all those books from the Skyrim Library. And there’re quite a lot of books from Morrowind and Oblivion in there.

I especially like the different stories that are “published” in different volumes, like A Dance in the Fire, The Argonian Account and The Wolf Queen.

A downside of having those books in actual physical format is that there’s less of an incentive to own your own house in the game to store all those books in. But it always was a struggle to put them on the shelf anyway. And if you ever managed to put them up, they could sometimes fly all over the place if you so much as walked past them.

* I write that in the knowledge that it’s probably not true. If I would have unlimited free time, I would probably get bored of playing games real quick.