I always loved mythol­ogy, espe­cially ancient Greek leg­ends. Norse and Egypt­ian mythol­ogy are quite inter­est­ing too and I always tried to deepen my knowl­edge about these leg­ends. I’m not a spe­cial­ist but I know the most impor­tant char­ac­ters because I like to read and those sto­ries seemed quite inter­est­ing back then. I was intrigued because they seemed very sim­i­lar and still so dif­fer­ent. Nowa­days, I don’t read that much books con­cern­ing or involv­ing mythol­ogy. Instead, I play games who are based on myths or I watch TV shows where the ancient sto­ries are deeply involved in the plot, like Star­gate, for instance.

Of course, I soon real­ized that there are some trade-offs, espe­cially with games. You like to know some­thing about mythol­ogy? Don’t trust in games to con­vey the leg­endary deeds of ancient gods. Why not? The Seat­tle Times has the answer. In this short edi­to­r­ial the author makes one impor­tant point: Games aren’t the most reli­able sources for infor­ma­tion on mythol­ogy. That said, I have to admit that they did a much bet­ter job with Star­gate and Star­gate SG-1. The recently played God of War II is pretty impres­sive either, but it doesn’t treat the Greek mythol­ogy with much regard for accu­racy.

Any­way, there are plenty of games and TV shows based on dif­fer­ent mytholo­gies. As long as the cre­ators can meld all the frag­ments into an inter­est­ing and believ­able piece of enter­tain­ment, who cares? Alas, who is look­ing for an edu­ca­tional value in our enter­tain­ment world? All one can hope to achieve is to arouse inter­est in the con­sumers so that they get them­selves immersed. The good old books will surely be around for some time to come, I guess.