Southsamurai

@Southsamurai@reddthat.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there are few video games with a lot of mythological pantheons?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Popularity × audience + accessibility to devs.

  Popularity is a vague term for how well represented a pantheon already is in popular media; movies, books, tv, comics, gaming mostly, with maybe some music being a factor.

  That’s amplified by the intended audience. If your audience is focused on one place in the world, chances are better that their pantheon, whatever it may be, will get picked. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a Western pop culture audience.

  And it’s likely that developers are going to go with what they know best. It’s like how jrpgs pull more from Japanese mythology when they use mythology, and korean devs often pull from their history and legends first. It isn’t as heavily weighted as the intended audience, but it’s in there.

  So, there’s typically going to be a bias towards mythologies that are easier to research, when the devs aren’t familiar with something, and it ends up with a lot of the published and easy to find info on pantheons in general is in English, and is heavily biased towards European and Mediterranean mythologies.

  There’s also the factor that a lot of people default to what’s in Bullfinch’s mythology. So, Greek/Roman, Norse, and that’s about it lol. Even Celtic mythology gets shafted in that regard, the slavic gods get totally ignored, and you might as well just pretend that any deity that wasn’t also in Clash of the Titans doesn’t exist.

  Egyptian mythology tends to be horribly misrepresented even compared to Greek. And pretty much any pop culture use of mythology ignores the fact that pantheons weren’t some kind of static group that never changed, and weren’t all worshipped the same everywhere. Hell, it wasn’t even always a pantheon that was worshipped at all, it could be single deities, where the others just got a nod occasionally.

  I ran into some of the trouble when looking into mythology when doing world building. It’s fairly easy to find translation into English if you stick to those cultures. You can often find translation of original texts and later recordings of oral writ, not just stuff like Bullfinch’s.

  Finding anything even remotely unfiltered for anything from the Asian regions is harder. You can usually find good translations of some of the more well known texts, but past that you’re relying on what some other person’s interpretation of what they read is, and that’s not the same as a translation.

  So, it isn’t just a gaming industry thing. It’s everywhere.