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 otherwise. What if we set the net wider in terms of looking for inspiration?
In this short design case study, I’m going to make an abstracted attempt at doing that: I’m going to semi-randomly pick something medieval and design around it. I drew up a list of twenty western Asian and southeastern European high medieval texts, then dice-rolled to randomise book, chapter, and page or passage, and picked three:
- Page 36 of John Kinnamos’ Chronicle. This is from 1144, and mostly covers Manuel Komnenos recalling and reconciling with his uncle in the Pontus and brother in Constantinople after various political plots.
- Law 21 in Mkhitar Gosh’s Armenian law code. Late 12th century. This stipulates that Armenian peasants are free to live where they choose if they leave: if they are prevented from leaving by a lord, their children should not be.
- Mkhitar Gosh’s Colophon, section two. Yes, I somehow got the only pair of texts on the list by the same author. This covers the religious councils of 1139 among the Albanians/Aghuanians (that is to say, Caucasian Albanians, a former kingdom in the eastern Caucasus that was by this time a regional identity falling largely within the Armenian religious community). That, after a gap of some years, anointed a new Catholicos of the Albanians, and blessed a lot of new chrism (christening oil), which had run in such short supply that people were using water instead.
What here might provide us with game inspiration? First, we have some core narrative concepts – exile, forgiveness, missing a religious leader, freedom from servitude – to play with. Second, we have fairly contemporary material chronologically, so there is the possibility for a particularly historically grounded loose connection between these elements. Third, we have some activities. Travel in the case of the exiles, or in the case of the imagined freed peasant or their child, debate and travel in the case of the Albanian clerics brought together.
It feels like this is bringing together some sort of Canterbury Tales situation – or, indeed, an adventuring party. Whilst Manuel’s uncle was only sent as far as Heracleia in the western Pontus, sending exiles further afield did happen including his cousin and eventual successor Andronikos ending up in the Caucasus, so we can shift a less historically grounded, less senior Byzantine noble over to meet our other travellers, a peasant (or peasants) whose priest advised a reluctant noble that he should be allowed to leave and seek a new place to live, and an Armenian or Albanian monk carrying chrism or perhaps escorting a senior foreign cleric.
These characters are also neatly well motivated: the Byzantine as a military aristocrat will be trying to find someone to grant them land or to serve militarily, the peasants are presumably trying to find somewhere with a better lord to start a new life, the monk has an escort/delivery sidequest to do. There are tensions in these motivations too: the Byzantine noble is going to have different Christological views to the Armenians (and may be educated enough to express them),
Finally, how could we mechanise this? One could just play these guys at a D&D table quite easily, but I think as a standalone game the core objective might be to focus on exploration and the party. Balancing the needs of our party could essentially be a case of morale resource management, with storylet-style design (see for example Fallen London or Wildermyth) giving us particular story moments that can come in randomised orders.
And there you have it – a miniature bit of design through medieval text and randomisation. As an experiment this got me much closer to something that fits familiar modern gaming tropes than I expected, and I may try repeat tests to see if other random sets work out as well (the three passages above were literally the first three I picked). Whilst I needed my own wider knowledge to work out from these passages, using randomisation as a shortcut to serendipity and discovering historically-informed motivations, events, and processes that we can build game mechanics around might have useful potential for helping think through how we can, and could, convey medieval ideas through gameplay.
References
John Cinnamos, The Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus trans. Charles Brand (1976).
Mkhitar Gosh, The Law Code [Datastanagirk’] of Mx’itar Gos’ trans. Robert W. Thompson (2000).
Mkhitar Gosh, Mkhitar Gosh’s Colophon, or, The Aghuanian Chronicle trans. Robert Bedrosian (2007).
Biography
Dr. James Baillie is the Digital Humanities coordinator for the Institute for Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a collaborator on the Coding History project at the University of Oslo. His research interest include the medieval Caucasus in the 11th-13th centuries, prosopography and social network analysis, the interactions between data models and historiography, and the modern understanding of medieval history especially in games. He is a co-convenor of the Middle Ages in Modern Games conferences, and of the Medieval Caucasus Network, and a member of the International Association of Byzantine Studies’ Commission on Prosopography, as well as being lead convenor of the Coding Medieval Worlds workshop series. Outside academia, he is an active game developer, having released his last title The Exile Princes in 2024 and more recently working to support the development of the forthcoming game Innkeep! as well as his own, as yet unannounced, next game project. He is also chair of the Exilian indie creative and academic projects community.
Image credits: Base characters by Johannes “wulax” Sjölund, main background by craftpix, adjustments and domed church image my own.
