Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages

Daniel T. Kline, Daniel T. Kline

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136221828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

Digital gaming's cultural significance is often minimized much in the same way that the Middle Ages are discounted as the backward and childish precursor to the modern period. Digital Gaming Reimagines the Middle Ages challenges both perceptions by examining how the Middle Ages have persisted into the contemporary world via digital games as well as analyzing how digital gaming translates, adapts, and remediates medieval stories, themes, characters, and tropes in interactive electronic environments. At the same time, the Middle Ages are reinterpreted according to contemporary concerns and conflicts, in all their complexity. Rather than a distinct time in the past, the Middle Ages form a space in which theory and narrative, gaming and textuality, identity and society are remediated and reimagined. Together, the essays demonstrate that while having its roots firmly in narrative traditions, neomedieval gaming—where neomedievalism no longer negotiates with any reality beyond itself and other medievalisms—creates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts. Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages demonstrates that the medieval is more than just a stockpile of historically static facts but is a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.

Part I
Prehistory of Medieval Gaming

1
The Right to Dream of the Middle Ages

Simulating the Medieval in Tabletop RPGs

William J. White

The [fantasy role-playing] campaign, then, is pervaded by the elements of feudalism. Players are urged to absorb as much of the “mental set” of the period as possible to permit role-playing that is authentic. To think as a 20th Century man while conducting a campaign based on feudal society is an unfortunate thing to do, as most of the fun of the thing will be lost.

—Edward E. Simbalist and Wilf K. Backhaus,
Chivalry & Sorcery (1977)

In an essay on the persistence of the Middle Ages in Western culture, Umberto Eco notes that the medieval is invoked in contemporary culture in a variety of ways and to mean a variety of things. In many cases, Eco observes, the invocation of the medieval is mere pretense: “There is no real interest in the historical background; the Middle Ages are taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters.”¹ Alternately, Eco continues, the idea of the ‘medieval’ may be used to convey something real, as shorthand for a variety of connotations: (1) the atavistically barbaric, (2) the culturally romantic, (3) the historically originary, (4) the artistically decadent, (5) the mystically Hermetic, or (6) the perennially philosophical— when it is not just a device for (7) the ironically self-parodical, à la Monty Python. Sometimes, however, the Middle Ages are indeed the object of sober and serious-minded philological reconstruction, by which Eco means a historiographically sophisticated redescription of medieval modes of thought, language, and action such as that of the Annales school.

Fantasy role-playing games (RPGs), part of a broader fantasy and science fiction fandom that is itself a component of “geek culture,”² happen to partake of the invidious division that Eco identifies, with medieval trappings frequently serving only vaguely thematic or pretense-play-enabling functions. In some cases, however—as when a game author is interested in the faithful replication in play of a Middle Ages–inspired game setting—the RPG text may constitute a primer on the reconstruction of the medieval in the service of a more satisfyingly ‘realistic’ game experience. This orientation to the in-game diegesis as a simulation of some other domain of experience, like a distant era or a foreign place, is called ‘Right to Dream’ play by some observers of role-playing gaming;³ it is conceptually similar to the sort of imitative play known as mimesis.⁴

This chapter examines the discourse of the medieval within and around four tabletop RPGs that eschew some of the other conventions of ‘traditional’ secondary-world fantasy role-playing in order to pursue the ‘Right to Dream’ of the Middle Ages. These works can be seen as explicit efforts to simulate a medieval setting and include Chivalry & Sorcery (1977), Fantasy Wargaming (1981), King Arthur Pendragon (1985), and Chronica Feudalis (2009).⁵ The various ways in which the medieval is implicated in each game-text—as sociopolitical ordering, as moral framework, as Arthurian structure of feeling, as system of interpersonal relations—are discussed and compared in order to describe the ‘dream of the Middle Ages’ as role-playing simulation. The epitextual reception of these games—particularly online discussion by fans regarding them—is also traced in order to understand the extent to which they are actually used to simulate the medieval.

Tabletop Role-Playing and Digital Gaming

At this point, it may be necessary to mention that some game studies scholars take the position that nondigital forms of adventure gaming (board games, collectible card games [CCGs], tabletop RPGs, and live-action role-playing [LARP], for example) are outside the purview of their field, or at best are at its margins.⁶ This position is understandable, because it allows those scholars to focus on the phenomena of particular interest to them, but it is also unnecessarily limiting as a matter of disciplinary boundary work, for a number of reasons.

