17: Before 1492: Building Medieval Environments for Immodern Games

Sarah-Nelle Jackson, @queerdievalist, University of British Columbia

Whether inspired by the European Middle Ages or another intersection of time and place, videogames reflect the worldviews of those who make them. Even when we honour the unfamiliar or distant, we translate it to “make sense” within the world and medium of the game. As a result, many games reflect what Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw) calls “late colonial” values: gamers “seize and control territory” by “leveling up, conquering enemies, opening new levels, and … acquiring more power, more skills, and more wealth” (430). A new game, a New World. Such gameplay conveys, among other things, a logic of environment. Through exploration, discovery, and combat, new areas transform from active and hostile to “flattened … mapped and claimed by players” (LaPensée 20). Levels, rendered known, become unresponsive, safe, and often skippable.

Pursuing other methods of play, critical Indigenous gamers like Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishnaabe and Métis) are exploring how Indigenous worldviews can resist such logics and inform new approaches to gameplay and game design (see Miner). Their work inspires me, a settler medievalist, to wonder whether precolonial European worldviews might challenge colonial logics, even as they point toward them. By allowing medieval pasts to inspire the form as well as the content of contemporary games, can we make some calls from inside the house?

Medieval England’s capacity to disrupt colonial logics may seem vanishing. Besides inspiring countless mainstream franchises, the often Euro- or even exclusively Anglo-derived idea of “the medieval” serves as an imagined origin point not only for a given game’s world, lore, or aesthetics, but also for settler legal regimes and New World chivalry. And doubtless medieval English rulers — to say nothing of many authors — would have loved to be able to presuppose the modern, Eurowestern view of environment as real estate, a depersonalized commodity, or an ever-retreating frontier. Periodizationwise, the era arguably culminates in and around 1492.

Evidence suggests, however, that medieval Europeans couldn’t count on such a worldview. Even when ostensibly navigated, conquered, and managed, medieval environments represented, both creatively and politically, a site of ongoing and begrudging relation. More curiously still, the sources themselves help us answer the question of how we might incorporate these elements into modern games. In literary, historical, and even legal writing, the way the environment interacts with humans evokes classical RPGs.

Take Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Malory completed his extensive account of King Arthur’s reign in 1485, just years before Columbus would sail apocalyptically across the ocean blue. Yet even in this canonical, influential, and relatively late text, the environment cannot be taken for granted. Instead, it proves a site of informative resistance.

Some of that informativeness is diegetic. Among the Morte’s many RPG-like features, the frequent, gold-lettered flavour text stands out. In videogames, flavour text refers to the brief, lore-imbued snippets the player encounters when, for example, you read about an item you’ve just picked up, such as a new weapon or health potion. Here, for example, is the item description for an Estus Flask, the iconic healing item in From Software’s 2011 action RPG, Dark Souls:

The Undead treasure these dull green flasks. Fill with Estus at bonfire. Fills HP.

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The Estus Flasks are linked to the Fire Keepers. The Dark Tales also make reference:

An emerald flask, from the Keeper’s soul She lives to protect the flame, And dies to protect it further

The first part is practical: Estus Flasks restore the player’s hit points, or health, when used as directed. The flavour text that follows, however, raises questions. Who are the Fire Keepers? How do their souls effect these flasks?

The environment of the Morte generates similar informative, elusive text. When the precipitating sword in the stone appears, for example, onlookers notice

letters … wryten in gold aboute the swerd that saiden thus: “Whoso pulleth oute this swerd of this stone and anvyld is rightwys kynge borne of all Englond.” (Malory 7) The gold lettering is clear and accurate, but it also introduces wonder and ambiguity. After withdrawing the sword, Arthur himself asks: “Wherfore I … and for what cause?” All Sir Ector can reply is “God wille have hit soo” (9). Such lettering appears frequently in the environment of Arthur’s realm. Sometimes the not-quitehuman wizard Merlin scrawls it. More often, it appears without account of age or cause, as in these examples from the tale of Sir Balin:

And there the ermyte and Balyne buryed the knyght undir a ryche stone and a tombe royall. And on the morne they founde letters of golde wrteyn how that “Sir Gawayne shall revenge his fadirs dethe Kynge Lot on Kynge Pellynore.” (65) Balen … rode forth. And within thre dayes he cam by a crosse, and thereon were letters of gold wryten that said: “it is not for no knyght alone to ryde toward this castel.” (70) The Morte’s flavour text tends to convey information either foregone, as in the first Balin example above, or blithely ignored, as in the second.

In gaming terms, Arthur has often already “completed” the regions where the text appears, not least when the gold letters pop up on the seats of the Round Table itself. But they render his completion temporary and contingent. Without the colonial logics of the frontier, there is no presumptively safe boundary of control. The Morte’s environment is almost roguelike, to borrow another gaming term: punishing, fatal, and — from the players’ perspectives, at least — arbitrary. As distinct from roguelikes, the environment generates events, features, and text in a way arguably unconnected to or unconcerned with a given Arthurian’s progress or presence, even as it intervenes in, brings about, or complicates chivalric aventure. Each golden tidbit signals new content, difficulty, and ambiguity. Ultimately, the entire Arthurian project fails.

As far as game design, Malory’s Morte offers a new take on the RPG tenet that decisions do, should, or must matter. Medieval sources more broadly may help us move from predictable, pseudo-colonial encounters on unfamiliar territory to unpredictable, immodern encounters on familiar but unknown terrain.

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Bibliography

Byrd, Jodi. “‘Do they not have rational souls?’: Consolidation and Sovereignty in Digital new Worlds.” Settler Colonial Studies 6.4 (2016): 423–437.

Dark Souls: Remastered. Windows PC version, From Software, 2018.

LaPensée, Elizabeth. “Indigenously-Determined Games of the Future.” kimiwan / takwákin (2014): 20–21.

Malory, Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Edited by P. J. C. Field, vol. 1, D. S. Brewer, 2013.

Miner, Joshua D. “Critical Protocols in Indigenous Gamespace.” Games and Culture 17.1: 3–25.

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