14: What you Leave Behind – Tracing Actions in Digital Games about the Middle Ages

14: What you Leave Behind – Tracing Actions in Digital Games about the Middle Ages

Jonas Froehlich and Tobias Schade, @tales_things, University of Tübingen Games simulate an experience of historicised situations and enable players to take actions, and to do history in virtual worlds (McCall 2019, 29–30). This paper aims to analyse virtual remains left behind by players while taking actions in these worlds. Through an interdisciplinary perspective – archaeological and historical – virtual remains can be identified, characterised, and studied similar to remains from the ‘real’ world. Following this premise, subsequent questions can be asked: Which things remain – and why? In this regard, this paper focuses on four different games: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI including Gathering Storm (2K Games; 2016/2019), Crusader Kings III including Northern Lords (Paradox Interactive; 2020/2021), Foundation (Polymorph Games; Early Access Release 2019), and Valheim (Coffee Stain Publishing; Early Access Release 2021). In these strategy and survival games players leave a variety of remains behind: Built structures are core elements. For example, a shelter in Valheim – basic for the character to rest and to re-spawn –or a Builder’s Workshop in Foundation – enabling players to construct buildings – are essentially for game progress. Runestones in Crusader Kings III or churches in Foundation for instance are special monuments which yield bonuses. Moveable objects like work of arts, relics, and archaeological artefacts in Civilization VI generate benefits for the current holder and can be displayed, themed, traded, and stolen – and can therefore be used as resources. In Valheim, crafted tools like the cultivator are used actively. These tools enable new players’ actions, like planting seeds and farming. The most visible remains are left behind in the landscape in the form of built structures, but the environment itself is often shaped as well. This becomes most apparent in Valheim, where gaining substances by ‘harvesting’ the landscape and using them as resources is a core element of the game (Figure 14.1). In Valheim it is possible to gain raw materials and to shape the landscape with the players own ‘hands’ – e.g., cutting trees to gain wood as building material. The community of Valheim discusses deforestation and strip mining as actions of landscaping. However, in Crusader Kings III the landscape is predetermined, and the transformations are mainly narrated, not visual.

Figure 14.1: Valheim, Early Access Release (Iron Gate AB / Coffee Stain Publishing, 2021). Although the digital things that players leave behind vary widely, they all seem to have meanings for game mechanics. They have a function. It does not matter if they are visible or not: While the tools in Valheim are visibly stored and used to shape the world, documents in Crusader Kings III are only narrated things enabling players to claim territory and to move borders.

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However, other remains of the ‘real’ past are neither visible nor narrated in many games – this also applies to pottery, remains of consumption, which are often found in archaeological contexts (Figure 14.2): Waste from consumption, craftmanship, daily activities, or human needs and objects which lost their function like abandoned buildings, used documents, and broken things are often missing – this also applies to human remains and subsequently to a remembrance of these.

Figure 14.2: Giorgos Peppas; Panagiotis Koutis, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons These remains do not have a function in the game mechanic. For instance, in many strategy or survival games it is reasonable to remove structures which lost their functions for getting the building plots or the raw materials back. Therefore, most players’ actions would not be traceable by historians and archaeologists exploring the virtual worlds. Based on these observations, we make three assumptions: 1. To do history in virtual worlds means to leave virtual remains;

2. Players’ actions result in visible remains as well as narrated ones; 3. Remains have a function – unfunctional things are not part of these worlds. From an archaeological and historical point of view these remains could be studied as (virtual) sources of a (virtual) past. Following this concept, intentional remains (‘Tradition’) seem to be more present than unintentional remains (‘Überrest’) in the sense of Droysen (Droysen 1868, 14).

While not intentional or not functional remains (‘Überreste’) are often key elements to narrate past in the ‘real’ world, they are marginalised in virtual worlds – presumably in the favour of game mechanics. They seem unimportant for doing history. However, playing historicised games and subsequently leaving virtual remains – which enable players to trace own actions as well as (virtual) daily routines and (virtual) human activities – can create more awareness for the variety and value regarding remains of the past, both historical and archaeological, in the ‘real’ world.

Bibliography

• Johann G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (Leipzig 1868). • Jeremiah McCall, Playing with the past: history and video games (and why it might matter). Journal of Geek Studies 6(1): 29–48 (2019).

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