Alina Menten is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg. She holds BAs in Media Design (RH Köln) and Scandinavian Studies (Universität zu Köln) and an MA in Game Development and Research (TH Köln). Her research spans game studies, media studies, and game design, with a particular focus on representations of history, landscape, and space in digital games. She also serves on the board of the Working Group for the Humanities and Digital Games (Arbeitskreis Geisteswissenschaften und Digitale Spiele, AKGWDS). Alongside her academic work, she works as a game and visual designer.
Romantic Landscapes, Dragestil and the Myth of Northernness in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
FROG 2026 – Talk
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda 2011) constructs an atmospheric image of the North that draws, explicitly and implicitly, on ideas of European northernness. This paper argues that its environment design operates as a form of artistic appropriation: it quotes Romantic landscape aesthetics, the composed sightlines of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, and the national-romantic Dragestil with its stave-church vocabulary, translating these art(-historical) forms into traversable, playable space.
Taking the early part of the main quest “Before the Storm” as a case study, the analysis reads the game as an interactive media text in which landscape, architecture and atmosphere function as cultural codes in Roland Barthes’s sense. Tundra plains, carved dragon heads, Viking-age longhouses and auroral skies are detached from their original contexts, recombined and aesthetically heightened. Drawing on Barthes’s concept of myth and Eugen Pfister’s political reading of it for digital games, the paper shows how this process charges such signs with seemingly natural meaning. The game world does not depict a real geography or culture; it stages an ideologically framed North as self-evident truth: a sublime, timeless wilderness, a pre-industrial social order, and a heroic warrior ideal.
This case makes visible what is at stake when art forms become playable. Skyrim reuses cultural heritage — landscape painting, vernacular architecture, saga literature — without the contextual framing. Its interactivity means players do not merely perceive the resulting myth but perform it. The paper therefore asks what responsibilities arise when artistic and art-historical forms are transferred into game systems, and how playful formats might make their own selections and exclusions legible instead of naturalising them.