25: Iconic Bastards and Bastardised Icons: Plebby Quest’s Neomedievalist Crusades Mike Horswell, @mjhorswell I’m a historian who works on modern uses of the crusades. I’m going to talk about the game Plebby Quest: The Crusades as an example of ‘neomedievalism’ – an image of the Middle Ages reflecting an imagined medieval past.
Figure 25.1: Plebby Quest (Neowiz, 2021) Medievalism, and medieval digital games in particular, employ bitesize, self-referential tropes or ‘icons’ to signal and reinforce their ‘medieval’ status in modern culture. I introduced some tropes about the crusades last year: https://twitter.com/mjhorswell/status/1279059823552679937 Plebby Quest: The Crusades (2020) offers a quintessential example. A grand strategy game for mobile gamers that is set in the medieval world PQ reduces historical figures to soft-cornered rectangles& promiscuously mixes in pop culture references. In its irreverent, offbeat scenarios, players encounter a ‘bricolage’ of neomedievalism, where the medieval is bastardised to produce ‘icons’ recognisable in the context of knowing invocations of the pop-historical Middle Ages. The cast includes a jumble of iconic medieval figures: the antagonists of the Third Crusade (1189-92) Saladin, Richard ‘the Lionheart’ and Philip Augustus; as well as Machiavelli, Ibn al-Athir, and Baybars. Richard wears a lion pelt for easy identification. 44
