Adam Bierstedt (Ludohistory)
One research trend in game studies deals with the relationship between a player and their “avatar” in the world. Players tend to model their avatars on themselves, both in appearance and in personality. In many games, this is desirable, especially in what Adam Chapman termed “realist simulations.”
Larian Studios roasted players for this phenomenon in Baldur’s Gate 3.
In historical settings, player self-insertion can have drawbacks. Since the Annales school, much has been written exploring the “mentality” of the Middle Ages. While no single mentality describes all medieval cultures, this research has demonstrated that medieval people the world over understood their reality in very different terms than modern people do.
To use an example from my background: Ármann Jakobsson explores the “troll” in medieval Icelandic folklore as a psychosocial phenomenon. Medieval people accepted, and therefore manifested, trolls; modern people taxonomize them or explain them out of existence. In games, where NPCs see monstrous beings, players, through their avatars, find naturalistic explanations.
Consequently, avatars frequently don’t act like they are meaningfully shaped by the culture they ostensibly participate in.
While games are contemporary creations, they can successfully model social mentalities distinct from our own – I will showcase 3 games set in other historical time periods that take different strategies to do so.
1: The Thaumaturge
In The Thaumaturge, you play as Wiktor Szulski, a magician able to detect and manipulate emotions. Set in Warsaw during a revolt in 1905, The Thaumaturge is excellent in many ways, but its best tool is its “Urban Secrets.”
Thaumaturges can sense objects that another person has had an emotional reaction to. Warsaw is full of such items! Wiktor is inquisitive and prideful, and loves gathering as much information as he can. Each item, though, has incomplete information, creating small mysteries that also pique the player’s interest. These lead to historically-attested cultural events, which Wiktor sees and sketches in his notebook (the player does not witness it except through this sketch).
This aligns player and avatar interests, instead of their reactions. Players are also inquisitive, so solving diverse mysteries that avatars react to in period-appropriate ways deepens the overall mental space without losing interactivity!
2: Last Train Home
Last Train Home explores the Czechoslovakian Legion, who from 1917 to 1920 evacuated from Kyiv to Prague the long way around, crossing Russia in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the game, you command one armored train battling through Siberia.
The game models the Legion’s mentalities in two ways. Firstly, the whole game is written as a journal, mirroring historical fiction written by real Legionnaires. This narrative style gives plenty of insight into the characters’ frustrations and stress.
Additionally, the Legionnaires have personality traits that affect various scenes. These traits are similar to what Paradox Interactive does to model personalities in Crusader Kings III! However, a more limited scope and direct control of these characters in battles renders their input and disagreements more human and more grounded than the royal court in CKIII.
3: Card Shark
In Card Shark you play as an assistant to the Comte de Saint-Germain, an infamous charlatan in 18th century France. Through mastering increasingly convoluted ways of scamming people, you can unveil a deep conspiracy in the French court.
It is a game that is difficult to pin down. You meet Voltaire, support a Roma troupe, and are framed for murder within the first hour. The lesson I take from it, though, is that ‘minigames’ (a popular activity in realist simulations) do not have to be isolated activities. In many premodern cultures, games were used to negotiate social status – therefore, familiar games and tricks can be used to explore unfamiliar quarrels and ideas.
Conclusions
I see 4 lessons for medievalist games:
- Align player and avatar interests, but let the avatar have period-grounded reactions to events.
- Use real literary genres to frame the game’s narrative.
- Focused personality traits can showcase ideological diversity in a period – more isn’t always better!
- Use minigames to make unfamiliar social drama more familiar to players.
These lessons rely on good research and rich prose (the writing in all these games is incredible!). Even so, I hope they give actionable ideas for how medievalist games can showcase their setting’s mentality without sacrificing the fun.
Thanks for an excellent contribution as always, Adam. I wonder if you could say a bit more about the alignment of player and avatar interests that you illustrate so interestingly here: is it in a sense more a give-and-take relationship where we find a middle ground between modern and medieval mentalities to communicate the latter to the former, or more a way in which we ease modern players into a medieval context using aspects familiar to them and linking those to the medieval?
It’s a great question – I definitely think of it as a give-and-take relationship! If characters view the world in ways that are fundamentally unlikable or troubling (e.g. if a player character was as grossly misogynistic as Jean de Meun, for instance), I would bet most players would hate the experience. And they should – that would be bad!
So I think the balance here comes in beginning and ending in the recognition of shared humanity and experience, then using rich narrative design and systems to bring the player from that point of shared commonality into cultural particularity. Ideally, the commonality exists in both mechanics and narrative, but then allows for reinterpretation (I just finished played *Tales of Kenzera: ZAU*, and the way it re-interprets Metroidvania combat as a form of spiritual dance is a great example of this). That does take some compromises to prioritize the desired experience, though, and so that should happen early in a project.
Thanks, Adam. Really interesting stuff. I do wonder if this is an advantage for medieval fantasy games over more strictly historical ones, making it easier for players to relate by essentially getting to pick and choose what aspects of the Middle Ages to be inspired by.
Thanks for the paper! My question is a broad one – whether you think these techniques can be hauled back into more conventional big-splash genre games like BG3 or similar, or do you think we need new and different styles of medievalist game to make more room for these sorts of mentalities-focused approaches?
Both? Both.
I think a lot of the techniques hinge on simply investing in scenario design and narrative writing to create the sorts of situations and mysteries that really deepen the perception of an overall social mentality (i.e. not just what the player character thinks, but how the whole culture thinks). But writing for games is hard, and the more choices players have, the harder it will be to make every choice both historically grounded and narratively impactful.
One of the things that’s really interesting about BG3, to me, is the use of a narrator that can just… tell you what someone’s mentality is. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 does something similar where there is a narrator’s voice that explicitly tells you how Senua views the world and how she’s reacting to the events of the game. I don’t know if this is the most effective strategy, but it certainly works.
