ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

“All Your History Are Belong to Us”: Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages

part I|16 pages

Prehistory of Medieval Gaming

chapter 1|14 pages

The Right to Dream of the Middle Ages

Simulating the Medieval in Tabletop RPGs

part II|50 pages

Gaming Re-imagines Medieval Traditions

chapter 2|12 pages

“Best and Only Bulwark”

How Epic Narrative Redeems Beowulf: The Game

chapter 3|10 pages

Systematizing Culture in Medievalism

Geography, Dynasty, Culture, and Imperialism in Crusader Kings: Deus Vult

chapter 5|12 pages

Gabriel Knight

A Twentieth-Century Chivalric Romance Hero

part III|52 pages

Case Study 1: World of Warcraft

chapter 6|12 pages

Coloring Tension

Medieval and Contemporary Concepts in Classifying and Using Digital Objects in World of Warcraft

chapter 7|14 pages

Sir Thomas Malory and the Death Knights of New Avalon

Imagining Medieval Identities in World of Warcraft

chapter 8|12 pages

Accumulating Histories

A Social Practice Approach to Medievalism in High-Fantasy MMORPGs

chapter 9|12 pages

“Awesome Cleavage”

The Genred Body in World of Warcraft

part IV|56 pages

Case Study 2: Dante's Inferno

chapter 11|14 pages

Courtly Violence, Digital Play

Adapting Medieval Courtly Masculinities in Dante's Inferno

chapter 12|13 pages

Shades of Dante

Virtual Bodies in Dante's Inferno

chapter 13|12 pages

The Middle Ages in the Depths of Hell

Pedagogical Possibility and the Past in Dante's Inferno

part V|53 pages

Theoretical and Representational Issues in Medieval Gaming

chapter 14|13 pages

We Will Travel by Map

Maps as Narrative Spaces in Video Games and Medieval Texts

chapter 17|13 pages

The Consolation of Paranoia

Conspiracy, Epistemology, and the Templars in Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex, and Dragon Age

part VI|16 pages

Sociality and Social Media in Medieval Gaming