The first is the increasing technological sophistication of digital games, which paradoxically makes the experience of play more similar to nondigital games than before. Online games, in particular, with their capacity to allow synchronous high-bandwidth communication among players, foreground the social and communicative aspects of play in ways that dramatically contradict the hoary stereotypes of gaming-as-alienation—and that bear strong similarities to the experience of tabletop play.⁷ In a world of highly varie-gated mediated play, in other words, ‘face-to-face’ is just another medium. Insights produced in the study of one kind of play may thus be applicable to the other kinds, once differences in media characteristics are accounted for. The concept of immersion, for example, may serve as a powerful conceptual framework for understanding all kinds of participatory media.⁸

The second is the cultural entanglement of board gaming (e.g., Arkham Horror and Settlers of Catan), CCGs (e.g., Magic: The Gathering and Poke-mon), tabletop RPGs (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons), and LARP (broadly defined to include sci-fi and comic-book character cosplay [costume play], creatively anachronistic RenFaire participation, and other forms of carnivalesque in-costume ‘live-action role-playing’) within a broader ‘geek culture’ that also includes digital games and digital gamers. Many of these activities, in other words, are enjoyed by the same set of people and are thus part of similar and related subcultural experiences.⁹

Third and finally, the historical role of tabletop RPGs as antecedent to and inspiration for many kinds of computer and online gaming has only recently begun to be explored as part of the cultural history of gaming and game design,¹⁰ and further attention to this aspect of gaming’s origins is thus warranted. More briefly, there are pragmatic, cultural, and historical reasons for regarding nondigital gaming as an integral part of the gaming scene, and so the scholarship of games and new media cannot limit itself to digital games only without fundamentally mistaking the object of its inquiry. As one game studies scholar has observed, such an extension of the field “is only a problem if we insist that ‘digital’ is an overriding category, which is both an arbitrary and a technology-fetishizing thing to do.”¹¹

What is Role-Playing?

The tabletop role-playing game emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of wargaming with miniature figurines—painted toy soldiers made of lead and arrayed in companies on a battlefield of model-scale terrain and made to fight “little wars”¹²—in which the focus of play shifted from the military campaign (i.e., a series of tactical tabletop battles in pursuit of an overall strategic objective) to the dungeon crawl (i.e., a sequence of ventures into the depths of an underworld in pursuit, largely, of in-game material gain). Early role-playing systems and supplements assumed a basic familiarity with the conventions of tabletop-miniatures wargaming even as they billed the game as something completely different.¹³ What eventually became Dungeons & Dragons¹⁴ was a creative amalgam that combined rules for medieval battles with game statistics for fantastic creatures and magical effects as well as the concept of dungeon exploration as the central activity of the game and the individual character (rather than the player’s ‘army’ in aggregate) as the key instrumentality of play.¹⁵ The transformation of the neutral referee who merely arbitrated rules and enforced game mechanical provisions mimicking the ‘fog of war’ (e.g., tracking the locations of hidden units) into an adversarial ‘Dungeon Master’ who created dangerous wilderness and dungeon settings for those individual player-characters to explore was also a central element in the origin of the tabletop role-playing game.¹⁶

Strict historical fidelity was not always a principle of those early Dungeon Masters, even though the appeal of fantasy gaming was understood to be potentially driven by an interest in medieval or military history as well as fantastic literature and mythology. Reading an account of the “first fantasy campaign”¹⁷ more than 30 years after its publication, one ‘old-school’ gamer reports, “Gamers used to a more straitlaced and serious approach to world building will no doubt find much that offends their sensibilities (turnstiles to enter the dungeon, holy water hoses, souvenirs, etc.) and I’ll admit that it’s a fair bit more over the top than I’d ever use in my own campaign.”¹⁸

Players, too, approached the game from different perspectives. In an interview for one of the earliest sociological accounts of fantasy role-playing games, M. A. R. Barker, the impresario of a fantasy campaign on the world of Tekumel,¹⁹ describes the differences between two game groups: “The Thursday party is much more of a jolly kind of ha-ha game party, where you have adventures, and you go and you meet people and you do things, and you don’t take it all that seriously. Whereas the party that comes on Monday night … all come here particularly because they’re interested in the reality of Tekumel. They don’t care if I ever open the book or ever use a table out of the book, they want to know how it really is on Tekumel.”²⁰

The range of aesthetic orientations or stylis...