32: What Makes Crusader Kings, Skyrim, and Golden Sun Similar? Proposing a Descriptive “Character Creator” Framework for Medievalist Games

Adam Bierstedt, @sagathain, Simmons University

This paper outlines an early version of a new descriptive framework for historical games, derived from gamic character creators. I hope the Character Creator Classifier (CCC) can help create ‘snapshots’ to allow faster, better selection of analytical tools.

The CCC seeks to answer 2 issues:

1- Adam Chapman outlines ‘realist’ and ‘conceptual’ simulation spectrum. While useful, this is often too broad for analysis. 2- Many Historical Game Studies conferences talk about fantasy games. How do we usefully include them in “historical” schema?

The CCC tackles these issues by creating 5 sliders: Realism, Conceptuality, Fictionality, Referentiality, and Educational Design. These are supplemented by text fields describing setting and ludic genre (themes which contain too much variability to describe via slider). Importantly, these sliders are not independent. Like with Dark Souls below, the sliders influence each other and exist in tension. Even though the sliders positions are determined by the researcher and are subjective, keep interdependence in mind with this tool.

The Realism slider describes visual and mechanical fidelity, simulating moment-to-moment of living in a physical space. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is therefore very realist. NOTE: High Realism is not high accuracy! It’s perceived immersion and affect. Conceptuality describes how a game renders larger political and social processes. Crusader Kings 3 is the obvious example, but a story about politics is also conceptual. Conceptuality exists in tension with realism, and they realistically can’t both max out in a simulation! Fictionality is how much a game pretends that its setting is not ‘real’ history. Skyrim = very fictional, despite obvious Norse influence, while Civ 6 is much less fictional (though still much more fictional than CK3).

Referentiality refers to historical/folkloric entities or places referred to by name/replica. Often but not always is inversely related to fictionality. But, the JRPG Golden Sun is very fictional and referential. Ulysses is Ulysses, even when they’re an anime magician. Lastly, Educational Design. Games designed for teaching or with lots of teaching potential have specific constraints that other games don’t. Recognizing intention and potential affects how we analyze games and so gets its own slider.

Let’s see the CCC in action with 4 examples (Golden Sun, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Discovery Tour, and Skyrim). The slider positions are assigned by me and are therefore intentionally subjective, but understanding how the sliders represent inter-related design decisions creates a snapshot of how a game intersects with ‘history’.

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Fig. 32.1: The Character Creator Classifier

The snapshot is really powerful for two reasons:

1- even a rough picture lets us describe games a little faster than just playing them for 10, 20, 50 hours. 2- the highly visual design makes identifying potential similarities easy.

It should be emphasised that the CCC is descriptive, not prescriptive! If it is useful to describe a game with this tool, that game is ‘historical.’ It also may be expanded (let me know other sliders that may help!) But hopefully it is a tool that empowers comparison in robust ways.

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