A
haphazard and half-formed listicle research agenda for medievalists and
medievalismists in need of more interaction and whimsy in these moribund times
Kevin
Moberly, Old Dominion University
Brent Moberly, Indiana University
Brent Moberly, Indiana University
[A slice of this (the first section) was pre-published in "Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19: A Collegial Plenitude"; here is the full version with all the recommendations]
Joust
(1982) – If you must social distance, then what better way to do it than armed
with a six-foot lance astride an ostrich (or a stork) soaring over an ever-rising
lava lake. The gameplay is as simple as it is allegorical: keep flapping and
don’t let the buzzards get you down. Originally released as an arcade game,
Joust has been ported to any number of home entertainment systems and is still widely playable on the web. It
also lives on as a sort of ghost in the machine, with cameos in World
of Warcraft: Cataclysm (2010) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One
(2011). For those of us with as-of-yet unspent research monies, a restored
version of the original arcade cabinet is available for around
$3000.[1]
Conquests
of the Longbow: Robin Hood (1991) – Christy Marx’s Conquests
of the Longbow was the third mass-market game in 1991 to feature Robin Hood—a
moment of ludic synchronicity motivated by a desire to capitalize on that
year’s release of the feature film Robin
Hood Prince of Thieves. Marx’s expressly antiquarian take on the Robin
Hood legend is the best of the three by far and still remains compelling today,
especially for those of us whose summer trips to Nottingham have been cancelled
due to the quarantine. The game calls upon players to serve both as the
conscious of a wistful Robin Hood and as putative scholars of his legend,
charging them with assembling the authoritative account of his deeds as they
guide him through the dream visions, inventory
puzzles, and “authentically
medieval” minigames that comprise the bulk of the game’s narrative. For
those more interested in Nottinghamshire than in its most legendary forebearer,
the game renders the shire’s most
infamous tourist traps as late-twelfth-century versions of their present
selves. Free
to play on the web, or $6.00 on gog.com.
Trüberbrook (2019) –
The year is 1967, and the rural German village of Trüberbrook finds itself at
the heart of a potentially catastrophic quantum convergence. At the center of
the village stands a suit of armor memorializing the town’s thirteenth-century
margrave and savior, one “Hilarious the Unready.” In keeping with its namesake,
the margrave’s armor does not survive the events of the game and only has a
small role in the game’s overall narrative. Nevertheless, its initial
prominence in a game that bills
itself as a “sci-fi mystery” along the lines of “Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Stranger Things”
raises important questions about the continued significance of the medieval in
a world increasingly defined by the hard sciences. Aside from this, the game is
worth playing for its scenery and sets, which were hand-crafted
as miniature scale models and then digitized for the game. $30
on Steam. A downloadable travel-guide
to Trüberbrook is free, but requires the base game.
World
of Warcraft (2004 to eternity) – Not the original, but arguably the most
enduring neo-medieval wasteland. Where else can one cavort with the likes of Jhordy Lapforge,
Hemet
Nesingwary, and Harrison
Jones, all while saving Azeroth from a
revolving cast of underwhelming
and largely interchangeable baddies. Never quite satisfied with the serious
business of its own medievalesque narrative, the game indulges in a
seemingly endless meta-commentary on the popular works (Peter Jackson’s [and
J.R.R. Tolkien’s] Lord
of the Rings, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and George
R. R. Martin’s A
Song of Ice and Fire, among many, many others) that have come to define
contemporary medievalism. Available for Windows and macOS, the game requires a
monthly subscription to play. This subscription, though, includes seven
expansions worth of content and, for those of you who are curious as to
whether the game is still as addicting as it was when you had a dissertation to
finish, access to the recently-restored
“Classic” version of the game.
Assassin’s Creed
Unity (2014) – Set during the French revolution, the game is not as
noteworthy for its plot, which has something to do with the Knights Templar, as it
is for its take
on Notre-Dame de Paris. The “real” Notre Dame is arguably itself a
simulation, having been so
extensively “restored” by Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-nineteenth century as to be, as
Michael Camille argues, paradoxically more medieval than the original.[2]
Assassin’s Creed Unity infuses this simulational logic with the
imperatives of the late-capitalist tourism and culture industry, and the end
result is a doubly impossible version of the cathedral, one that recalls Viollet-le-Duc’s
distinctive restorations but from the context of Revolutionary Paris, nearly
three-quarters of a century before such work began. UbiSoft made the game available for
free in the weeks following last April’s
catastrophic fire, but it will cost you $30 to
play today. Yes, there are probably cheaper or more
historically accurate ways to experience Notre Dame in all its pre-fire
glory, but do any of these ways include Templars?
