Temporal Experience and Medieval Contemplation in The Longing
Jessica Iolanda Costa Bispo The Longing (2020) can easily be perceived as an unconventional video game. It invites the player to take control of a small creature known simply as Shade, who is tasked…
The Wilderness, Self-Reliance and Community in Medieval Dynasty
Poppy Tester In the 2021 RPG Medieval Dynasty, the player builds and manages a medieval settlement. In the original game, the playable protagonist is Racimir. He is an eighteen-year-old refugee at the…
Tides of Pestilence: Mechanizing Eco-Anxiety within a Fourteenth-Century Dystopia
Blair Apgar As global environments rapidly degrade, the psychological toll on humanity has increasingly manifested as “eco-anxiety”—a condition Panu Pihkala identifies as rooted in feelings of uncertainty and uncontrollability regarding the global…
Skyrim Puzzles Mods: Finding Indie Freedom within Mainstream Gaming
Andrew Griffiths Skyrim is not a puzzle game, nor is it designed to heavily support such mechanics. However, enterprising modders have utilized its scripting and dialogue systems to provide just this experience.…
Reconquering Lloegyr in Crusader Kings III: Modding as a counterfactual historiographical exercise
Maxime Kremer Crusader Kings III (CK3) allows the player to mold history according to their will within the limits of the gameplay and of their abilities. As a simulator of counterfactuals, the…
Designing around medieval sources: a thought experiment
James Baillie In historical game studies, our usual mode of operation is analytical – looking at what games already do – or occasionally discussing our own personal bugbears in games, literal or…
‘Playing the Irish Annals’: Narrative Agency and the Gamic Mode of History.
Vinicius Marino Carvalho Today I wish to talk about my upcoming game, Galar. It is visual novel about the memorialization of the Black Death in Late Medieval Ireland. It is divided into three…
“KAFLI 141”: An Interactive and Immersive Heritage Gamification Experience of the Acoustics of Lögberg, Þingvellir National Park (UNESCO World Heritage Site, Iceland)
Acoustic Heritage I. Framework Þingvellir, or “the plains of the assembly,” sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the few places on Earth where you can walk between the North American and…
Keynote Address: Why we play the Middle Ages? A proposition for engaged thinking
Leandro Wallace I have changed the beginning of this piece several times by now. Events keep unfolding that matter when thinking about what is possible. At home a large and popular mobilization…
Possible Worlds and Possible Pasts: the Middle Ages in Modern Games
Tess Watterson Opening Address by Vinicius Marino Carvalho and Tess Watterson Welcome to the seventh Middle Ages in Modern Games Asynchronous Conference! To those who have joined us before – thank you…