Me as a viking

A new show about the dark ages will be premiering on the History Channel this Sunday. As part of the promotion leading up to the premiere, they have an interactive game to create your own dark ages character. You get to choose things like gender, role, and clothing, and it generates a character name for you based, using some mysterious algorithm, on your name.

I chose "Viking" for my role, and my character is named Geira the Ash Tree. You can see her here:

Check out my Dark Ages profile!

And yes, that's really my face! It lets you upload a photo to use for the face.

I had a lot of fun playing with this, although the gender limitations frustrated me. After I selected female for my gender, I was presented with four options: Lady, Viking, Nun, or Peasant. Lady? Bo-oring. Nun? No way! Peasant? Too hard. So I opted for Viking, which sounded pretty exciting to me. Unfortunately, I should have remembered from reading Viking Warrior that the life of women in Viking culture was not very exciting. So Geira is stuck caring for the children and supervising the servants, when I'd much rather go out viking! Oh, well, it could be worse: at least I'm not one of the servants! And while I wish it could be otherwise, the gender-based roles made sense in a game which is meant to teach you about the dark ages.

Edited to add:

My son David also created his own dark ages character: he opted to be a monk. He also cracked the name code and figured out how to pick his own name rather than being stuck with a randomly selected one.

See Godomar the Wandering Scholar