The Sonic Environments of Medieval(ist) Games

Karen Cook (Hartt School, University of Hartford)

This keynote is culled from a chapter forthcoming in Music and Sonic Environments in Video Games: Listening to and Performing Ludic Soundscapes, eds. Kate Galloway and Elizabeth Hambleton, Routledge, 2024. I am grateful for my editors’ permission to reuse material for this talk.

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The Middle Ages has often been idealized as a time in which humankind lived in unity with nature, often in contrast to industrialization and urbanization. Such a Romantic view of the past has long literary roots, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Keats. In Gothic novels, the past haunts the present, sometimes literally, and the natural world is wild and dangerous. Perhaps no one combined rural idyll, untamable nature, and ancient danger more than Tolkien, whose influence on modern games need not be reviewed here.

Art relayed similar ideas of the medieval past. See, for example, Howard Pyle’s illustrations for The Story of King Arthur and his Knights (1903), in which the human-made dwellings hide behind the old, overgrown landscape.[i]

In modern media, I argue, these trends have continued in sound. My previous work explores how games construct “past-ness” through music, but here I examine diegetic soundscapes in medievalist games and suggest that they participate in Kowalik’s “green medievalist” stereotypes.

Overwhelmingly, the primary environmental sound in these games is birdsong. Usually it is a generic part of the game’s soundworld, but occasionally one might distinguish an owl or a crow. In games with night cycles, one might hear frogs or insects such as crickets or gnats. Few insect sounds occur during daytime, but in larger open-world games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, flies might buzz around a stagnant pond or a corpse.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and The First Templar feature wolves, and in games involving forests, players might hear deer, elk, or bear. In games like A Plague Tale: Innocence, the player might encounter mice, rats, and snakes, especially on farms or in underground areas.

Horse hoofbeats are omnipresent in games such as Iron Lord, Age of Empires 2, Mount & Blade, or Pillars of the Earth. Other games, like the Civilization series, include whinnies and neighs. In games with rural settings, the player might hear chickens, roosters, cows, sheep, and pigs, and in many cases dogs. Cats, however, are rare.

In-game people create myriad sounds. Footsteps are sonically textured to reflect the character’s environment, actions, and attire: sand, dirt, wood, stone, snow, mud, water; inside vs. outside; walking, running, climbing, jumping, sliding; soft boots, hard-soled sandals, armor. The sounds of various tools or weapons and modes of transportation are commonplace. World-building, simulation, and adventure games emphasize industrial sounds such as axes, pickaxes, hammers and saws, constructing buildings and extracting resources from the land. Fishing poles, arrows, swords, and spears denote either hunting or battle; boats, wheelbarrows, and carts signify travel and trade. Some games also utilize speech or singing.

Games also depict weather and flora through sound. Most of these games include the sounds of wind: trees creak, drop branches, lose their leaves; grasses swish. Rain hitting rooftops or leaves is common, on some occasions accompanied by thunder and lightning. Snow also occurs in a few games, resulting in a softer, more muffled soundscape.

Bodies of water routinely appear: characters settle near coastlines or live near oceans, seas, rivers, and creeks, as in Age of Empires. Players hear waves lapping or crashing over boats, as well as boats creaking, raindrops splashing, or characters swimming. Rock and stone are made audible through mining, climbing, crafting, or walking. Gravel paths crunch, dirt paths offer muffled thuds, mud squishes. Fire is omnipresent; campfires crackle, torches sputter, and raging infernos burn.

The last category of diegetic sounds is human-made structures and devices. In most of these games, characters interact with buildings, from huts and tents to castles and cathedrals to mines, tunnels, and crypts. Many require the player to construct these buildings to grow one’s city (the Civilization series) or to destroy them (Besiege). In adventure and open-world games, players must enter the buildings to obtain supplies or seek shelter. Movement or speech reveals the buildings’ acoustic spaces and materials: an item dropped onto the stone floor of a castle creates a different reverberant sound than the same item dropped onto the dirt floor of a hut. Diegetic speech is not uncommon, but communication can also happen through bells or horns, which are used to tell time or sound alarms, as in the Assassin’s Creed series.

The natural environments in these games are closely linked to stereotypes about the medieval period. In times of industrial growth, the medieval past was often envisioned as an idyllic time of oneness with nature. See, for example, Sherwood Forest as a safe haven for Robin Hood and his men, an impenetrable obstacle to his foes, and a buffer against urban, modernized forces, as seen in Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood or Robin Hood: Sherwood Builders. Nature is constructed as anti-modernist, anti-industrialist, and representative of a purity that is in danger of being lost. In these games, sonic fidelity to a believably medieval landscape emphasizes “natural” sounds over and against modern, industrialized ones.

We know much about what kinds of sounds actually existed in the historical Middle Ages, and they certainly include the kinds of sounds I’ve mentioned thus far, in some fashion. Other historical sounds, however, have no real video game counterpart—musical moments, religious practices, and a host of public sounds. But most of the medieval sounds left out of modern video games are the ones most closely related to urban life, especially certain religious and civic practices that are no longer commonplace and therefore less sonically familiar. In short, the sonic cues used in these games are neither inauthentic nor inaccurate, but they are certainly incomplete; they err on the side of familiarity, and they connect modern notions of rurality to a long history of Romantic green medievalism.

While familiar sounds aid player engagement with a game’s environment, mechanics, and plot, they also conflate modern rural societies with a sense of pastness, even backwardness. This allows players to claim a game’s medieval lands and peoples as their own. And, in a neat case of circular logic, this reclamation of the past, coupled with game goals for growth, development, and “civilization,” leads the player to re-enact the kinds of settler-colonial and industrial activities upon the medieval landscape that led, in a manner of speaking, to the present day. While this has been explored in studies of gameplay, narrative, and visual features, I argue here it is also reinforced through sound.

Ludography

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[i] http://www.oldbookart.com/2008/08/25/howard-pyle-king-arthur-and-his-knights/