Thank you so much for this James – I really love this as a thought experiment, especially seeing how the randomness forces us to think of things we likely otherwise wouldn’t have drawn out of those sources in isolation or only in amongst a wider set of sources. I’ve always been very hesitant about randomisation, with a tendency towards assuming that hand-picked/deliberate organisation is inherently going to be more meaningful or produce better combinations, but I’m more convinced every time we talk about game design like this! Could you talk a little bit about how much work actually goes into setting up the parameters to make randomisation work the way you want it to in something like randomised order for story elements if you turned this idea into a game? Or in other games you’ve designed, as obviously this was just a hypothetical! To someone without as much understanding of the back-end of game development, for this kind of scale of concept, where does the benefit of randomised elements come in or where does it start to be outweighed by the effort needed to ensure those elements still add up to the story or theme that you wanted to convey as the designer?
So for this experiment the randomisation was pretty genuinely fully random (excepting the initial selection of sources but that was fairly broad).
When it comes to actually randomising things within a game like story elements, it needs a lot more thought and constraints, and it also depends how big and how specific the steps are. If it’s big plot points, it’s easier to lose coherence if there’s a randomisation element, whereas smaller steps that can change things more gradually often work better, especially if there’s then a way of testing that against an overall requirement or mechanic (so if you’re gaining a resource, I might have a system that caps gain/loss in case the player’s luck or unluck gets ridiculous). A lot of that’s a testing problem, running a lot of simulations of the system you’re building until the feel is right.
Sometimes that can mean reducing the randomness, but not always sometimes it just means having particular combinations that the system rejects or accounts for in some way. So it might be “if you get X, you can’t then immediately get Y”, or having fixed points that let the player have a defined aim or point to reset what they’re doing with the randomness, or having a situation where if you get both X and Y, you also get Z which makes that make more sense. For the latter, an example would be in The Exile Princes where characters have romances and characters have separate mechanics for if they actually like one another as people: I could have reduced the fluctuation to avoid situations where those were out of synchrony, but what I actually did was wrote extra dialogue lines for the specific “these people are in a romantic relationship and arguing all the time” outcome to make that work narratively.
I hope that makes some sense! I can probably think of some better examples if useful.
This sounds so fun! It reminds me of the TTRPG design workshop Thom Gobbitt and I attended earlier this year at Leeds. It didn’t involve randomization (at least, not to this degree) but it encouraged us to mix-and-match diparate sources and themes into a game design idea.
I think my question is: even though the exercise is simple, it *does* require a deal of familiarity with the sources to be able to put it together. How do you see this previous research being incorporated into the design? Or to word it differently, how should one with a less-than-specialist-level knowledge of medieval sources (e.g. a classroom teacher) proceed to perform a similar design exercise with satisfactory results?
That’s a really good question. I think it depends on how much less knowledge the teacher has: for example, the average UK school teacher would not know the point above about Albanian meaning Caucasian Albanian (or indeed Iberian meaning Georgian) in medieval Byzantine sources. Stuff on that level I think you need the basics on before you can really approach some of this material, or you risk having things that are too incoherent or in some cases dangerously wrong. So you’d need material that had been a bit more filtered and selected by a historian (which loses some of the exploratory power of the method), or you’d need a historian in the loop (which is not in reach of most classroom teachers).
For a classroom application my instinct would be to get historians and teachers building much more structured design tasks than this sort of unstructured work: the average student (or indeed teacher) also doesn’t have a lot of game design experience so things that would be super intuitive to me like “hey this fits into the narrative structure I’d need for an adventuring-party setup” also won’t necessarily slot into place easily. It’d be a fun thing to write a book that has “pick from among these abstracts, pick which of these game setups would work best” as design-level challenges, but I think it would require an extra layer of pre-selection.
[…] Annals: Narrative Agency and the Gamic Mode of History’– Vinicius Marino Carvalho14h40 – ‘Sources and Serendipity: Experimenting with randomisation and medievalism’– James […]
I love this concept. I have a technique for my own creative writing projects where I consider how a character would work within various other settings. Conveniently, this includes a Middle Ages example: Ars Magica. Each House has its own philosophies and methodologies, and in considering which fits the character best, I dig into what really makes them tick.
I feel silly saying this now, but I’ve never thought of doing the opposite, and taking a selection of results and seeing what sort of character they inspire. I’ll have to set up a randomizer. Thanks!
You’re very welcome – I hope you come up with something interesting for you! And yeah, I’m hoping to do some more experiments of this kind and write them up at some point 🙂
Thank you so much for this! I love the thought experiment turned design workshop. With your permission, may I extrapolate from this into a lesson for my students?
