Game Studies

Review: Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games

Page one of this edited volume pronounces that its subject, Medieval game studies, is “an adolescent field.” Rapid growth can be ungainly, but is of course a good problem to have. This 2023 collection’s only predecessor was edited by Daniel Kline in 2014, which in games industry terms is arguably a whole generation: indeed, around half the games studied in it did not exist then. The millennium-long Middle Ages can of course lay claim to a vast range of historical content in modern games, and this book from Bloomsbury’s New Directions in Medieval Studies brings together diverse studies on both digital and analogue content. After a superb introduction, assessing work done so far and setting the agenda, thirteen chapters take various approaches to Medieval games. Some are broad and others narrow, and most use between one and four case studies apiece. As with all edited collections that cast their net wide, the catch is mixed. But without a doubt, this one charts new waters, taking the interdisciplinary field of Medieval game studies a little closer to the stated aspiration of “develop[ing] its own identity and coherence” (p. 3).

Robert Houghton has industriously edited two whole volumes on Middle Age game studies, based on a single and evidently seminal 2019 conference panel: the other collection is on pedagogy (Houghton ed. 2022, in De Gruyter’s Videogames and the Humanities series), so this one focuses on research. With a string of authored and edited publications on Medieval history, digital games and the intersections between them, Houghton is probably more qualified than anyone to curate such a collection. It touches on the biggest AAA Medieval franchises, whose two main genres are grand strategy (Civilization, Age of Empires, Crusader Kings) and ARPG (Mount & Blade, Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, Dark Souls). The much-studied Assassin’s Creed and World of Warcraft franchises are left out, but many dozens of other games enter the discussion. For historical game studies (as for game-based cultural studies in general), it makes sense that analogue or tabletop games are included alongside digital ones, since their thematic affinities outweigh material or social differences between game media.

Most readers will be interested in particular topics or games, so each contribution merits individual comment (the Table of Contents is below).

Several chapters investigate how games interpret some aspect of historical reality from the Middle Ages. This produces a range of insights into the design choices that determine how players experience the Middle Ages. Grufstedt applies the idea of counterfactual history to Medieval Dynasty, Mount & Blade: Bannerlord and Crusader Kings III, finding that they show different degrees of historicity and speculation, which are not a binary opposition. Houghton explores Medieval rulership in strategy games, arguing that besides the much-studied Civilization franchise, there are alternative models to be found in Crusader Kings II, Reigns and Mount & Blade: Warband. Two chapters analyse how digital games evoke the Middle Ages through sound: López compares the soundscapes of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the 2015 audiogame A Blind Legend. Meanwhile, Cook builds on her own past work to show how games use stereotypical auditory cues: church bells, the Gothic organ and Latin chanting. Another pair of chapters discuss boardgames from different perspectives. Smith surveys representations of the Crusades across six styles of games, finding a broad range from the historically detailed to the abstract, while Bierstedt applies Jeremiah McCall’s Historical Problem Space Framework (published in this journal, September 2020) to the 2016 worker placement boardgame A Feast for Odin. McLeod’s chapter uses white supremacist terrorism as its framing topic, rather a tenuous connection, but is an insightful study of the horror fantasy series Legacy of Kain and its Christianity-influenced Medieval setting.

The remaining chapters address individual historical figures or groups. The politics of identity -- mainly gender and ethnicity -- have raised fierce debate over historically-themed games, including those with Medieval settings. The authors of this book defend portrayals of diversity as reflecting historical reality, while recognising that others decry them as fashionable revisionism. Bloch and Angwekar discuss individual elements of the now-vintage 1999 grand strategy game Age of Empires II. Bloch’s subject is how player communities have adopted and memeified Joan of Arc, doomed participant of the game’s second campaign, over two decades: this breezy discussion captures a glimpse of the player-community side of Middle Age gaming through a single character, who was reshaped by nineteenth-century Romanticism. (Joan of Arc now has her own civilization in Age of Empires IV’s 2023 expansion The Sultans Ascend, too recent to be included.) Angwekar examines the same game from the perspective of race: he assesses postcolonial criticisms of the tactically unremarkable “Indians” in Age of Empires II’s Definitive Edition, first introduced in 2013’s Forgotten Empires expansion pack. He concludes that there is no egregious misrepresentation here, while noting that postcolonial criticism should be included rigorously and objectively in future game studies. Apgar (like Bloch) studies a “beloved” (p. 245) female ruler in a grand strategy game, this time Matilda of Canossa, who is playable in Crusader Kings II: they show that Matilda’s portrayal as a “papal warrior” is based on the seventeenth-century propaganda of Pope Urban VIII. Quijano tackles the representation of race and ethnicity in several games, including both historical and fantasy settings; he finds that ethnic minorities tend to be underrepresented or misrepresented because games tend to reproduce popular misconceptions, including that only white Europeans existed during the Middle Ages. Mindrebø argues that characters in the Viking-inspired fantasy worlds of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt successfully reproduce the gender categories of the Old Norse sagas, in which women sometimes belong in the category of “active masculinity” (hvatr) and men in that of “passive femininity” (blauðr). One difference he notes is that modern games offer a greater range of empowered roles for women. Butler performs a separate comparison between Medieval narratives and modern games, this time pairing certain characters in the Dark Souls trilogy with parallels in the chivalric romances. In both story-worlds, these characters undercut the mainstream stereotype of the knight as unrelentingly strong and brave, which is still perpetuated by modern white supremacists among others. Several contributors acknowledge that the Medieval past is being co-opted and distorted for ideological purposes: an acute reminder that “authenticity” can remain highly subjective.

