39: Games and Fantasy in the Medieval Middle East

39: Games and Fantasy in the Medieval Middle East

Edmund Hayes, @HedHayes20, Radboud University in Nijmegen Most games drawing upon the Medieval Middle East fit into a few archetypes: Arabian Nights; Bazaar trading; the Desert; Crusades. To acknowledge the obvious: a lot of the original source material for the Medieval Middle East in pop culture is racist. Tolkien’s Haradrim sided with Sauron. The Necronomicon was written by the mad Arab Abul Hazred. Arabian Nights is great, but became conflated with 19th C wet dreams about harem girls in tinsely bikinis. The Crusades are a little different. I’ll come to that.

Different media and genres relate to slightly different archetypes: boardgames often include Middle Eastern trading setting. It’s hard not to link this to old stereotypes of the hook-nosed Semite haggling in the Souq. To be fair, trade is ubiquitous in boardgames, but Middle Eastern games emphasize theft. But a trade theme can also allow designers to present hybrid settings that evoke historical mixing. Positive images appear more often in Central Asian silk road settings, as opposed to the Middle East itself, especially for Italian designers. For example, Merv refers to historical routes. In RPGs, the Arabian Nights is a common fantasy, perhaps the most visible Medieval Middle East setting, with an emphasis on the exotic & fantastic, and a blurring of cultural lines between North African, Middle Eastern, Persian and Indian. True, the 1001 Nights had vague settings & exoticized its own East, but while games create a fantasy playground, cultural blurring allows consumers to ignore humanizing historical specificities, perpetuating old visions of an eternal Orient starting somewhere east of Vienna and blurring up to the borders of China. If a game aims at genuine history, it’s focus will be on the Crusades. Ironic given the goal of establishing Christian hegemony in the Middle East, Crusade settings offer the most positive vision of the Medieval Middle East. It goes back to Walter Scott’s revival of medieval European romance with Saladin as chivalric hero. Saladin indeed is everywhere, especially in strategy games like Crusader Kings and Civilization. Occasionally you see other historical settings are explored in some marginal contexts. See the indie boardgame al-Rashid, set in the golden age of the Abbasid caliphate. The Medieval Middle East, absurdly, is often seen as an intrinsically more religious place than Europe, with bonuses in strategy games for ME leaders who capitalize on religion. https://t.co/T66jsSkfzh?amp=1 Game designers have difficulty, perhaps understandably, positioning Islam. Christianity and paganisms, by contrast are handled as neutral background or mythologized. Islam is avoided. "Through the Ages" has a modern Islam giving military advantage & lost science. The issue of religion and the Ismaili Nizari “Order” portrayed in Assassin’s Creed needs its own paper. Briefly, it deracinates a real group from religious roots and projects it as sceptical philosophy. Much of the representation of Medieval Middle East in games is itself rather medieval: distant, exotic, and blurred.

Historical detail often traces to MEDIEVAL European romances lionizing Saladin, or thrilling over the Assassins. Public taste can be blamed… but also historians. Unlike European medievalists, historians of the Medieval Middle East haven’t seriously embraced the ludic. Perhaps it’s time.

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