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The invasion of Nordic mythology in gaming

  • May 18, 2014 9:26 AM EDT

    Lately it seems to be that video games have been borrowing heavily from Norse mythologies and largely exagerating them for advertisement campaigns.

    Video games have always borrowed from mythologies and historical civilisations to make their lore, but since the release of Skyrim, the hype on Norse mythologies has gone up way out of hand. In League of Legends we have just spent the entire year hearing of new champions related to that culture, and they've even added a whole new chapter of lore involving the "Freljord" and a map with its theme. Being a "viking" is now a status as fantastic as being a hybrid human reptile, it's considered as beyond being a human: I was reading a review for ESO sometime ago and found this:

    Humans are pretty boring, especially in a fantasy setting. When Bethesda announced that The Elder Scrolls Online was restricting the Imperial race to its more expensive Digital Imperial Edition, I assumed they'd done it knowing that very few people would care, far preferring to indulge in the high fantasy of being a reptile, or a cat, or a Norwegian.

    This idea of Scandinavians being a superior race... do I really need to point where this is going? We now have to deal with this everytime we play said video games.

    In spite of the game's depictions of Norse culture being as true to reality as Dragonball is to street fighting, many people seem to have bought into this. I'd gladly turn around and ignore the crowd but it's when I get the impression that this cult is being forced on us, and that there are supremacist ideas being expressed, that it starts becoming a problem. Three years of these advertisement campaigns are just boring.

    What happened to the fans of pirates, ninjas, spartans, knights, crusaders, persians, and others?

    How do you personally feel about this?