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 function as (ideologically) contested stages. This paper applies three theoretical frameworks to analyze how games construct the digital medieval Rus’ through nostalgia, affective orientation, and material entanglement.
Drawing on Ania Loomba’s (2005) colonial nostalgia, I argue these games selectively retrieve an ideologically charged Rus’ past, shaping it into one of two dialectically gendered forms: either a cozy, feminized domestic haven or a deterministic, masculinist trajectory of progress and decline. This binary is constitutive, channeling the past through present longings. The hearth and the Kremlin thus stand as twin poles of a peculiar nostalgia that manifests contemporary desires.
Using Sara Ahmed’s (2010) affective economies, I show how objects and their inherent mechanisms are oriented to produce gendered feelings tied to promises: coziness around domestic spheres, ambition around strategic ones. Applying Ian Hodder’s (2012) entanglement, I argue that specific material objects and their ludic visualisation constitute these worlds — an interdependent materiality manifesting a fabricated heritage.
Close readings of ludic visualities — screenshot series and interface analysis (Table 1) — yield two extremes. In The Sims 4 medieval CC, domesticity is almost exclusively cozy: hearths, textiles, and wooden furniture yield a purely emotional payoff (Fig. 1). At the opposite pole, Europa Universalis IV orients players entirely toward territorial consolidation via coring, expanding, and managing Muscovite realms; its sonic background (A Russian Heart, Ivan’s Dream, Following the Volga) underscores a manifest destiny with no domestic sphere (Fig. 2).
| Game | Orientation Axis | Visual Palette |
| The Sims 4 medieval CC | Domesticity (exclusive) | Warm, soft textures |
| Europa Universalis IV | Conquest (exclusive) | Sparse abstract map |
| Black Book | Oscillating hearth/wilds | Folkloric |
| Crusader Kings III (RICE) | Soft-power domestic, linked to conquest | Abstract maps, cultural notions |
| Age of Empires IV | Conquest (strategic) | Images of distinctive historical buildings |
| Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord | Conquest (martial) | Gritty battlefields |
Table 1: Ludic orientation and visual palette per game
Between these poles, titles oscillate in instructive tension. Black Book centers on the witch Vasilisa, who gathers village resources to mend a home, staging the hearth as refuge against the demonic wilds and evoking nostalgia for a lost premodern rural life in 19th-century pre-Revolutionary Russia (Fig. 3). Crusader Kings III‘s RICE mod Galicia-Volhynia: Borderlands of Red Rus adds regional peculiarities and Russo-Slavic rituals whose domestic soft power generates prestige (Fig. 4). Age of Empires IV renders the Rus’ Landmarks — St Basil’s Cathedral, Dormition Cathedral — as strategic choices for military power, orienting players toward the teleological rise of (Muscovite) Rus’ (Fig. 5). Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord reduces the Rus-derived Sturgia to a warband of recruiting and sieging (Fig. 6).
Together these examples show that orientation is never incidental: it decides which past is felt and how the player is bound to it. Such worlds foreclose genuinely contingent digital pasts — worlds that resist tidy binaries and embrace the messiness of open history. A caveat remains: the affective-orientation lens risks underestimating how players resist, subvert, or reframe these orientations, and flattening ambiguous play within a single title. I therefore call for closer attention to negotiated and deviant play.
Bibliography
Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things. Wiley-Blackwell.
Ludography
Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition. Developed by Relic Entertainment, published by Xbox Game Studios, 2021. Windows PC.
Black Book. Developed by Morteshka, published by Flylemon, 2021. Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One.
Crusader Kings III. Developed by Paradox Interactive, 2020. Windows PC.
Europa Universalis IV. Developed by Paradox Development Studio, published by Paradox Interactive, 2013. Windows PC, macOS, Linux.
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Developed by TaleWorlds Entertainment, published by TaleWorlds Entertainment, 2022. Windows PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S.
The Sims 4 . Developed by Maxis, published by Electronic Arts, 2014. Windows PC, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One.
Author Bio
Dr. Kristina Wittkamp is a Senior Researcher at the Chair of Modern Eastern European History, University of Passau. Her current research focuses on Rus‘ and its legacy as discoursive topics in diachronic perspectives. Medievalism and historical cultures in its East (Central) European ‘successor societies’.
Obviously in the strategic-masculinised sphere, encountering the non-Russian other confrontationally is a big element. Are there any occasions of such encounter in Russian games that involve the “hearth sphere” more, either direct human encounters or encounters with definitionally non-Russian material culture? How are those handled?
