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The Smutty Play That Doesn’t Exist
On the strange literary life of the Lusty Argonian Maid
Have you heard of The Lusty Argonian Maid? It’s no ordinary book. You can’t find it in a library, nor on Amazon. The only way you could read this weird book is by playing The Elder Scrolls, a genre defining video game saga. The book can be found in the three latest games of the franchise (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim) as a readable item.
Is this game item a book? I would suspect yes, since it has virtual pages, text, some sort of story, characters. It’s been quoted, memed, cherished, ridiculed, and even adapted into fan fiction and real-world stage plays. It even has some kind of physical aspect. Yet it doesn’t have an ISBN, it can’t be traditionally purchased, and it’s mostly incomplete.
The question whether this digital object is a book or not is fun, but not trivial. If we were to boldly classify The Lusty Argonian Maid as a book, and accept the estimated 80 million sales of The Elder Scrolls games containing it as its de facto distribution, then technically, it would rank among the top 20 best-selling books of all time.
It would sit alongside The Da Vinci Code (80 million copies) and just below And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (100 million copies). Of course, this comparison is tongue-in-cheek. But…