Absolutely! I’d love to see whatever you come up with, and if any further thoughts on anything from my end would be useful please do drop me an email at any time (james dot baillie at oeaw.ac.at) 🙂
I agree with those who’ve said this sounds like a great classroom exercise, or a history-themed gamejam prompt. I wonder, though, in relation to things we’ve been discussing in other threads, whether it has to be so reliant on textual sources, as these are maybe likely to limit the kinds of history that make it into the games? (I don’t know whether this is *as* much of a problem outside of classics, but for us this approach would often lead to women only included as stereotypes for furthering of male-oriented narratives!) Can you see the same sort of approach working for e.g. a selection of material culture or visual/art sources?
That’s a great point. My instinct would be that yes, you absolutely could find a way to add that, probably either by using archaeological reports or databases of material. I think the difficulty is, as with textual sources, what you know and what you can do with that. Something like an archaeological report on a site I think would work quite well as you could get the wider sense of e.g. “we had this cemetery in Dmanisi, it had these monumental constructions, this section was Islamic, this section was for the Christians” and then you have a backdrop of things you can make use of in that location, a sense that it’s place where these communities might interact, and so on. Things more in the individual object/museum artefact line are often a bit harder to do that with unless the artefact can be turned into a particular sort of quest object, and then you end up only handling elite artefacts which loses some of the potential benefit of bringing in archaeological material. There’s also things like sigillography in the Byzantine case, but that requires even more context as to who on earth these people were and what all the titles mean. So I guess the answer overall is yes, but things that provide more context or can be handled by someone with more context tend to lead to better outcomes, and I think there’s some specific things to think about with material culture to apply that.
Since you mentioned the issue of women specifically – terms of the actual balance for this test, whilst some of the sources in my 20-text stack certainly are misogynistic and there’s many times more men then women mentioned (I’d guess five or six to one), I certainly don’t think I’d say they’re only included as stock/flat stereotypes. Narrative epics and histories from this period have some quite interesting and complex female characters, and this is a period where there are quite a few very politically prominent women especially across the Caucasus/Levant region so there are texts in this set that have particular women as their main central concern and/or very much go out of their way to give discourses about women’s power. Non-elites more generally are certainly something that gets sidelined: the fact that I got a section mentioning peasants in any way for the above test was probably an even lower-probability event than getting something discussing an elite woman. You’re absolutely right in general that a broader base of sources helps, and that’s true within the textual world too: including law codes which have to deal with day to day events more, and narrative epics which have different incentives re what characters appear, as well as the histories all definitely helps diversify what can come out here.
Very interesting, thanks! I wonder if images is also a way of working in different ideas and types of history – for example if you include a painting and then ask people to design a game from that; whether that’s as the ‘how did they all get here’ narrative or even ‘where do they go after this moment’. I think for a lot of these it’s fine to think quite broadly about inspiration – objects, for example, don’t necessarily have to be quest objects if they still lead to ideas about character/narrative beyond that object? Yes, I did of course note gender, but in some ways as you note the class issue is even bigger if using literary materials (of any kind), which material culture or images might also help avoid. Interesting to think about, anyway – thanks for making me do so!
Yes, I think the “if they still lead to ideas about character/narrative beyond that object” is totally the heart of the matter and was what I was (perhaps more clumsily) getting at with the context question – for a lot of day to day objects it’s pretty difficult to be certain what character or narrative we should derive from that, unless you have enough context to be able to go “well this is an Islamic glaze that was first found in this region about a century earlier, but this is a fairly marginal site, so we may be seeing evidence of this sort of pottery being more widely available to wealthier peasant strata through trade” and then you’re into something that you can start thinking of stories around, activities of exchange etc etc. But that’s a lot of extra work for me to check as a non-archaeologist historian, let alone in a classroom setting where being confronted with objects without much context may not tell anyone much more than “well these people definitely ate food”.
Artwork is another matter of course, but that has its own skews which are often at least as big as those in the textual material, especially as overwhelmingly we’re talking about religious production in terms of the surviving evidence and with very skewed survival: if you did medieval Georgia more visualised through its *surviving* art then its Muslim and Kipchak and pastoralist minorities probably lose out a lot in representation for example. It’s certainly not uncomplicated in any direction. But important food for thought re visual material and I’ll have to mull over some more what the possibilities might be there – thank you.
I really like this – there’s a lot of scope for roleplay and associated historical empathy here. Are you envisaging the play as cooperative, or would it work with characters pulling in different directions?
Honestly, you could do it either way, that would sort of be the next step. I think if I ran it as a TTRPG it would be cooperative, if I ran it as a boardgame it might be cooperative but with a secret extra objective, and as a computer RPG one can do all sorts of things depending on whether the player is the whole party or one character therein. My overall instinct would be to run the above scenario in a single player format where you have to manage the party, which I think is often a less stressful way for people to explore people having competing goals than actually confronting people with other humans working at cross-purposes none of whom have a very intuitive understanding of the stakes involved?
