Teaching the 16th Century with Pentiment
Lucas Haasis By Lucas Haasis and Patrick Heike (Gamelab ‘Villa Geistreich’ in Oldenburg) Pentiment is a narrative adventure and crime game set in 16th-century Bavaria. It has attracted considerable attention from the…
Social Media is Dungeons & Dragons
Stephen Yeager By Stephen Yeager (Concordia University) Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X should be categorized generically as free-to-play ad-based mobile RPGs, descended from the frameworks for collaborative storytelling developed…
Gaming Beyond the ‘Commons’: Counter-Hegemonic Readings of Medievalist Tropes
Vinicius Marino Carvalho By Vinicius Marino Carvalho (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) Is this the way out? Modern fantasy shares a relatively consistent set of narrative and aesthetic references, roughly informed by medievalist artistic…
Stranger in a Strange Land: Eivor’s Encounter with the Mohawk Culture in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
Renata Lesniakiewicz-Drzymala By Renata Leśniakiewicz-Drzymała (Jagiellonian University) During her mission to defeat the Order of the Ancients in AC Valhalla, the main character Eivor finds herself in Vinland, a Viking colony in…
A Left-Coast Medieval: Progressive Medievalism in Age of Empires IV
Robert Rouse By Robert Rouse (University of British Columbia) Introduction The latest iteration of the longrunning AAA franchise Age of Empires was developed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada during the period 2017-21.…
How Civilization V Brings Historical Nations to the Global Stage: Analysis of the Game’s Majapahit-Era Indonesia
Pratama Wirya Atmaja By Pratama Wirya Atmaja, Andreas Nugroho Sihananto, and Gredy Christian Hendrawan Putra (University of Pembangunan Nasional “Veteran” Jawa Timur, Indonesia) Regardless of the world’s increasing globalization, every nation still relies…
Pixel to Parallax: Low-Poly Cartographies of Medieval Spatial Narrative in Games
Xinyu Kang By Xinyu Kang (Peking University) and Yuantong Yun (Tsinghua University) Introduction: Low-Polygon Medievalism as Technical Mediation Low-polygon 3D assets dominate medieval-themed games, with 47% of Steam titles (2020-2023) using this…
Harnessing Nature by Hand: An Ecofeminist Critique of Age of Empires II
Shu Wan By Shu Wan (University of Buffalo) In light of the persistence and prevalence of the exploitative perception of human-nature relations in RTS games, there is an urgent need to address…
Gnosticism in the Medievalist Game Genshin Impact
Emilienne Parchliniak By Emilienne Parchliniak (Sorbonne Nouvelle University) If Western games usually consist of an amalgamation of Christian stereotypical material perceived as medieval, many non-European games have appropriated the Middle Ages, drawing…
Chivalric Quests and Nostalgic Aesthetics: Final Fantasy IX as Global Medieval British Romance
Enrique Torres-Hergueta By Enrique Torres-Hergueta (University of Extremadura) Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy IX (2000) means a nostalgic tribute to earlier entries in the franchise and also a richly layered narrative artifact, as it…