65-year-old lady plays Skyrim and keeps a diary on Twitter

Bethesda's community manager, Nick Breckon, decided to stir up the discussion about Skyrim online and had his 65-year-old mother play the game, starting to tweet her reported experiences. The account SkyrimMom was launched on January 9. (First tweet: "I think I need Todd Howard on the couch here.")

It must be said that the elderly lady is remarkably advanced: she compared the pace of Skyrim after the incident with the executioner, axe, and dragon savior to the pace of Super Metroid. The storyline quest of killing the first dragon reminded her of "Red Dead", where she "galloped with a bunch of cowboys into that gorge to kill a bunch of bad guys." During the incident, mom hid between boulders and shot at everyone until NPCs explained to her the wrongness of such behavior. (Indeed, Nick's mom at one point crafted a clay spoon holder inspired by [Fallout 3](/games?search=Fallout 3); she calls fast travel "warp"—she was only twenty back in 1966, after all.) One can only believe that a person is 65 by mentioning the televised broadcast of the New Hampshire primaries.

Like most gamers of Skyrim, Mrs. Breckon is troubled by moral questions: "I walked into a house, and there was all this stuff saying: 'Take', 'Steal', 'Steal'. Should I be stealing?" And further: "I got into a scuffle with a woman in the house. I stole all her food, she pulled a knife, and I killed her. Is stealing the goal of the game?" Naturally, guilt took over, and the lady started collecting lavender to use on attacking aggressors in order to pacify them (in the real world, lavender shampoo indeed soothes tempers for a while). It didn't work; since then, Mrs. Breckon is afraid of strangers and prefers to travel during the day. And so on.