Book Review - Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games, edited by Robert Houghton

Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games, edited by Robert Houghton, Bloomsbury, 2023.

Book review by Holly Hoffmann

The study of medievalism in games is a large and interdisciplinary field, spanning medieval studies, game studies, media studies, history, and other disciplines. Because scholars often approach games from within their own specialties, it can be difficult to follow the full range of conversations about how games represent the Middle Ages. In Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games, Robert Houghton, editor and senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Winchester, addresses this problem by bringing together fourteen essays on the ways games construct, reinterpret, and challenge representations of the medieval past. He argues that medievalist game studies have grown rapidly, remaining fractured across disciplines but should be considered a “distinct media which forms a field in its own right” (3). This volume seeks not to establish a single method, but to demonstrate the wide variety of questions that the field can ask.

The essays reflect this breadth, often with differing results. Ylva Grufstedt examines how games such as Crusader Kings III and Mount & Blade: Bannerlord allow players to create alternative versions of medieval history. Mariana López and Karen M. Cook turn to sound, asking how music and sound effects create recognizable impressions of the medieval past. Gordon Smith examines the representation of the Crusades in board games, while Liam McLeod considers how Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver challenges the idealized figure of the crusader that has become “commonplace for alt-right actors and white supremacists” (104)––a fascinating look at a relevant and concerning topic that all scholars of medieval history should consider.

The book strives to organize the chapters topically, grouping similar themes together: Adam Bierstedt explores Viking social roles in A Feast for Odin, and Houghton himself considers how strategy-game conventions shape representations of medieval rulership. Later chapters by Jonathan Bloch, Neil Nagwekar, Johansen Quijano, and Markus Eldegard Mindrebø turn to questions of historical memory, colonialism, race, and gender. Depictions of race, for example, is a particularly interesting topic in medieval games. As Quijano suggests games that are only loosely inspired by the Middle Ages (such as Skyrim) might actually become “unshackled by stereotypes of Middle Ages as white-only spaces and create games that are, ironically, more faithful to the Medieval zeitgeist than ‘realistic’ simulations” (201). Finally, Patrick Butler looks at Dark Souls and how popular culture uses medievalism to celebrate martial violence, and Blair Apgar at Crusader Kings II and the enduring legacy of Matilda of Canossa. These essays demonstrate that seemingly simple decisions about characters, factions, and historical settings can carry significant cultural assumptions.

Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the range of approaches currently being used to study games and the medieval past, and the problems that can arise when trying to create a “historically accurate” game. Its contributors analyze what games do with the past: how mechanics, player choices, sound, narrative, and genre conventions determine which aspects of history become visible and playable. While each contributor makes fascinating connections between games and different aspects of the Middle Ages, the collection also demonstrates how a lack of cohesive scholarship remains a tangible issue. Playing the Middle Ages makes progress toward addressing this problem by placing different approaches alongside one another, but the essays remain diverse. The volume consequently works better as a survey of important questions and approaches than as a unified argument about what medievalist game studies should become. This is not necessarily a weakness of the individual essays; rather, it illustrates the fragmentation that Houghton identifies at the outset. The collection's greatest contribution may therefore be its demonstration of both the possibilities and the challenges of bringing these diverse approaches into conversation with one another. 

Byline:

Holly Hoffmann is an academic librarian at St. Mary's University, and holds a Master's in Library and Information Studies and a Master's in Medieval Literature. She is interested in the intersection between medieval literature, popular culture, and information literacy pedagogy.