You Can Now Study Skyrim at Rice University

Rice University is offering a course titled Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim in which students will explore how real Scandinavian tales and history influenced the game. It looks like a fun course!

My big question is if they’ll address my favourite Icelandic tale about the necropants.

This course has two goals. First, it introduces students to fantasy as both psychological concept and driving force in gamer culture; and second, using these paradigms, it considers how and why medieval Scandinavia serves as a locus of modern Anglo-American fantasy. To these ends, students will read selections from Old Norse and Old Icelandic sagas (in translation) as they play different quests within Skyrim. While the course begins by identifying moments of intersection between the worlds of the sagas and of Skyrim (inclement environments, supernatural figures, mythologies), the course is not in any means meant to map the former onto the latter. The purpose of establishing these connections is to then consider how elements of medieval Scandinavian culture have been taken out of historical milieu and literary context, morphed into unfamiliar shape, and appropriated towards other fantastic pursuits. We’ll consider the political saga of Skyrim, with its emphasis on Empire and rebellion, as pursuits made possible by way of Scandinavia in order to think through what Scandinavian fantasy worlds are really about and why they resonate with contemporary Anglo-American culture.



October 24th, 2012 by Adam

Portal 2 Joins Skyrim in Steam Workshop Next Week

Skyrim has been on the Steam Workshop for a few months now and has seen some nifty things come out of it. Valve has announced that Portal 2 will get a level creator on the Steam Workshop too.

The Verge is reporting that May 8 will be the official release date for the creation kit. Of course, it’s Valve so don’t forget to adjust your clocks to Valve Time.

I haven’t had a good chance to explore the creation kits in detail but I’m interested in seeing how I can use the workshop to help teach game design.

You can get more info on the Skyrim Game Creation Kit here.



May 1st, 2012 by Adam

The Geographic Size of Skyrim

I really enjoyed Skyrim and as I walked from place to place (eventually needed up using quick travel all the time) I wondered what the true size of the world was. It’s a good thing that people who are good at math wonder the same thing, over at Quora someone figured out large Skyrim actually is.

From this measurement:

To this one:

There is more math involved that further refined and increased the accuracy of the measurements, but the short of it is that Skyrim is about 5km wide.

We can compare that to other ways to measure the land of the game, in fact on Stack Exchange the answer is an area of about 37.1 km². The way that number was figured out was using the “game cells” and comparing them to previous games in the series. Of course, if we do that we mustn’t ignore Daggerfall which is 161600 square kilometres.

For more video game context here’s an old but good land area comparison between some games:

Click here for even bigger game worlds.

Edit:
There is also an article at GameSpot about the geology of Skyrim. The author of the article invites people interested in this idea to join in at Dark Creations.



April 5th, 2012 by Adam

Nifty Skyrim Tweaks From the Original Team

After Bethesda completed Skyrim they let the people working on the game jam on it for a week to see what they could add to it. Here are the results:

I wonder what the future holds and how much of a factor the technical limitations on consoles is. Still, the best use of kinect I’ve seen.

For those of you out there wanting to try your hand on improving Skyrim you can download the Creation Kit.



February 9th, 2012 by Adam

SkyUI Improves Skyrim’s Native UI on PC

SkyUI Skyrim

Skyrim has been out for a few months now and the internet is still talking about it (which is like an eternity in internet time!). Heck, you may have noticed that the frequency of posts appearing on this blog has decreased and I blame Skyrim for this.

Anyway, I’m playing Skyrim on the PC and the stock UI is totally ridiculous because it’s clearly not designed for a keyboard and mouse. Bethesda clearly decided that they should make only one way to interact with the inventory and levelling system and that’s through a controller. I’m sure the UI is good on consoles, but the PC version is pathetic. I’ll let Rock Paper Shotgun and Armed Gamer elaborate on the bad UI.

Luckily the mod community around Skyrim has created SkyUI!

SkyUI improves the UI for PC players by adding basic things like searching and listing inventory items based on value, stolen, weight, etc.

It has turned a frustrating part of the game into something I no longer think about, which is a good thing. If you play Skyrim on the PC then you need to go get SkyUI now.

Here’s a video showing what it does:

I’ll leave it to Gamasutra to add even more issues with the UI in Skyrim.



January 16th, 2012 by Adam
%d bloggers like this: