25: Fenlander: Exploring Life in a Medieval Landscape

James Baillie, @JubalBarca, University of Vienna

Today for this year’s Middle Ages in Modern Games I’m talking about Fenlander, an adventure game I made in three days this January, and how it presents medieval peasant life. I made the game for itch.io’s Historically Accurate Game Jam 5, using a text-parser engine and colour-indexed photo and digital collage illustrations. The game takes you to a medieval village in the East Anglian fens, as an ordinary peasant trying to make their eel-rent.

Your goal is to use your tools, items, and four skill attributes – harnsering (skill & fishing), surefooting (travel & balance), hickathrifting (brawn & strength) and skeining (social skills) to make your way through the game and build up a smoked eel surplus. In Fenlander, days and nights roll by: the player has a choice of three main tools - eel glaive, peat spade, and reed scythe - that they can take to the fen to gather resources. They must also eat, sleep, by watching the landscape and talking to NPCs they can trade and learn additional skills and recipes.

At its heart, Fenlander is a game about survival: going hungry and tired exhausts the player character which can lead to health problems building up and, eventually, death. The landscape of the fens, both as risk factor, provider, and biome, is core to its challenges. With a weighted-random chance system for producing resources on the fens, and the fact that you can only take one main tool out at once, balancing the resources you gather is a key to success. The game economy is thus at heart a problemspace of how you manage your time: how you expend time working on each resource, versus resting, versus actions to progress through the game, is the main challenge for players.

Fig. 25.1. A game screen from Fenlander. Note the bonus from the heron as a landscape factor

Unlike many survival games, though, in Fenlander survival is necessarily social. Successful players engage with NPCs who move around in daily patterns & offer knowledge or items players can’t 65

produce. This breaks down the isolationist “frontier” survival model. But there are game limits on how social: the player’s household economy is simplified to give them a one-person household. This gives the player more freedom & avoids them being expected to know NPCs at the game start, but simplifies their household economy.

This “economic solo” model prioritises food and resource gathering that pushes players to explore: conversely, family care, spinning, and other ‘feminine’ house-centred work may be deprioritised –something worth considering when writing peasant economies in games. Simplifying economies also means simplifying time: in RPGs, full-year time cycles are difficult to implement in sensible playthrough time. Even if it takes only three minutes to play through a day – and it usually takes far longer – the player would need to sit down for over eighteen hours to play a year’s cycle. Medieval societies where certain feast days, festivals, and agricultural cycles were central to life can thus easily lose those social elements.

Progression is another issue: in Fenlander improving & learning skills and recipes provides evolving gameplay. In the game, that’s provided socially or from examining and learning about the landscape. Background descriptions of sounds and experiences in the fens are provided as the player moves through the fenland parts of the game, and observing the landscape can provide stat bonuses as the player learns about the environment. As noted above, social learning is also important, with fellow villagers providing the player with advice or information they need. However, these learning experiences are given outside family units and to the implicitly adult player, implying big starting knowledge gaps. The player only starts with one food recipe – that for smoked eels – and others must be learned during the game, meaning that the player character starts off with a level of knowledge better matching the player’s out-of-world perspective than the character’s in-world perspective, to allow for these improvements.

Fig. 25.2. The player's house in-game. The player forms a one-person household for narrative and ludic reasons. 66

Some of this could arguably have been solved by making the player character an outsider to the setting, explaining why they need to learn so much – but this common narrative device, too, has its issues. Firstly, it does not solve the whole problem: the fact that the player does not know how to make bread is still weird even if they do not come from the fens. Second, and more importantly, making the player character an external observer gives them a very different viewpoint on the setting, othering the core location and removing the sense that this location should be an understandable ‘home’ landscape for the player character. We should be cautious about always embodying the player’s lack of knowledge in a game context given the extent to which that requires sending the message that the game’s setting is a curiosity to be explored and observed, rather than an ongoing situation that the player must get to know.

There are more possibilities future versions may explore: year-cycles may be too big, but the church, planned but incomplete in version one, may help structure weeks and add focus for the social game, possibly providing a day without work but with bonus NPC interactions available. More NPCs and interactions might create explorations more aspects of life, too: deeper NPC stories with which the player can interact may allow a game to present a more multi-faceted view of ordinary life.

Games naturally focus on exceptions and elites in history: but it's worth thinking about how they encode social and structural norms too. Fenlander's mix of time-management and engagement with landscape & community are one approach to examining those areas in a game. You can get the first demo version of Fenlander at jubalbarca.itch.io/fenlander: all questions, thoughts, and feedback arevery much welcome. Thanks for reading!

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