From Medievalism to Early-Modernism by Gerzic Marina Norrie Aidan

Author:Gerzic, Marina,Norrie, Aidan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Section II

Historical Medievalism and Early-Modernism

9   Playing in a Virtual Medieval World

Video Game Adaptations of England through Role-Play

Ben Redder

Empire Earth (2001), a real-time strategy computer game that lets players build and expand civilisations from the prehistoric era to the futuristic robotic age, was my first game experience with medieval England.1 Unlike other strategy games of that time, Empire Earth implemented historical narratives through its campaign structures and game objectives, particularly the English campaign. The English campaign primarily focuses on moments of William the Conqueror, from his early life until the Battle of Hastings (1066) in his conquest of England, and significant military events between England and France during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).2 For its time, Empire Earth displayed an extensive representation of medieval England by providing players digital participation in these histories through the game’s virtual historical world, dialogue between the characters, rules, and play through global strategy and battles.

Since the release of the game in 2001, however, relatively few game designers have undertaken the task of, or expressed an interest in, adapting the history of medieval England into digital games.3 Historical games are without a doubt a popular genre for players, as well as being a creative commodity for game designers. Most of them, however, are based on the Second World War (such as the Call of Duty series), global-based or macro worlds (such as Sid Meier’s Civilization series), and histories of East Asia (such as the Dynasty Warriors series), or are hybrid sci-fi or fantasy-adventure set in different historical periods (such as the Assassin’s Creed series).4 Medieval games have more or less been both a sub-genre of historical games and a genre of video games themselves, but as medieval high-fantasy has a long and popular history in occupying and satisfying the players’ niches for fantasy, inhabiting foreign worlds, and adventure, it has either restricted or displaced the historical in many medieval games. This displacement concurrently opened a market demand for game designers to commercialise this trend, with preference for creating and consuming medieval high-fantasy video games, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015).5 The popularity of producing these types of games can be traced to older, and still popular, forms of engagement with medieval culture, role-playing, and fantasy. From the high-fantasy novel series The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien to the pre-digital, pen-and-paper table-top game Dungeons and Dragons, medieval digital games have more or less followed “remediation,” where games “incorporate, contain, reform, and re-establish old media [and literary] forms for a new cultural moment.”6 Nonetheless, the few games that have adapted England in a historical context are interesting in the way they re-use, or renew, both well-known and under-represented histories of medieval England, as well as how they are integrated into the game’s structures, narratives, space, and time.

The scarcity of history-based medieval games set in England coincides with the limited study of the relationships and intersections between historical medieval games and medievalism. Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.