One of America's leading colleges, Rice University, Texas will offer a course on "Norse Mythology - Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim."
Students will learn by playing the popular game, Skyrim. This course is available for only one semester.
The course is offered will be available to third-year English students, where they will "learn fantasy as a psychological concept and how the genre is a driving force in gaming culture," The Verge reported. Students will also read from Norse and Icelandic legends and draw a parallel between them.
"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," reads the description of the course. "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."
The course is available for a limited number of students.
Bethesda developed Skyrim is an action role-playing open world video game. It was released Nov. 11, 2011.
"This is the deepest, loveliest world ever created for a single player to explore," Joystiq had said about the game.
The game is based on Norse legends and stresses on Heroic quests that is the main theme of old Scandinavian literature.
University of South Carolina offered a course on "Computer Games and History." History students evaulated the respective games' version of history in class discussion, The Verge reported, Thursday.
