The Middle Ages in Modern Games: ‘Worlds of Learning’

The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research at the University of Winchester is pleased to sponsor The Middle Ages in Modern Games strand at the Leeds International Medieval Congress (IMC), 7 to 10 July 2025. The theme of the Congress is ‘worlds of learning’.

In engagement-oriented classrooms, games have become powerful tools for educators and students alike. While traditionally viewed as leisure activities, games are increasingly recognized for their potential to enhance learning across disciplines. Video games, board games, and roleplaying games can all serve as valuable pedagogical tools, fostering deeper engagement with course material and promoting the development of key cognitive skills. Beyond this, games must consider how players learn mechanics and gameplay in order to ensure player success. This onboarding process typically utilizes numerous different mechanisms both within and without the game, and its implementation is subject to developer standards and is not industry standard.

This strand addresses both the role of learning within games, as well as the use of games as pedagogic tools. We invite papers and sessions that explore the educational potential of these games, examining both how they function as learning tools and how they depict the concept of learning itself within their design and storytelling. We also welcome papers and sessions addressing any aspects of the medieval period or medievalism in any forms of digital or tabletop games.

Topics may include (but are not restricted to):

•Teaching Medieval History, broadly defined, through Games

•Knowledge creation in Medievalist games

•Depictions of learning, preaching, and/or teaching in Medievalist games

•Simulating history in the classroom through roleplay

•The Global Middle Ages in Modern Games

•Crafting and building as hands-on history simulation

•Map development and location discovery in Medievalist games

•Choice-based gameplay and altering the Medieval past

•Empowering subaltern perspectives through play

•Senses and information gathering in Medievalist games

•Indices, Codices, and expert knowledge

•Player choice and Discovery learning in Medievalist Games

•Gameplay mechanics in Medievalist games

•Pedagogical strategies involving gameplay in Medievalist games

We encourage submissions from medievalists or games and media scholars and professionals at any point in their career—Postgraduate Students, Early Career Researchers, Independent Scholars and members of any groups under-represented within the academy are particularly welcome. We also welcome pieces dealing with any region of the globe, and within a broad definition of ‘medieval’—including the fantasy genre.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and brief biographies as attachments in Word to midagesmodgames@gmail.com by Friday 13 September 2024.

Our previous strands at Leeds IMC can be found here.

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