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The more I think about this, the more I am not sure if this functionality even makes sense for games like these... but I'll ask anyway. Is there a way to record the "game-state over time" in terms of the game data, not screen captures?

Maybe a bit of context: I play Quake, and in Quake you can record your matches and then watch them later by rendering them with the game engine. This has a couple of advantages. First and foremost, the recordings themselves are resolution and video-quality independent. This makes Quake matches much more efficient to store. The second is that if you want to produce an actual video later, you can decide how your want to render it---the resolution, the textures, etc.

Of course there is a LOT less game data in a Quake match at any given moment than while playing Oblivion. It might be more efficient to save HD video than to literally track the game state...

Googling around lead me to suggestions like FRAPS that are generic screen-capture applications. And the people that do Elder Scrolls "Let's Play" series seem to use screen-capture tools. This leads me to believe that there is no mechanism like this for the Elder Scrolls games but wanted to ask.

That's not a feature in any Elder Scrolls game, sorry.