Playing the Middle Ages amply demonstrates how evolved and diversified Middle Age worlds have become over decades of digital gaming: a far cry from that Proterozoic era of the first digital RPGs, whose main template was the eclectic high-fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons. Games under scrutiny range from the late 1990s to early 2020s. This book is well presented, with high-quality monochrome figures, a general index, and very few typos. The depth of resources behind the chapters varies considerably according to their approach. Only three have illustrations, seven apiece for Chapters 6 and 14 plus two for chapter 7. More strikingly, Chapter 6 has a one-item bibliography and no endnotes, by contrast with the one after it, which has a 61-item bibliography and 68 endnotes.

Perhaps one way to achieve greater identity and coherence in Medieval game studies is to find consensus on key terms. Middle Ages, Medieval and Medievalism are used variably in this book. Some contributors define “medievalisms” as uses of historical topics and tropes (Grufstedt p. 31; López p. 54), while others use the word more broadly, or not at all. The distinction between history and fantasy may be far from clear-cut but it is still important, and others have used distinguishing terms such as “Medieval fantasy” or “pseudo-Medieval.” Perhaps the “-ism” can be meaningful: it certainly is for Hellenists (Greek historians), who sharply separate the terms Hellenic and Hellenistic. “Hellenic” simply means Greek; but “Hellenistic” (and Hellen-ism) means turning-Greek, and is used to label what happened across the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond after the conquests of Alexander the Great. In game studies at least, the strictly Medieval could be usefully distinguished from the Medievalistic (and Medieval-ism), which denotes the far broader territory of fantasy that continues to borrow from history. Medievalists are of course the experts in both Medieval history and “Medievalistic” fantasy: this collection has proven it, by using games to yield new insights into both.

Table of Contents

1. The Middle Ages in Modern Games: An Adolescent Field, Robert Houghton,University of Winchester, UK
2. Unbending Medievalisms: Finding Counterfactual History in Sandbox Games Set in the Middle Ages, Ylva Grufstedt, Malmö University, Sweden
3. Playing the Sonic Past: Reflections on Sound in Medieval-Themed Video Games, Mariana López,University of York, UK
4. Medieval Sounds, Sounding Medieval, Karen M. Cook, University of Hartford, USA
5. All on Board for the Crusades, Gordon Smith, University of Edinburgh, UK
6. Subverting the Valiant Crusader: The Sarafan in the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver Series, Liam McLeod, University of Birmingham, UK
7. Making Friendships, Breaking Friendships: Exploring Viking-Age Social Roles Through Player Strategy in A Feast for Odin, Adam Bierstedt, University of Reykjavik, Iceland
8. Abandoning Civilization: Medieval Rulership in Crusader Kings III, Reigns, and Mount and Blade: Warband, Robert Houghton, University of Winchester, UK
9. Joan of Arc, the Meme of Orléans: The Playful Liberties Taken with History by the Age of Empires 2 Gaming Community, Jonathan Bloch, Independent Scholar
10. On the Postcolonial Analysis of 'Indians' in Age of Empires II: A Theory of “Ethical Programs” Behind Postcolonial Criticisms of Videogames, Neil Nagwekar
11. Virtually (De)Colonized: Racial Identity and Colonialism in the Middle Ages and as Depicted in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Innocence: A Plague Tale, The Elder Scrolls, and Black Desert Online, Johansen Quijano, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
12. Representations of Medieval Gender Archetypes in Fantasy Role-Playing Games, Markus Eldegard Mindrebø, Royal Holloway, UK
13. Ashen, Hollow, Cursed: Fragile Knighthood in the Dark Souls Series and its Medieval Antecedents, Patrick Butler, University of Connecticut, USA
14. Matilda of Canossa and Crusader Kings II: (Papal) Warrior Princess, Blair Apgar, University of York, UK

References

Houghton (ed.) (2022). Teaching the Middle Ages Through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact. De Gruyter.

Kline, D.T. (ed.) (2014). Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. Routledge.

McCall, J. (2020). The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium. Game Studies, 20(3). https://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/mccall