Closing Remarks
Tess Watterson In the recently released Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, the protagonist must merge together different possible pasts to save the world in a post-apocalyptic future. This year’s Middle Ages in Modern…
‘The Problem with Paladins: Eulogising Crusaders in CRPGs’
Rob Houghton Paladins are commonplace across fantasy roleplaying games. Typically appearing as knights in shining armour, these warriors are almost ubiquitous within games based on the Dungeons & Dragons rulesets – including…
Agendered Alchemy? Postmodern Rebis Analysis in Elden Ring
Marcus Jensen The world of FromSoftware’s 2022 RPG Elden Ring draws heavily on abstract alchemical processes of the Renaissance to create characters that challenge our contemporary worldviews on gender. This work focuses…
The Sign Is Added Later: Blood Magic and the Moralisation of Possible Worlds
Peter Färberböck “Medievalist fantasy games like Metaphor: ReFantazio openly engage with utopian thinking and our capacities to imagine possible worlds”. This line from the call reached me while I was playing the…
When the Past Returns as the Future: The New Rome in the Wasteland and the Roman Metaphor in Fallout: New Vegas
Yahuai Lu History in video games invariably belongs to the present. In recent years, a major consensus in historical game studies holds that games almost always reflect contemporary reality—arguably operating within “only…
Virtual Battles for the Past: Medievalism as Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Yaraslau Kot In contemporary geopolitical conflicts, historical representation is systematically weaponized across interactive media (Kot, 2026; Games Gathering & UCF, 2024). As documented in empirical research on Russian historical propaganda (Re-Vision of…
Between the Hearth and the Kremlin — Nostalgic Entanglements: Gender, Affect, and Materiality in Digital Depictions of Medieval Rus’
Kristina Wittkamp What does it mean to feel a medieval past that one has never lived? Digital games increasingly return to medieval Rus’, yet these virtual worlds are rarely neutral reconstructions; they…
‘I do not seek a marquis title but peaceful seas’: The imagination of an alternative Chinese maritime history in Uncharted Waters IV
Hanjun Shi Historical games provide players opportunities to reshape history, or even counter-narrate the ‘original’ history through intentional or unintentional anachronism. In the Japanese simulation and adventure game Uncharted Waters IV/Daikoukai Jidai…
Queens of Hell: Kleopatra, Lilith, and Possible Pasts in Medieval Fantasy Games
Kurtis Pope The monstrous-feminine has long populated our imaginations – the witch, the killer, the archaic mother, the demonic entity, the seductress and so on – serving as an allegory for the…
When an era comes to an end: agency, memory and micro-history in Pentiment
Ian Regueiro-Salcedo Pentiment (2021), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, presents a compelling case study of how digital media can engage with micro-historical and post-modern approaches to reimagine the Middle Ages. Set in a…