Skyrim Wellbeing Manager

11/11/11

The day that changed my world forever, the day that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. Over 15 years later, I can happily admit I sunk at least 300 hours into that game on console, and hundreds more for subsequent releases on PC, of Skyrim Special Edition. Skyrim was a fantasy world to escape into, an immersive realm of adventure, power, and mystery to explore. I found myself gravitating towards the Thieves’ Guild and Dark Brotherhood, with the comic relief equivalent and polarizing figure of a Jar Jar Binks, Cicero, as my loyal companion. Then came the DLCs, in particular Hearthfire and Dragonborn, another excuse to lock in another hundred hours or so into the game, exploring the new locations, vampires, Dovahkiin, and more. This nostalgia of my childhood years has kept bringing me back to what I would easily call the best game of all time IMO. A longing for a simpler time when everything was just right.

Since then, things haven’t exactly been easy. For the majority of my adult life, I have suffered from clinically diagnosed depression. In more recent years, with the addition of anxiety. Two climactic moments were psychotic episodes, where I had convinced myself “X is trying to kill me”, where X in “friends” or “Mossad”, and sought the assistance of emergency services to “save me”. Excessive drug use was responsible for the first psychotic episode, and my mother’s recent passing was responsible for the second. I had always been warned of a genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as my birth mother (hint: I’m adopted) had also had severe struggles with drug use and mental health. A decade of mental health issues, culminating in a bipolar type 1 diagnosis, has not exactly been fun, to say the least. But I am still grateful for a privileged upbringing, a good circle of friends and family for support, two loving and adorable cats, my partner of 7 years, and great video games like Skyrim, to help me through it all. Coping with mental health has been an uphill battle, but apart from my assorted collection of (now) legally prescribed drugs, I have found one thing that helps the most. Or to put it better, one system that has proven to work, “one system to rule them all”.

That system involves to-do lists and practising gratitude. What started as a physical journal, with the day of the week, date, today’s date, and three highlights of the day, has slowly evolved into a daily routine and ritual. It is a simple system, really: for each day, write what you plan to accomplish and keep track of what you manage to achieve. At the end of the day, reflect on 3 highlights or things you are grateful for. Now, if you have never suffered from depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or other mental health issues, you might underestimate how difficult it can be to do the most basic things. To give you an example, my to-do for 30th June 2026, three months after Mum passed away, includes:

• [ ]10 AM wake up
• [x]Cold shower
• [x]Deorderant
• [ ]Vitamins
• [x]Feed cats
• [x]Brush teeth
• [x]Make bed
• [ ]Floss
• [ ]Mouth wash
• [x]Message friend
• [ ]Message family
• [ ]Read
• [ ]Exercise
• [x]Daily journal
• [ ]12 AM Bedtime

Yes, at the time I did need a daily reminder to brush my teeth and feed my cats. No, I didn’t finish my list most days. As each day would end with an assessment of the day’s accomplishments, an emoji, be it happy, sad, or neutral, would be branded at the bottom of the page, along with a positive message, and a score, e.g., 7/15 for the day given above. While it was tough work, daily repeating to-dos and proper management of shit I needed to get done, eventually evolved into a routine. And the lists got longer, and there were more ticks each day, as the scores grew higher, and the emojis grew happier. After two to three months, my lists were so long they took up the entire page of my notebook, and the highlights section, over time, had turned into an odyssey of managing the fallout from depression, grief, anxiety, and psychosis. Reflecting on these journals, I can see that sometimes I went for months, struggling to achieve the most basic things (again). I’m not asking for your sympathy; I was truly pathetic and miserable. I don’t know if the journals helped, and this is anecdotal evidence, with a sample size of 1, but I’d like to think that this system helped me establish a routine.

Later, I decided to start tracking my sleep, mood, and energy levels. There’s an app for that, I thought. So I searched the Play Store (Android Gang) to find that they were all paid or subscription-based, with a shitty freemium tier. I also had some reservations with storing my personal information, such as journals and mood tracking stats, on someone else’s computer (hint: the cloud is just someon elses computer). Nice to see capitalism leeching every cent they can from the poor souls of the world suffering, through no fault of their own, from mental health issues. Then the inner software engineer in me was awakened. “I could do that,” I thought. And so I did. Using React as a frontend, and Firebase as a database, and a healthy dose of vibe coding, thank you to my virtual assistant, Gemini Cli, I constructed a basic mood tracking application and released it as an open-source codebase and website hosted with Github Pages. My data, my rules. Eventually, I realized I could combine my mood tracking application with the system I described earlier. To gamify the experience, I themed the application after the Skyrim user interface, because I had always thought to myself, “you know I’d actually do everything on my to-do list if it were quests and stuff like Skyrim”.

