‘Medievalist mechanics: digital humanities and game design’ from

https://twitter.com/MidAgesModGames/status/1277956350429900800

1/12 #MAMG20 Hello! I'm James Baillie, PhD student @DH_UniWien working on medieval Georgia and occasional #gamedev and game modder. This thread/paper is on my course "Digital Medievalisms: Game Design and Digital Humanities". I’ve taught it once so far, this year at @univienna.

2/12 #MAMG20 A key aim with this course was to balance examining games as narratives to compare to medieval texts with looking at them as mechanical models of societies - the understanding of pseudo-past society a player intuits from a game is as much mechanical as narrative.

3/12 #MAMG20 Questions like "how do other actors react to your actions" are some of the most important for a player's ongoing impression of a past/pseudopast society. Are they seeing an age of belligerence? Or retrenchment? Lone action or networked plans? It's all in the code.

4/12 #MAMG20 So the structure of the course was to have a number of sub-units, each of which was thematic: travel, fate, race, crafts, relationships. Each had one session on medieval viewpoints on the topic, and one session on the digital and DH presentation of the topic.

5/12 #MAMG20 The viewpoints sections took a breadth approach. We looked at translated texts from across Eurasia, 500-1500, with as wide a range of viewpoints as I could find. This gabe glimpses of what does *and doesn't* get used in games, and ranges of factors affecting a topic.

6/12 #MAMG20 For the digital sections I set a worksheet or examination of a DH resource & discussed in basic/theoretical terms some underlying storage mechanisms and algorithms behind modelling that particular theme, with a comparison to DH approaches to the same issues.

7/12 #MAMG20 So for travel we covered djikstra's algorithm and looked at its use in games or in the al-Thurayya project (https://althurayya.github.io). For fate, we looked at the basic building blocks of functions and did a bonus session teaching first principles of Python.

8/12 #MAMG20 Race and relationships led to discussions of prosopography and social network analysis: the ways that both DH practitioners and devs encode interpersonal relationships and personal characteristics affect analyses or stories that can mechanically develop from them.

9/12 #MAMG20 For example, take a strategy game where the engine mechanically considers if a noble is likely to defect between factions. One factor might be what the character considers their ethnic/cultural identity to be and which parts of that they're drawn to.

10/12 #MAMG20 Many if not most games, though, have those sorts of identities as a single, pre-set fundament of a character. This is alien to the sources I as a prosopographer grapple with where people have complex, layered identities which can come to the forefront situationally.

11/12 #MAMG20 Split identities and mixed loyalties are a core part of medieval chronicle and epic narratives alike: but without them being mechanically there, they can at best be a pre-scripted feature for certain characters rather than a "natural" aspect of the created world.

12/12 #MAMG20 Examining how DH practitioners & game devs model these concepts, and the narrative effects of that, I think helps provoke humanistic thinking about code and what it does and says: code can and does tell & create stories too. Thanks for reading and for all questions!