A Title About Rubik’s Cubes and Skyrim
So, what exactly about Rubik’s Cubes and Skyrim is worth putting into an article where they’re both featured. It seems like the two things couldn’t be any more different. One’s a puzzle from the 1980s, the other is a video game from 2011. They’re so incredibly different, why are they being talked about together?
I’ll get to that. I promise. For now, let’s talk about what both of these things are.
Rubik’s Cubes, as I mentioned before, are puzzle toys originating from 1970s Hungary. The first Rubik’s Cube was constructed by Erno Rubik, for whom the toy is named after, in 1974, before making it’s way to the world market in 1980. By 1983, around 200 million Rubik’s Cubes had been sold. Soon after though, the Rubik’s Cube would plummet in popularity. With the advent of the internet and online forums, however, the Rubik’s Cube would make a resurgence in the early 2000s that persists to some degree, even today.
Skyrim, the fifth installment of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, puts the player in the high fantasy setting of Nirn, more specifically the province of Skyrim in Tamriel, and essentially asks them to exterminate the resurrected race of dragons (or dovah) to save the world or something like that. Pretty standard video game protagonist stuff. It’s a game that has been remade and re-released so many times by Bethesda, that the internet likes to meme that Todd Howard (the Executive Producer of Bethesda Game Studios) will push for a Skyrim re-release for the Samsung Smart Fridge. It’s only a matter of time after all.
So, now that I’ve explained what Rubik’s Cubes and TESV: Skyrim to an audience that probably (hopefully) already knows what they are, what is it that makes the similar? The answer, dear reader, is the relevance they’ve managed to maintain for years on end.
For a single-player game made in 2011, Skyrim still has a very active player base. In 2020, Skyrim Legendary Edition averaged about 7382 players on Steam at any given moment in time, while Special Edition was hitting an average of 16,455, making for a grand total of 23,837 players at any single given moment in time. But 2019 and 2020 was also in the midst of Corona Virus, so what about 2018, seven years after Skyrim’s initial release and before the COVID-19 Pandemic? Legendary Edition, in 2018, averaged 11,640 concurrent players and Special Edition comes in at 10,133 players. That’s 21,773 concurrent players in 2018. That’s pretty impressive when you compare it to something like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game from the same year that was just as, if not more popular than Skyrim. Modern Warfare 2, on Steam as of writing this article, struggles to breach even 600 concurrent players, and has hit numbers sub-1000 since 2018. Oh, and that’s for multiplayer. It’s single-player campaign numbers are even more abysmal.
The World Cube Association (a non-profit, volunteer association that helps facilitate competitions for ‘twisty cubes’, the most famous of which is the Rubik’s Cube) hosts competitions with upwards of 100,000 competitors.
Somehow, after literal decades of existence, both games maintain a still very much alive player base and community. The lifespan for these games seem to be near endless. But how have they managed to do that? Rubik wasn’t even trying to make a game or toy when he first developed his ‘Magic Cube’, and for Skyrim to have survived for this long in a world where games go as quickly as they come, it’s nearly unheard of.
Sure, in Skyrim’s case, one could argue that it’s in part due to the fact that Bethesda re-released Skyrim so many times, but to be completely honest, if it were any other game, that likely would have just killed all interest in the game. No, both games did one very simple thing. They helped facilitate player endeavor.
Now what do I mean by an ‘endeavor’. Endeavor is really just a word that I’ve been using a lot recently for a long term objective or goal that takes considerable effort to achieve. For example, the endeavor of Minecraft (another game with a very active player base) is to create. Or to survive. The thing about endeavors is that its often different from player to player.
In the case of Rubik’s Cubes, there’s the endeavor to get the shortest solve time, or the endeavor to find new solving algorithms. Skyrim, to 100% clear every dungeon in the game, or max every skill tree, or to mod the game into the perfect fantasy experience.
These goals can be finite or infinite, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the games themselves encourage the players to reach beyond what is placed directly in front of them. A objective, when shown a Rubik’s Cube is to solve it. The objective of Skyrim is to beat the main questline (and the side questlines, if that’s what you’re into). But they reward the player in some way shape or form for pushing further, for diving back in again and again.
In the case of the Rubik’s Cube, this was in part facilitated by the World Wide Web. It allowed the spread of formulas, algorithms and knowledge surrounding the game. Similarly, Skyrim’s modding scene would not exist without the internet.
The search and desire to complete an ‘endeavor’ isn’t exactly universal to all players, nor is it universal to games. Not every game needs or even wants an endeavor. Some games don’t even know that they’ll produce an endeavor for the community. But those that do can outlast other games and achieve longevity, creating a lasting name in the world of games.
About the WCA: World CUBE ASSOCIATION. (n.d.). Retrieved February 22, 2021, from https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/about
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — Multiplayer. (21 February 2021). Retrieved February 21, 2021, from https://steamcharts.com/app/10190
Carlisle, Rodney P. (2009). Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society. SAGE. p. 612. ISBN 978–1452266107.
“History”. Rubiks. 19 May 2008. Retrieved 25 January 2019
Quenqua, Douglas (6 August 2012). “Rubik’s Cube Twists Back into Limelight”. The New York Times.
Singmaster, David (1994). “The Utility of Recreational Mathematics”. In Guy,
Richard K.; Woodrow, Robert E. (eds.). The Lighter Side of Mathematics: Proceedings of the Eugène Strens Memorial Conference on Recreational Mathematics and Its History. Cambridge University Press. p. 340
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition. (21 February 2021). Retrieved February 21, 2021, from https://steamcharts.com/app/489830
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (21 February 2021). Retrieved February 21, 2021, from https://steamcharts.com/app/72850
