22: Work in Neomedieval RPGs

Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, @RgKrista, University of Malta

Daniel Vella, @d_nielv, University of Malta

While many RPG protagonists begin their journey running minor errands for a local community, such tasks are generally presented as being tied to an interest in self-progression. Work as a regular activity is rarely a defining feature.

We take our cue from Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero (Sierra On-line 1989), to consider the place of labour in games with a [neo]medieval setting. In Quest for Glory, our aspiring wandering hero can gain some coins and levels in strength by raking out the stable. This is presented as tediously laborious and literally ‘unskilled,’ but with a neat reward at the end. Such work is optional and framed as something of a joke, mocking the hero’s aspirations in line with the game’s humour and affectionate parody of genre conventions.

Employment is a temporary situation. The protagonist soon extricates himself from the need to do regular work – questing and killing monsters quickly make employment redundant. Work becomes only one of the choices the player can take, and not the most rewarding one. The main characteristic of work is its contribution to progress in self-fashioning and character development. The strength attribute granted by stable-raking is most relevant for the fighter class, so may be missed with little consequence by the rogue and mage.

Similarly, in Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios 2018), which prides itself on authenticity, the hero’s labour in the forge garners a strength stat boost. Again, work is presented as optional and functionally gainful, contributing to character-building.

Most such games don’t present the feudal labour relations one would expect – at least not for the hero. Non-player characters (NPCs) are bound to their place and labour, but the hero is an itinerant protagonist – already a traveller in Quest for Glory; soon thrust into the wider world in Kingdom Come. Outside the towns and villages, the wilds function as a kind of de-localised commons, unconnected to a particular community. However, the right to the commons seems hardly customary or common –the hero alone can venture where NPCs do not and access increases with progress. The hero seems to lay claim to a right to take and use the fruits of the land.

This roaming may reflect rather the commodification and mobility of labour – the uprooting of the labourer, as property claims supplanted the commons.

However, the way the hero rises through the ranks suggests a more [neo]liberal subjectivity of work as commodified identity. This also implies a certain privilege as it frames the provision of one’s labour on the ‘free’ job market as a mechanism of self-fashioning.

The way neomedieval RPGs present work aligns them with open-world games in a present-day setting, like Shenmue (Sega 1999), No More Heroes (Grasshopper Manufacture 2007) or the Grand Theft Auto games, which show a neoliberal gig economy the player is ostensibly free to pick and choose from. Their idea of work is a contemporary one. As with other aspects of these games’ neomedieval representations – such as their constructions of city space, which we’ve discussed in our previous work (2018; 2021) – we have a crosshatch of contemporary ideological constructions superimposed upon a pseudohistorical imaginary.

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