I personally think Disco Elysium helps with the narrator, though – instead of one narratorial voice, it’s a dozen, each with their own biases that reflect different aspects of the player character’s psychology, and the choice is more “which aspect of this culture influences this character.” But the sheer density of writing involved means that it has to be a smaller game in other aspects!
So… can it be hauled back? Maybe, if it’s started early in the process. Can I easily see how that would look in practice for something as gargantuan as BG3? Honestly, no.
I had a somewhat different impression of “Last Train Home”. I can see why you think it captured the mentality of the time. E.g. the way “foraging supplies” is ok when the Legion does it, but it’s “theft” when the Reds do it. The overall jingoistic tone feels out of place from a contemporary perspective, but makes sense given who the agents are.
But I felt the message and the game mechanics were not always connected. E.g. in my playing experience at least, there is no collateral damage. I once shot a civilian by accident (because it was dark and not every communist wore a uniform), and absolutely nothing happened. Apparently, only enemy units are targetable in combat.
Ideology also seems to play a much less important role than, e.g. in “Through the Darkest of Times”, that adopted a similar political framework. For example, some legionnaires were described as “communists”, but never (in my playthrough at least) considered ditching this whole “fatherland” thing and joining the revolution instead.
I did have one legionnaire come close to ditching! It seems to hinge on that character having critically low morale, which while in-scene choices can affect that, is really easy to patch up with some vodka. In historical reality, his isn’t a bad thing, though – there were some Czechoslovak communists who also tried to persuade Legionnaires to defect, but after May 1918 (when Trotsky ordered the forcible dissolution of the Legion), the general sentiment appears to have been that Legionnaires stuck together regardless of personal ideology. There are definitely exceptions – the Legion was tens of thousands strong by 1920 – but I’m not sure it’s as much of an outlier as you saw it.
As far as the rest of the mentality – I think we’re looking for two different “mentalities” there. You’re definitely right that it presents a very biased view of the Legion. But, that’s a really close mirror to some of the novels of Frantisek Langer (the Legionnaire-turned-author that gave his name to Last Train Home’s narrator) – the anti-Bolshevik sentiment, downplaying the violence of interactions with civilians (though those could be very tense!), and the desperate frustration of Legionnaires stuck in Russia after Czechoslovakia declared independence in October 1918.
That’s why I pinpointed the genre fiction as the lesson to take away from that game. It’s not a perfect mirror of the historical reality and the total diversity of thought among people who were part of or interacted with the Legion, but it does mirror in many ways the ways in which Legionnaires remembered their experience in later literature!
Great points, all in all, and I definitely agree on the genre fiction part (that ties in with my current research, in fact).
I see what you mean by the resort to later literature. But I’m still uncomfortable conflating these narratives together – especially when the memorial appropriations are not properly acknowledged or problematized (yes, there is reference to an actual veteran-novelist, but also a prologue narrator called a historian (or something of the sort), claiming what we’re about to see is actual history.)
I don’t know. Maybe I’m over sensitive because I work with a history (Ireland’s) that has had a long historiographical reckoning with its own nationalistic violence thanks to the Troubles in the later 20th century. Last Train Home’s gung-ho attitude seems a bit unpolished in comparison. Although I understand from your answer that it makes sense in the context of Czech historical memory (which I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about.)
Great paper! To build off of Markus’ question, I’m wondering if you have any specific thoughts about how games might successfully synchronise player interests to those of historically-grounded avatars while also pointing out their inherent flaws? The example that made me want to ask this (which I know you’ve talked about tons) is Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its problem with depicting Cumans uncritically through Henry’s anger for the attack on his home, which is reflected directly onto the player with no other way to explore any sort of nuance.
I think where KC:D struggles on this is twofold. 1) Henry is wildly inconsistent in reacting “medieval-y” to situations. Since he’s so unstable as a character outside of story cutscenes, he doesn’t really move with the player from common ground into a really specific mentality (as I mentioned in another comment). 2) He’s never put into a situation where his anger has really interesting consequences. There’s a handful of scenes that try and humanize the Cumans, but they’re late in the game and kinda blah. So, there’s nothing to really suggest that this anger is anything other than justified, or to signal that the player is supposed to see Henry as going too far or as victimizing people with a multi-century history of displacement and marginal existence (and thereby helping the player see a bit of that ideological diversity).
Thank you! We agree that it’s extremely hard to make character choices based on medieval mentality understandable to modern players. It’s rare even in medievalist films. From our experience of LARPing, it is very hard for a player who is not a historian to make period-appropriate choice (we are going to touch on this in our today’s paper), and it’s likely to be even harder in a game, which, in difference from role playing, does not require immersion into the character’s psyche.
(this is a joint comment from Edgar and Anastasija)
In some ways, I’m not sure that it’s “harder,” so much as the burden is shifted from the player to the developer. In a videogame, developers are able to constrain the available choices through dialogue and mechanics in ways that LARPs aren’t able to do. This can lead, in an ideal world, to all choices available to the player being “period-appropriate.” In practice, AC Valhalla kind of shows the shortfalls with this – many of the choices either 1) were “in-character” but not period-appropriate or 2) had a very different tone and direction than players wanted from their Eivor. Those aren’t problems with LARPs! But at the same time, a vast amount of research and thought on the player’s end needs to go into a LARP to create a consistently plausible historical character.
This is where my first takeaway comes in – setting up mysteries and scenes where the players’ desire to solve the mystery matches the character’s desire to see something interesting is a close enough alignment that it may alleviate the tension of a player avatar not being able to act towards the social end that the player wants them to (i.e. allying with a particular NPC, talking down an army, romancing someone, etc.).
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