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. 28