Thanks James. That sounds like a smart move. Now to apply this in the classroom…
Hi James, thanks for the excellent paper – lovely to see the kinds of texts you’re working with, and how the luck of the dice brought you a rather suggestive and coherent frame. I like the idea of an emergent plausible setting coming from inspiring each character in the game from a given text, rather than setting several characters into exploring a single text. Bringing intertextuality as a mode of analysis!
I find myslef wondering about how far that potential for inferring connections can be stretched/restricted? that is, are there any combinations of texts that could theoretically be rolled from your table that would have been particualrly challenging? or woudl they simply have led you to approaching the gamification approaches to play to different strengths?
I think the answer to those questions is “I don’t know but I want to sit down and find out sometime soon”! I need to experiment with this more to see what other combinations I end up getting out of this table. I am sure a lot of combinations could have been much more challenging though – but that might give rise to opportunities of its own (he says, perhaps over-hopefully).
Thank you so much, James! As others have already said, this is such a great thought experiment, and it also feels like something that would work wonderfully as a game jam exercise in the kind of source-reading class that can otherwise easily send students to sleep!
Randomisation is such a good idea. At least in my own research, I increasingly find that, when I don’t have enough time to read through a body of sources systematically, it is very easy to fall into simply following the citation trails of the secondary literature, and to inherit the selected visions that come with that. Why have I never thought of rolling dice?
It makes me very curious about what might happen if we introduced more game mechanics into historical research itself. In that sense, historical game studies would not only be about studying how ideas of history are represented through games, but also about asking what new perspectives and pathways might emerge from a form of historical research that is itself somehow played.
I also really enjoyed your description of all these activities coming together as something like an adventuring party. As someone in Asia whose first impressions of the “European Middle Ages” came partly through D&D, one of my earliest impressions of the medieval world was precisely travel and mobility. I have often wondered whether this tendency to imagine mobility as such a defining feature of medieval Europe is itself a projection of modernity onto the Middle Ages through games. Is it partly our contemporary preference for travel being projected into game worlds? Or is there something historically distinctive here when compared with other ancient or premodern societies?
The fact that your randomly selected texts themselves ended up foregrounding travel makes this a particularly inspiring experiment for me.
I think this mobility question is definitely an interesting one, and my instinct is that it has a complex dual answer – which is to say, mobility can both be a defining societal feature *and* actually quite a rare exception. Precisely because travel is more difficult, it becomes a much larger societal problem and potential source of narrative, so travel becomes something that is much higher risk and higher reward, something fewer people are doing but which is very textually prominent precisely because of that. Medieval texts are consequently very into travelogues (whether that’s Marco Polo and John Mandeville’s travels from my end of Eurasia, Ibn Battuta or Ibn Fadlan from SW Asia, or Journey to the West and the Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions from your end of the landmass!). It’s also in a sense why pilgrimage works, the fact that it’s not just going to a sacred place but the devotional practice of the hardships of travel.
But that sort of marvel at travel is partly maintained by the fact it’s rare and few people do it, or people don’t get to do it often. If I booked a plane and went to Singapore next week, it’d be a bit of an interesting little trip and unusually expensive and spontaneous for me, but it wouldn’t be something I could write a book about in and of itself. Doing a pilgrimage in a Mercedes with air con just isn’t the same. So we can (and, I think, did) simultaneously have a world in which travel and especially the *process* of travel was a more important part of the imaginary but where a lot of people never got to travel very far at all. I do think we lose that localness and groundedness in some views of the middle ages, and particularly short-range and regular travel (eg pastoralists with herds) or the weird individualities of local communities and their devotional practices, because those things are more alien to modern urbanites. The focus on travel in D&D is an odd mix where part of it is coming out of a medievalist literature tradition that really did care about travel details – Tolkien thinks a lot about food and routes and so on, and Gygax picked up on that strongly – but also where going places is something that feels fairly natural to its modern audience. I have no numbers to prove this but I sort of suspect that over time D&D in play is retaining travel in the pure mobility sense but losing some of that grounded “you make camp, who’s on watch, what are you eating” part as post-Tolkien fantasy drops more of it and it’s something fewer players have experience with. If you’ve never been in significant environmental hardship or danger it’s wildly easy to underestimate how significant that can be, and people today I think have a bit less sense of it being built into their narratives except perhaps in survival games as a genre, and even survival games tend to make dying a pretty low-stakes experience and make resources pretty plentiful. So maybe we’re losing some narrative sense of travel processes in gaming in the Fast Travel empowered world? I don’t know, this is a ramble off the top of my head and I should think on it all some more. Thank you for the comment and thoughts! 🙂