Asynchronous Conference

The 2024 Middle Ages in Modern Games Asynchronous conference took place between 4 and 7 June. You can find our programme and links to each paper here. The comments section on each paper is still live for ongoing discussion.

The Middle Ages in Modern Games Asynchronous conference (formerly the Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference) is an annual four-day event which brings together a host of game developers, game scholars, medievalists and medieval historians from around the world to talk about any and all aspects of the Middle Ages or medievalism in games of any variety. Recent events have featured around 50 speakers and reached a peak audience of over 100,000 people.

Each participant delivers a ‘paper’ in the form of a 400-500 word written piece or a 5-minute video about any aspect of their recent, current, or forthcoming work. The papers are posted on the conference website over the course of the event, and are available to access publicly and free of charge. Questions and comments are welcome from everyone during and after the conference.

Recent participants have spoken about a diverse range of topics such as:

• The experience of gender in medievalist computer games
• Creating Fantasy Species for Roleplaying games
• Audio Environments in Assassin’s Creed
• Medieval Apocalypse in LARPs
• Challenging Dark Age tropes
• Arthurian and Skaldic influences in Skyrim
• Exploring medieval cultures in Warhammer Fantasy Battle
• The medievalism of Fallout
• Romantic violence in The Witcher

The papers from previous asynchronous conferences have been compiled and are presented within a growing series of conference proceedings, which are available Open Access. They provide a useful and accessible introduction and summary of ongoing and embryonic research throughout this diverse and growing field, and serve as important teaching and research materials.