Today I wish to talk about my upcoming game, Galar. It is visual novel about the memorialization of the Black Death in Late Medieval Ireland.
It is divided into three chapters, each addressing a step in our collective process of assimilation of the non-human into cultural narratives: from raw appreciation of the forces of nature to the abstractions and calculations of contemporary history. The first chapter – the prototype of which can be played here – takes a posthuman, philosophical approach to our relationship with more-than-human hyperobjects [1]. The second, discussed here, discusses how Late Medieval writers wrote down the history of the plague.
Like any medieval source, annals were not neutral accounts. Among other things, they promoted political narratives highlighting the careers of their sponsors, as well as other matters of regional interest. Consequently, their subject matter was selective: the plague – or anything else, for that matter – was important to the extent that it helped frame or substantiate their agenda. Whence numerous mentions of aristocrats victimized by the plague, as well as accounts of plague outbreaks during wartime – an aristocratic activity chronicled in great detail – but only terse descriptions of its impact among the general population.
In the second chapter of Galar, the player character is an ollamh in seanchas: a high-ranking literato tasked with compiling annals to chronicle the last century of his patron’s lineage’s history.
Deciding how to fulfill these demands comprise the core of the gameplay experience. The ollamh protagonist must ensure the king is pleased with his work, deal with conflicts of interest among members of its oireacht (the local aristocracy), and add his own voice to the material – exercising what Conrad Hirschler [2] called narrative agency. There are no fail states, but different characters will attempt to encourage or dissuade the player into including certain passages and writing them down in certain ways.
Structurally, the game is an example of the ‘gamic mode of history’: an attempt to map game mechanics directly into historiographical procedures. [3][4] This style of scholarly game design was much criticized by historical game scholars for its unwillingness to explore the unique affordances of the ludic medium [5][6]. However, it can be useful if employed critically, as a way to denaturalize and deconstruct ‘crystallized’ [7][8] historiographical biases.
In this particular case, such a critique can – to invoke this conference’s theme – help us reflect on medieval historiography as one surviving record of a broader space of possibilities, which document a society’s relationship with the non-human in ways that were neither simple nor set in stone. The game allows such possibilities to be explored to almost humorous level – for example, although the annal segment is supposed to cover the years 1315 to 1426, it is possible to complete the task without a single mention to the plague!
You can read more about the project here – and also here: [9]. Although the game is still in an early state, I’m very grateful to any feedback!
Thank you very much!
Ludography
Marino Carvalho, V. Galar. 2025-
References
[1] Morton, T. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
[2] Hirschler, C. Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors. New York: Routledge, 2026
[3] Clyde, J. et al. ‘Beyond the “Historical” Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design. Loading… , v.6, n.9, 2012, pp. 3-16
[4] Clyde, J. & Wilkinson, G. “More than a Game…Teaching in the Gamic Mode: Disciplinary Knowledge, Digital Literacy, and Collaboration”. History Teacher, v.46, n.1, pp.45-66
[5] Antley, J. ‘Going Beyond the Textual in History”. Journal of Digital Humanities, v. 1, n.2, 2012 https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/going-beyond-the-textual-in-history-by-jeremy-antley/
[6] Houghton, R. ‘Beyond Education and Impact: Games as Research Tools and Outputs’ In: Houghton, R (Ed.) Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games. Oldenburg: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 279-298
[7] Nguyen, C.T. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, p.13
[8] On crystallization, cf. also Dewey, J. Art as Experience. New York: Wideview-Perigree 1934.
[9] Marino Carvalho. ‘History and More-than-Human Agency in Videogames’. Rethinking History, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2026.2629215
Author bio
Dr. Vinicius Marino Carvalho is a postdoctoral researcher at Universidade Estadual de Campinas and one of the convenors of the Middle Ages in Modern Games conferences.
So excited to play this, thank you so much for your paper Vinicius! I was wondering if you could talk about the use of language in the game in relation to our theme this year – how does the use of the Irish language and names, especially where it is visually very different and so stands out, fit into the ideas we’re exploring here about possibility and futures? Is the intention that this language is read and used in gameplay? Is it language that is used now or is it an older form of the language that is revitalised in a way through play here?
Great question!
Many things in medieval Ireland are not easily translatable to English, so using Irish terms is a necessity (even and especially in academic scholarship). In the game, I’m currently using a glossary feature to help players navigate these words. You can see this in the word ‘ollamh‘ in figure 2. Hovering over the term opens the definition.
So far, entries are very basic. But I’d like to elaborate on the glossary feature and give them a ‘point of view’ – e.g. the glossay for Chapter 2, whose protagonist is a member of the old Gaelic learning classes, won’t be the same as the glossary in Chapter 3, whose playing character is a modern historian. That way, I hope to discuss how things and ideas get lost/misremembered/reinterpreted throughout the centuries.