Carcassonne
(2017) – For those needing another
Viollet-le-Duc fix but with less Templars this time, there is always
Asmodee Digital’s adaptation of the classic board
game Carcassonne. The game’s take on medieval travel and commerce, rural or
otherwise, is just as fanciful as the picturesque
witches’ hats that Viollet-le-Duc grafted onto the towers of Carcassonne
proper, but this doesn’t make the game any less engaging or charming. The
digital version of the game follows the original closely, but without the
unhygienic uncertainties of reaching into a bag of tiles that has just been
pawed through by the unwashed masses, one’s immediate colleagues, or some
combination thereof. It also adds, among other things, a medievalesque
soundtrack, animated tiles, and a nifty field tracker that makes it much more
difficult for your opponents to sneak their dirty meeples onto your estates. The game is available
for desktop and mobile platforms for just $10, but expansions and the
winter tileset cost extra, which here again, is unfortunately completely in
keeping with the original board game’s business model.
They
are Billions (2019) – In this Steampunk take on the tower-defense genre, you
must defend your settlements against wave after wave of an infectious and
unrelenting horde. If any of the infected make it through your defenses, they
will infect your villagers, who will then infect their neighbors, and things
get exponentially worse until your entire colony is overrun. The game’s
survival mode is as addictive as it is punishing, and its swarming mechanics
are a wonder in their own right. Still, and in much the same way that The
Quiet Place was eminently watchable, but yet…, it’s hard to stomach the
racist
and colonialist implications inherent in the unironic spectacle of
explicitly white imperialists facing off against wave after wave of dark and
infectious natives. If the game was tone-deaf before the pandemic, it’s even
more tone-death now, especially given the Trump Administration’s recent push to
capitalize
on the pandemic to further its anti-immigrant agenda and, more generally,
the ways in which the handling of the pandemic has been troubled
by systemic racism. $30 on
Steam, but only if you find yourself in need of perhaps the most explicit
example as of late that parts of the gaming industry still insist that fascism
makes compelling gameplay.
King’s
Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (1990) – If you are in need of
a comfort game right now, any of Roberta Williams’ original King’s Quest games
(or their fan-enhanced
remakes) will serve, but King’s Quest V seems particularly apropos to
today’s woes. Here, a middle-aged King Graham returns from a walk only to find
that his castle and its contents, including his family, have been quarantined
(in a bottle!) by the evil wizard Mordack, all because Graham’s son Alexander
turned Mordack’s brother into a cat at the end of King’s Quest III: To
Heir is Human. Graham is accompanied on his adventures by Cedric the Owl,
the adventure-game precursor to Microsoft’s Clippy.
This means that the game also counts as productivity
software. Free
to play on the web, or $10
bundled with King’s Quest 4 and 6 on gog.com (Windows only).
King’s
Quest (2015) – The Odd
Gentlemen’s reboot of Sierra’s venerable King’s Quest franchise offers a
decidedly melancholic and neoliberal
account of King Graham’s past. Graham arrives in Daventry with only five coins
and a help-wanted poster in his inventory. Yet, Graham’s entry into the
kingdom’s professional class of “knights, dentists, and other protectors
of crowns” is far from assured. In order to secure his rightful place in
the franchise, he must first overcome the kingdom's moribund bureaucracy and
what, at least in the neoliberal imagination, is its private-sector corollary:
a trade union comprised of bridge trolls. The first (and
most substantial) chapter is free on Steam. The remaining chapters will
cost you, though.
Bioshock
(2007) – A plane crash leaves players stranded in the undersea city of Rapture, which was
constructed by Andrew
Ryan as an objectivist
refuge for the world’s elite but is now on the verge of collapse and teams with
mechanical and genetically-mutated horrors. On the diegetic level, Rapture and
its grotesqueries bear witness to the postlapsarian failure
of Ryan’s utopian project. The ravaged city, however, also testifies to the
failure of what, to many early-twentieth-century social reformers, was one of
the chief promises of the medieval as articulated through the architecture of
such icons as the Empire
State Building and Cathedral of
Learning: the hope that the excesses of industrial
capitalism could be tempered and even redirected by invoking the values of
a presumably less alienating and mechanistic era. Bioshock immerses players in
a nightmare vision that is explicitly constructed as the logical consequence of
such hopes, one in which player agency is manifested through a horrific form of
chivalry that forces players to choose whether or not to sacrifice girl-like little sisters
in order to endow their characters with the sort of quasi-medieval,
quasi-magical abilities that are commonplace in more-explicitly-medieval-themed
games.
The Night of the
Rabbit (2013) – with only “two days of adventure left” before the start of
the new school year, a young Jerry Hazelnut apprentices himself to a white
rabbit who promises to make him into a “tree-walker,” allowing him to cast
magic and travel between worlds. This choice frees Jerry from the dreary
prospects of the impending school term and the grey realities of an
ever-encroaching suburbia, but it ends up costing him more than just that
night’s dinner. A lyrical meditation on memory and loss and the allure and
limits of fantasy, with hand-drawn
backgrounds, compelling voice acting, and a moving soundtrack. $20
for Windows or macOS, but a free demo is also available.
[1] Here and throughout, we are providing purchase links
for informational purposes only. Lest we be seen as complete and utterly
unrepentant shills, these are not affiliate links, and we receive no
commissions from them. Full disclosure: we did consider affiliate links but
given the limited and generally parsimonious nature of our readership, we
eventually determined that it would be more economically feasible to just file
for unemployment.
[2] Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame:
Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 357-358.
