Reviewed by Chris Herde (cherde@wisc.edu)
Robert Houghton’s The Middle Ages in Computer Games lays out an incredibly thorough groundwork for future studies on the specific intersections of medievalism, ludic interactivity, and the commercial and cultural pressures present in the modern videogame industry[1]. At every turn, Houghton clearly reiterates the ways in which “ludic medievalism” aligns with and diverges from the traditional incarnations of medievalism (particularly those presented in films and television shows) as well as the presentation of other historical periods in videogame form. In so doing, he not only highlights the ways in which these mediums reinforce and contradict one another but also lays out a coherent argument for the existence of a ‘ludic medievalism’ that is informed (but by no means fully defined) by its medium, its subject matter, or the interactions between the two.
Houghton insists that his object of study is not any specific game or even any individual genre of games but rather the shape of the emergent worlds created by the conscious and unconscious decisions and presuppositions of the people who make and play videogames. I say ‘worlds’ in the plural because one of Houghton’s key points is that supernatural elements and full-blown fantasy cannot and should not be separated from the analysis of ludic medievalism. At no point have the two ever been totally disconnected, but in Houghton’s view fantasy has been so central to the history and development of videogames as a medium that even games purporting to depict ‘accurate’ history cannot be understood without the context of the medium’s fantastic conventions.
With that in mind, the book is organized into thematic chapters, consciously eschewing the presentation of individual case studies. The first two chapters lay out the unique elements of videogames as a medium for encountering the past by focusing on its essential interactivity. More so than any other medium, videogames must take the audience into account, as their active participation is required not just to ensure commercial success, but also to render the experience “complete.” In particular, Houghton emphasizes the power players have on an individual level to alter the fundamental text of a game in the form of counterplay and emergent narratives. Houghton therefore chooses to expand Alan Chapman’s division of historical game genres with recourse to the still-maturing genre conventions used within the medium itself. In addition to Chapman’s “realist” games—which one might call “narrative” or “immersive”—and “conceptual” games—mostly aligning with the “strategy” genre—Houghton adds “Role-playing” games and the more recently-identified “hardcore” genre. In so doing, he shifts the focus of his analysis toward the active agency of the players: not simply acknowledging their interactions within the game, but also their decisions about what games to pick up in the first place. These four genres provide a solid groundwork for Houghton’s later analysis and furthermore take the necessary step away from considering historical videogames as mechanisms to access an author’s idea of the past and toward conceiving of them as complex objects in their own right that interface simultaneously and dynamically with designers, players, histories and cultures past, present, and imagined.
Each subsequent chapter presents an exhaustive and self-contained argument about the way in which a given theme (violence, political authority, faith, scientific advancement, morality, race, gender and sexuality) is presented in medievalist games as opposed to its presence in games set in other historical periods or in noninteractive forms of medievalism. The Middle Ages in Computer Games will therefore be a useful reference work for more focused studies, but the chapters are also organized such that a reader engaging with the book cover-to-cover will begin to see the consequences of a relatively complex web of interacting concepts well before Houghton fully elaborates them (for example, the teleological role of science in strategic videogames vs in traditional medievalism and the impact that contradiction has for the presentation of organized religion in medievalist RPGs).
The question of historical accuracy is present throughout the book, though it is not one on which Houghton particularly focuses. This decision is largely to the book’s benefit. Houghton demonstrates early on that, if a game prioritizes it at all, historical accuracy is almost exclusively confined within the domains of aesthetics and marketing. Given that the unique appeal and power of the medium is in its mechanical interactivity, the aesthetics of accuracy[2] therefore necessarily always give way to the requirements of a smooth, functional, fun play experience. Thus, rather than focusing overmuch on litigating the accuracy of those aesthetic elements, Houghton explores the implications of the interactive experience: the intended and unintended narratives produced by systems interacting as well as the power of players to exploit and overwrite those systems to produce their own narratives.
This book succeeds convincingly at Houghton’s stated goal of defining “ludic medievalism” as a distinct category of engagement with the medieval past, governed by its own tropes and pressures and worthy of study. While not every chapter presents equally groundbreaking or unique observations about medievalist videogames as separate from their companions in other medievalist media and digital game studies, they all do important ground-laying work in support of future research. Each chapter concludes with a number of more speculative claims to demonstrate the field’s openness and potential for further debate. For example, Houghton posits that the “hardcore” genre of souls- and rogue-likes might present a divergence from the paradigm of traditional masculine power fantasy, heretofore ubiquitous within the medium, by forcing the player to accept the inevitability of failure and thus their weakness relative to their opposition. This claim seems to me fruitful ground for discussions of differing expressions of masculinity and the power of game audiences to redefine the medium through paratext. “Hardcore” is the game genre which brought us the colloquial phrase “git gud,” after all.
Ultimately, I believe that the utility of this book as a fundamental reference work within its academic niche is such that it will likely only be superseded in the face of significant shifts in the culture of videogames or popular medievalism.
1. The fact that I will predominately be discussing “videogames” while Houghton describes “computer games” is exclusively an artifact of American and British vernaculars referring to the same medium.
2. Or perhaps “authenticity,” as Houghton shows that appeals to historical accuracy within aesthetics and marketing are much more concerned with conforming to the expectations of the audience and designers rather than any significant engagement with modern historiography.
Chris Herde
University of Wisconsin-Madison