I’m mostly using Modern Irish spelling in the game – whence ‘ollamh’ rather than ‘ollaṁ’, for example. But the meaning of the terms, in this part of the game at least, are specific to the 15th c. Thus ‘ollamh’ refers to the head of a bardic school, not a university lecturer (the current meaning of the word in Modern Irish).
The proper names also follow Modern Irish spelling, but I’ve decided to write them in cló gaelach in the name boxes. This is an older script with specific diacritics (that makes the language much more intuitive to read and learn, if you’re familiar with it), that was used from the Middle Ages all the way to the mid-20th c. It’s meant to give a measure of temporal alterity, but it’s also my attempt to showcase this bit of the language’s history to people with little familiarity with it. To facilitate things somewhat, the names are written in Latin script in the text boxes.
I’ll have to give this a go and may have more to say then, but I like the idea of playing with reception of texts in games in this way.
I think my core question is who you see this as being pitched at – is it something you’re developing for classroom use, theoretical exploration, or would you like people outside those spaces to explore historiography in this way?
I originally envisioned it as a classroom exercise – specifically, for third-level and postgraduate history courses.
Yet, after showcasing it at the MAMG Workshop at the 2025 MAMO conference, I saw that it had a huge appeal as a ‘conference’ game of sorts. I.e. a game that is played and debriefed collectively by an academic audience – more like a performance than a solo game, if you will.
So this is the direction I’m leaning towards now!
I do see broader appeal for this!
It almost feels, in reverse, like how many Americans first learned of the Tulsa race massacre from the 2019 Watchmen TV series, and became more open to the fact their history books had omissions.
[…] Iceland)’– Emilio Marx & Ginebra Raventós de Volart, Acoustic Heritage Collective14h20 – ‘Playing the Irish Annals: Narrative Agency and the Gamic Mode of History’– Vinicius Marino Carvalho14h40 – ‘Sources and Serendipity: Experimenting with randomisation […]
I’ve played through your demo this several times now, and it is appropriately chilling given the subject matter. I wasn’t expecting such a poetic approach for a “novel,” and I enjoy how it leaned on more nebulous imagery. It left me feel like I wasn’t in control without the game itself seeming untethered – which can be difficult to achieve in an interactive medium. Between how interpretive and unsettling it is, I think this is a great foundation to demonstrate history isn’t as complete and objective as it’s often presented.
The second section sounds fascinating. I like the factors you want the player to weight, and the fact they can go kind of wild and still not “fail.” (Particularly on contrast to Chapter 3’s possible fail states.) One way or another, they’ve established the history that will be shared, and I could see this being eye-opening for students. Especially anyone who tries to omit the plague and still “wins.”
Is the plan to retain a fairly linear path, or allow for more haphazard research with the player able to move between various points to investigate and set information in stone. As natural as the latter feels, this also feels like a project that could lose cohesion with too few guardrails.
Thank you for this, and extra kudos for making it in Godot!
Thank you so much, Andrew! I means a lot to hear that!
Chapter 2 is relatively linear, in that it always starts with the player character receiving a commission, and always ends with the death of his patron. (His obituary is the last entry of the annal).
Whatever happens in between varies depending on the choices taken in part 1. The basic loop in these segments is: 1) the player’s assistant (the monastery’s scribe) brings up an episode, 2) the player makes a choice about it, 3) they move on to a following passage.
Some loops will have a small intro of their own, in which someone in the kingdom approaches the player character with a particular demand. The PC can chose to either accept or ignore it, and if it’s the former, it opens up new possibilities in the choice node (but doesn’t change the overall loop structure).
As for Chapter 3, it will also be relatively linear, but I want to create space for a good, a bad, and a bad (but actually best) ending. If the player character ‘survives’ (in a Reigns-style series of impossible choices), they will craft a perfect, but soulless and/or problematic dissertation (this is the ‘good’ ending). If they don’t survive, this triggers the bad ending.
The third ending, however, rewards players for ‘playing-to-lose’. To get it, it won’t be enough to simply fail your dissertation, but to act on some broader concerns regarding the nature of knowledge – very much what Leandro Wallace said in his keynote regarding ‘official’, written knowledge versus folk/alternative traditions!
I hope that answers it?
This looks fantastic! I have to try it!
I like how you are implementing this idea of the relationship with the beyond-human. What was your approach on thinking about death (I know the plague is kind of a give away) in a context that is popularly considered to be prone to it?
Looking forward to playing it and chatting more about it with you!
Thanks for the question!
The relationship between medievalism and death is something I subverted: there are no allusions in the game so far that the medieval period was more prone to mortality crises. Also, while the game is about the time of the Black Death, the second chapter is set in the 15th c., well past the end of the first and deadliest outbreak. So the player character is chronicling the pandemic from a position of some distance.