That’s a really productive question, thanks! It pushes right at the seam the hearth/Kremlin binary tends to smooth over, and I’m grateful for it. Here are a few observations from my material:
Where the hearth sphere does stage an encounter, it tends to render the “other” as supernatural rather than human or ethnic. Black Book is the clearest case: the demonic wilds press in on Vasilisa’s domestic space, but the intrusion is figured as metaphysical — demons, pagan spirits, the uncanny — rather than as an encounter with a “non-Russian” people. That’s telling, because it lets the encounter be resolved entirely within a folk-Christian frame (ritual, prayer, hearth-magic).
More often, the hearth sphere forecloses the encounter altogether. The Sims 4 medieval CC is a nearly closed, homogeneous space — no “other” ever enters, which is itself an ideological move. And in the Crusader Kings III Galicia-Volhynia mod, “soft power through the domestic” accompany military action: the non-Russian neighbor can also be persuaded through ritual and prestige mechanics rather than faced directly.
So my hunch is that the encounter with the non-Russian other is almost exclusively a privilege of the Kremlin sphere — EUIV’s steppe hordes, AoE IV’s Mongols — while the hearth sphere either translates the other into the supernatural or excludes it entirely. It’s a point I’d like to develop further. Do you have a case you’d read against this — an encounter in the hearth sphere you think I’ve missed? I’d be curious.
Thanks, this is really interesting. I was wondering if you could expand a little on the difference made by some of these being mods, and some being ‘official’ parts of the game – partly as to whether you think the mods are influenced by what players find in games elsewhere? (Whether to mimic or reject depictions they find in other games). Of course if a player can mod a game (or even choose to download a mod) they are to some extent I suppose taking more ownership over the kind of past they want to ‘feel’ in a game; does that have a significant impact here when comparing across games?
This is a really sharp point, and it gets at a tension I flagged (too briefly) in the paper’s caveat — the risk of treating these games as closed designs and underweighting what players actually do with them. Your question helps me push that further, so thanks. I would like to emphasize:
Mods aren’t a “purer” or “smaller” version of official content — they’re a different authorial layer with a similar orienting logic. The Sims 4 medieval CC and the CK3 RICE mod are community-made, yet they reproduce similar scripts: CC centers on hearth, textile, and home; RICE’s flavor events feed the domestic soft-power loop. For me that’s the crucial point — the binary isn’t simply imposed top-down by developers, it’s co-produced and desired by players who seek out that specific past. Which complicates any simple “player agency equals resistance” story.
On mimicry vs. rejection: I think mods do both, but within a remarkably stable repertoire. The “medieval cozy” aesthetic circulating through Sims CC is clearly in dialogue with broader cozy-gaming culture and with other mods — creators borrow, iterate, refine. And a mod like RICE explicitly positions itself against “generic” medieval representations by adding regional specificity. What’s striking, though, is that both moves — mimicry and rejection — happen inside the hearth/Kremlin structure rather than against it. Rejection occurs at the level of content, not of orientation.
And yes, downloading or building a mod is a real act of ownership over which past to feel. But it’s ownership over the selection of an orientation, not over the orientation itself: you choose the cozy past over the conquest past, yet the chosen package still orients you through its design. Modding doesn’t dissolve the framework — it relocates it one level up, from “what the game makes you feel” to “what past you volunteer to feel.” That’s precisely why the mod cases matter: they suggest the nostalgic entanglement isn’t just a commercial imposition, but something players actively want.
You’re right that this deserves more room than the paper could give it. Do you know of mods that meaningfully break with the hearth/Kremlin binary rather than deepening it? I’d love to compare a counter-example.
Thank you, Kristina!
You concluded the paper stressing the importance of not assuming automatic player conformity. There have been a few attempts to theorize that in game studies, coming from different directions and disciplinary traditions.
In your own experience, what do you think is a fruitful theoretical framework to understand how these messages get assimilated/negociated/subverted by players?
Excellent question — and one the paper’s closing caveat only gestures at. The most visible entry point is Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding: your assimilated/negotiated/subverted maps onto his dominant/negotiated/oppositional positions. But I’d argue no single framework covers it, because a game’s “message” isn’t one message. I would also consider Sicart’s “procedural bias” for negotiation at the level of mechanics and de Certeau/Flanagan for subversion as practice. Especially Sicart takes both the design’s bias and the player’s ethics seriously, and he explains why assimilation is the default — the player’s framework usually already matches the design’s. In my corpus that’s mostly what we see. Real subversion is the exception, not the rule — exactly why we should neither assume conformity nor romanticize agency. Would be curious how you’d weigh this.