Categories
Gender

What we play: Chatting about History, Gender, and Videogames

Videogames offer us the possibility to create spaces to enjoy and engage with in ways that approach the past visually and interactively. We can play with history, and we can play to do history. But playing and history are also gendered. Playing with history and gender can open possibilities for events that happened in a moment in human history […]

Categories
Medievalism

Virtual Byzantium: How Historical Games Represent Byzantine Society

The gaming medium can stimulate original perspectives on the past by incorporating underrepresented cultures or minorities into its game systems. However, when reflecting on the concept of accuracy,1 it has been emphasized that games “should also be inclusive without lying to the audience,” and Diana Cristina Răzman specified that the way the gaming industry addresses […]

Categories
Development Medievalism

Between Imagined Worlds: Reinterpreting Medievalisms in an RPG

As both a game developer and a medieval historian, each of my interests informs the other. In this post, I’m going to talk you through some ways I approach putting medieval elements in games and think about why they’re there. The process I use is based on thinking about medieval ideas as a sort of […]