As you can see from the demo, the first chapter approached death from a very poetic way, trying to think about what loss of life even means in the context of a more-than-human witness that sees the entirety of the ecological weave at once. I was inspired by the eco-fiction of Richard Powers, John Crowley and Aline Valek, among others.
In the second, while there’s no suggestion that society is at the bring of collapse, death ‘hovers’ around people. The player character’s patron rose to power, in part, thanks to the death of a political rival, who contracted the plague. At the end of the chapter, the patron himself succumbs from an unknown ilness (something I partly based on the life of Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusa, the compiler of the Annals of Ulster, who died from small pox).
Adding little nods/references to episodes of sickness in his own time to the annals is one of the things the player character can do!
Thank you for sharing! As a historian, I would disagree that _everything_ in the annals would have an agenda. Mostly it’s the case, but sometimes things get recorded for no particular reason, just because the author takes a fancy for them. Is there a possibility to add bits and pieces just for the sake of writing, so to say, in your game, without following a particular strategy?
Yes! And this is in fact an interpretative issue I’d like to call attention to.
In the game, the book serves an agenda, but nothing stops the compiler from sneaking in things that don’t necessarily suit it. Or which require further context that might not show up in the text.
An example (which I included in the game): the Annals of Ulster have more than one mention of an arrow being fired. What’s so important about this particular arrow that warranted an entry all for itself? Beats me! But whoever wrote it decided to put it in.
So yes, there will be examples of entries on the sillier/more random side of things!
This is looking so great, Vinicius, I can’t wait to play it in full! (WHEN can I play Chapter 2?????)
I don’t think this applies in the same way to chapters 1 or even 3 (barring the lack of inclusivity in academic circles I guess), but can I ask how or if you’ve addressed the potential limits for inclusive history in the scribe/patron situation in chapter 2? Somewhat inspired by a theme of discussion across papers so far, the focus on literacy in particular seems likely to lead to potential problems there, but are there ways for the ‘scribe’ to e.g. access different types of history (oral histories?) in putting together their record? Or is this one of the issues encountered by the writer in chapter 3 when they respond to what’s passed on, and so explicitly discussed as an issue?
Very soon, I hope! I’ll have a very basic functional demo working by the end of the month (won’t be posting it anywhere before I add more content, but very happy to send you a private download link). The main issue with Chapter 2 is that it requires a lot more writing that 1. This has been the biggest bottleneck so far.
Now to your question: the social context of this kind of writing was *very* privileged and hierarchical. Most of the characters in the game – the ollamh main character, the king, the abbott – sat at the very top of the social pyramid and derived their position from the fact they had privileges others didn’t. Furthermore, the craft of an ollamh was a very specialized one – and they charged according for it. So I don’t think they’d be interested in being ‘inclusive’ in the sense we understand it today – e.g. via the recognition of subaltern narratives etc.
That isn’t to say the things they wrote about didn’t circulate orally, or even originated in the oral tradition. But the whole process of compilation of these sources seems to have been literary. This is reflected in the obituary of Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusa, the compiler of the Annals of Ulster, which states that he ‘assembled this book from very many other books’. This would be particularly understandable given the time frame (15th c.). These guys weren’t writing from scratch, but adding to an existing (and very prolific) written tradition.
There will be some exceptions to that:
– Some local characters might approach the playing character with local tales or even invite him to an outing. This will open up the possibility to incorporate oral testimonies or even the character’s own eye-witness account.
– I’d like to include a character in reference to Sadhbh Uí Mhaoilchonaire. This was a 15th c wife of an ollamh (Maoilín Ó Maoilchonaire), who might have been a writer herself. There are some debates as to whether women like her were also part of the creative process or simply derived their prestige from their husband’s position (cf. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, “Landscapes of the Learned”), but in the game I was thinking of using that as a opportunity to discuss the gendered context of authorship.
I haven’t written Chapter 3 yet, but this is indeed one of the issues that can surface there: the annals are often taken as a comprehensive chronicle of medieval events, but it’s a very selective one!
Thanks that’s very interesting. I think it’d be a great idea to include that character, and think about how eye-witnesses or characters of different social statuses might contribute to the record, so that all sounds really cool! And exciting news to hear that I could be playing it soon…!
This is (still) looking really cool and I very much enjoyed the demo. It’s no secret that I have reservations about the Gamic Mode, but this looks less abstract and much more fully realised than most of the practical models I’ve seen and I can see clear classroom and commercial applications. Do you have an ETA for completion? And are you looking for playtesters?
Thank you Rob!
I think the Gamic Mode, paradoxically, works well when it is used in the exact opposite way its creators intended: as a way of critiquing historiographical authority, rather than putting it on a pedestal.
