AGAINST WORLDBUILDING, AND OTHER PROVOCATIONS: Essays on History, Narrative, and Game Design by Alexis Kennedy

Author:Alexis Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2021-05-31T17:00:00+00:00

Royal Blood

(Eurogamer, December 2016)

This article is dedicated to everyone who has ever played Sylvanas Windrunner too early in Hearthstone.

Before anthropology was really a thing, there was an anthropologist called Sir James George Frazer. Try saying that with a Glaswegian accent. It's like toasting the Fates.

Frazer's most famous for The Golden Bough, published in 1890 (not to be confused with the Golden Dawn, the occult order founded around the same time by the equally wonderfully sonorously named Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who was disappointingly from Hackney and not Scottish at all - help what has happened to this sentence - PULL UP KENNEDY PULL UP -)

The occult, religion, myth were all big in the dying years of the nineteenth century, which is why the Golden Dawn took off and why The Golden Bough sold so well, despite being prosaically subtitled 'A Study in Comparative Religion'. It was a colossally learned and influential account of myth and religious practice across the world, and its central thesis was that early religion revolved around a very particular narrative of kingship. That central thesis has been debunked now, but it's a hell of a narrative.

Frazer pointed out that myths are full of gods who die and return. They often do this for our benefit - dying to fertilise the earth or absolve us of our crimes, and returning in some changed state. (If you know Christianity, you might be thinking this sounds familiar, and you're right. It was one of the reasons The Golden Bough caused such a fuss - Frazier identified Christ as another dying god in another religion. In the age of Dawkins this sounds pretty tame, but it wasn't an 1890s-safe opinion).

Frazer's thesis, then, was that these early cultures often appointed a king who embodied the a fertility god who was married to the earth-mother. This is your classic god-who-dies-and-returns setup, but of course mortals can't die and return. So at the end of a year (or three, or seven) the locals would sacrifice the king and replace him with another one.

It might have happened somewhere; it probably didn't happen nearly as universally as Frazier suggested. But what a way to maximise the bang for your king buck. And as a political act, it's a lot simpler and more dramatically satisfying than an election.

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Before board games were really a thing, there was a board game called chess. Proto-chess appeared in India and came to Europe via Persia, then Muslim North Africa, then the Moorish invasion of Spain.

The most important piece in chess is the king. But the most powerful piece is the queen. How come? Women didn't get much respect in the Middle Ages.

For starters, it looks like the queen wasn't originally the queen: when chess was the Persian game, it was the 'vizier' or 'advisor', the king's closest counsellor. As such, he was just a king-lite. His only legal move was to go one space diagonally, which made him barely better than a pawn. It seems that after chess came to

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