Thus, the Skyrim Wellbeing Manager was born:

https://woodrock.github.io/moody-bitch/

The most iconic part of Skyrim is the map. The console version of the game comes with a fold-out map of Skyrim. Something you digital folk are missing out on. I decided to replicate this in my application, but instead of Skyrim, you get a map of your to-do locations, using location services, which shows you your progress on a map of your own city, or wherever you travel to, when completing quests on the application. Then came skills. These are directly ported from Skyrim, with restoration, enchanting, smithing, speech, alchemy, two-handed, one-handed, and alteration implemented so far. But rather than unlocking abilities related to these skills in a fantasy game, these skills have been translated into mental health achievements, focusing on eight areas of mental health:

• Restoration → Sleep
• Enchanting → Career
• Smithing → Hygeine
• Speech → Social
• Alchemy → Diet
• Two-handed → Exercise (intense)
• One-handed → Exercise (light)
• Alteration → Thoughts

In the example given below, the speech tree has an achievement for the skill Speech (Social) that is “Maintaining a 3-day journaling streak”. Each quest in the game grants XP towards a chosen skill. For example, “Text a Friend” may grant XP towards the Speech skill. The user completes quests to gain XP towards leveling up. Once levelled up, the user gets 1 point to spend on perks, which they can use to unlock an achievement to work towards, like our previous example of maintaining a 3-day journaling streak. The user would add that as a quest to their list, and then strive towards completing that achievement. This creates the core game loop --- a power fantasy about achieving mastery over all of the skills in the game --- while secretly improving their mental health.

Below, we see the iconic pause menu of Skyrim translated faithfully into the application. We have three tabs: Quest, Stats and Journal. The quests keep track of your active quests, with an add button beside the “Active Quests” title for the player to add new quests. When adding a new quest the user can choose which skill the quest grants XP towards, and the frequency of the quest, “Side Quest” is a one-off, and “Daily Misc” repeats daily. On top of all this, the website uses the Google Gemini API to consult a LLM to generate a quest description of the quest that appears lore-accurate. For example:

BRUSH TEETH

Not even the fires of Alduin can wither a warrior’s spirit as surely as the creeping decay of unwashed ivory after a night of heavy mead. Scour the remnants of battle and feast from your maw to ensure the Thu'um remains sharp and untainted by the rot of the crypts. A clean tongue is the vessel of a pure Shout.

The second page of the pause menu, the stats page, gives you basic information on your character and your progression through the skills. As well as an animated line chart that shows the progression of your “magicka”, “health”, and “stamina”; or in the real-world:

• Magicka → Sleep
• Health → Mood
• Stamina → Energy

This information is useful for personal reference, to track how your core vitals fluctuate over time. See if you can identify any red flags or patterns. Perhaps share your sleep, mood, and energy statistics over time with a health professional, and get certified medical advice about your current condition.

The final page of the pause menu, the journal, records a record of your “Triumphs” or daily highlights. This is part of practising gratitude, which is not professional medical advice or self-help guru-ism, but I’m pretty sure it helps with mental wellbeing. At least in my own personal experience and opinion, I think having a positive mindset and actively practising gratitude, despite your current situation, is a positive step towards change.

The final aspect of the Skyrim Wellbeing Manager is the Magic and Items pages. Magic contains a series of spells that fit into the categories we defined before: alteration, conjuration, illusion, and restoration, with the addition of shouts. The spells are fairly simple, spend magicka (sleep) points to restore some health, or practise a breathing exercise, or my personal favourite “Summon Familiar” which “[d]isplays a reminder to contact a specific loved one.” The shouts, which I mentioned before, alter the game mechanics. Unrelenting force, a.k.a FUS RO DAH, takes the oldest quest you have and puts a 5-minute timer upon its completion.

And so here is the obligatory, shameful plug or call to action. If you love Skyrim, and want to love yourself, please try it out.