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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |11 pages
Introduction
part I|16 pages
Prehistory of Medieval Gaming
part II|50 pages
Gaming Re-imagines Medieval Traditions
chapter 3|10 pages
Systematizing Culture in Medievalism
part III|52 pages
Case Study 1: World of Warcraft
chapter 6|12 pages
Coloring Tension
chapter 7|14 pages
Sir Thomas Malory and the Death Knights of New Avalon
chapter 8|12 pages
Accumulating Histories
part IV|56 pages
Case Study 2: Dante's Inferno
chapter 11|14 pages
Courtly Violence, Digital Play
chapter 13|12 pages
The Middle Ages in the Depths of Hell
part V|53 pages
Theoretical and Representational Issues in Medieval Gaming
chapter 17|13 pages
The Consolation of Paranoia
part VI|16 pages
Sociality and Social Media in Medieval Gaming