I sort of need to have the game ready by the time the OuP handbook comes out (as I included a chapter on it), so the ETA should be a year from now, give or take? Note that I refer to ‘completion’ in a very loose sense. I also want to hire an actual artist at some point to draw the character sprites. So I might have both a ‘public domain’ version and a more polished one with original art.
That said, yes, I’m very much looking for playtesters! Do let me know if you wish to volunteer yourself or someone else! As I mentioned to Kate, I should have a very rough demo of Chapter 2 by the end of the month.
This is so cool~ I’ll definitely give the demo a proper play! I really like the way each chapter works with a different agency, especially the decision to begin from the perspective of more-than-human agency. Historians have of course been working with non-human agencies for quite some time, not least in environmental history, but it still feels surprisingly rare to see that perspective become the starting point of game play itself. It also makes me wonder, in a slightly different direction, how many “generations” apart the historiography embedded in games really is from historiographical debates within the academy.
I also really like the way you use the gameplay loop. It reminded me of my own experience of writing my PhD dissertation on Late Antique patristic texts. I knew how earlier scholars in my field described the Church Fathers of Late Antiquity as writing for future readers — including us — and I also knew that, in my own language, there would probably not be another PhD dissertation on exactly the same topic within ten years. So I felt that I needed to write for the eyes that might one day look at it when the dissertation was taken down from a library shelf.
That strange feeling of a subject imagining itself meeting the gaze of both the past and the future may be a rather common experience. I find it especially wonderful that you use the loop as a mechanic to represent it.
I really enjoyed reading this paper, Vinicius. I find Galar particularly interesting because it does not simply use a medieval setting or historical events as the basis for a game. Instead, it makes the production and selection of historical knowledge part of the gameplay itself.
The paper also caught my attention because of its focus on the Black Death, a subject I have explored in the past and that has always fascinated me. Combining this historical theme with the game’s approach to the production and selection of historical records makes Galar especially interesting to me. I will definitely be downloading Chapter 1 and playing it in the future.
What I found particularly compelling is the possibility of completing the annal segment covering 1315 to 1426 without mentioning the plague. This connects very directly with the conference theme of “Possible Worlds and Possible Pasts”, but in a way that goes beyond conventional counterfactual history. The game does not necessarily create a different past. Rather, it allows the player to create a different historical record of that past, depending on what they choose to include, omit or reinterpret.
This also made me think about the distinction between historical events and the surviving evidence through which we reconstruct them. As researchers, we constantly work with records shaped by selection, omission, political interests, accidents of preservation and the choices of their producers. By making the player experience some of these choices directly, Galar seems to turn a methodological problem of historical research into a game mechanic.
This aspect particularly resonated with me because it touches on something I often encounter when working with medieval sources, that what survives is not necessarily a representative account of what happened, but what happened to be recorded and preserved.
I was also particularly interested in your use of the “gamic mode of history”. I found your argument that it can be useful when deployed critically, to expose rather than reinforce historiographical authority, particularly convincing. The possibility of producing an apparently “valid” annal without mentioning the plague is a powerful example of this. The player can technically succeed while producing a record that we, as researchers, recognise as highly selective.
This raises a question I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on. Do you see the “possible pasts” created by Galar primarily as counterfactual versions of historical events, or as counterfactual versions of the historical records through which those events become knowable to us? And does making the player responsible for those omissions change the way we understand narrative agency in relation to historical knowledge?
I also really liked the fact that the game allows apparently insignificant or random details to enter the annals. Your example of the unexplained arrow in the Annals of Ulster is particularly evocative, because it reminds us that not everything preserved in a historical source survives because it served a coherent political or historiographical purpose. Sometimes we are left precisely with things whose significance we can no longer reconstruct.
Overall, I think Galar is a fascinating experiment in making historiography playable. I am very curious to see how Chapter 2 develops, especially because the game seems capable of making players confront something that we, as researchers, also have to deal with when working with historical sources. The historical record is not simply a transparent window onto the past, but the result of choices about what is worth remembering.
Thank you so much for the kind words, Ricardo!
I would say the game is more of a historical fiction than a counterfactual history. Neither the book, the characters, or the very kingdom they come from actually exist. The story is set in a fictional Irish province, whose history is inspired by, but doesn’t affect, broader developments elsewhere in Ireland. I made this decision inspired by the novel ‘Land’ by Maggie O’Farrell, which tells a generational story about the Great Famine, but sets it in an indeterminate peninsula somewhere in the West coast.
As a curiosity: all the names are made-up, and make nods to my own family history (in Italy). The kingdom is called Tír Ársa (Old Land), as a tribute to Terravecchia, a village near Cariati in Calabria, where my family comes from. The monastery is Cill Chathail, and the ruling lineage is Mac Giolla Chathail – “Cathal” being the original name of San Cataldo, a popular saint in Calabria after which many of my own relatives have been named 😀