The Middle Ages in Modern Games, Volume 3

Vinicius Marino Carvalho, @carvalho_marino, Universidade de São Paulo

Robert Houghton, @robehoughton, University of Winchester

History games are an influential and dynamic genre of popular history. They have proven to be incredibly useful tools for education, research, heritage projects, and academic outreach. They can also be focal points for cultural criticism and analysis. This is especially true concerning the long tradition of medievalist games. Analysing how the Middle Ages is co opted by (often problematic) aesthetic, ideological and/or political discourses can be a window to understanding our present and its issues. History games operate in different epistemologies, mobilize distinctive genre conventions, and are often subject to commercial pressures. To understand them, we must consider their role as both historical discourses and cultural products.

These are the proceedings of the third Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference. The event comprised papers from 44 scholars and game developers over four days between 7 and 10 June 2022 addressing a broad range of issues surrounding the use of the Middle Ages and medievalism within games of all sorts. This volume is a compilation and expansion of these papers and represents a range of work in progress across a diverse collection of approaches and disciplines. This year we were pleased to welcome a substantial number of new voices from across the world including many graduate students and early career researchers, alongside industry representatives. These collected papers highlight the emergence of many new approaches and ongoing projects which will be of great importance to the field in the coming years.

This year the organisation of the event and proceedings was expanded with the assistance of several new organisers and editors, namely: Vinicius Marino Carvalho, Tess Waterson, Juan Manuel Rubio, James Baille, and Lysiane Lasausse. The event was sponsored by Slitherine Games and Intellect Books and supported by The Public Medievalist and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research at the University of Winchester.

Fortunately, there is increasing constructive dialogue between industry voices and scholars. This congress is a testament to this welcome development. Our sessions include speakers from both within and outside academia engaging with a wide variety of topics. Our papers include discussions on themes such as medicine, labour, religion, and geography in the context of medievalist games. Some sessions are entirely dedicated to modern impositions and the cross section between medievalism and contemporary discourses. We also have sessions looking at the practical implementation of historical concepts in games. Topics include how to design game mechanics, create historical settings, address challenges of quantification, and incorporate ludological theory.

The papers of this volume represent a truly diverse set of topics and fields, but a few common themes may be tentatively identified across them:

1) There is a growing amount of discussion around the construction of games in theory and practice. This is partly a consequence of the very welcome participation of many developers this year including representatives from Slitherine, Polymorph Games, Sengkala Dev, Stark Raving Sane Games, and the Sugar Collective, but we have also seen a growing number of scholars thinking about game design in earnest. This overlap between industry and academia is increasingly important and we hope to foster closer collaboration in future years.

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2) There has been a greater breadth of papers this year. New aspects of old favourites like Religion and Colonialism have been explored, but we’ve also seen clusters of papers around less commonly addressed issues like Illness, Labour, and the Apocalypse. This is really important and highlights the growth of the field.

3) These papers have also demonstrated a greater awareness of the state of the field than in previous years – and within many publications. These are informal papers, but there have been plenty of references to other scholars throughout the presentations and in the discussion around them. There have been a handful of papers dedicated to theory, but these have been rooted heavily in existing methodologies and illustrated through practical examples.

All of this is a sign of a maturing area of scholarship. The introduction to our proceedings last year (volume two) presented medievalist game studies as an embryonic field, but this is increasingly inaccurate. A growing body of written scholarship and theory exist within this field and in multiple subfields. There are numerous conferences, events and centres focusing on this subject. The field is still varied and shifting, but it is increasingly unconvincing to address it as a brand new area of study.

A key next step is greater integration across disciplines and between the academy and industry. A lot of the papers this year represent a move in this direction, but we would all benefit from moving further out of our silos. Medievalist game studies is conducted by scholars from archaeological, literary, historical and media backgrounds – amongst others – but we have a tendency to talk past each other and as a result there has been a substantial amount of reinvention of the wheel. Moreover, scholars have often ignored developers to the detriment of their research.

In sum, it’s a really exciting time to be working on the Middle Ages or medievalism in modern games. This volume represents a small cross section of the excellent work being conducted within the field and we can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with next. We hope to see a lot of new and fascinating developments at the fourth Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference next year.

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