Videogames and the Middle Ages

Virtual simulations in the digital realm are thoroughly circumscribed by our fantastic reimaginings of European history between approximately 500 and 1500 CE to an extent that is difficult to name, much less account for [6]. Consider the terminology of digital technology. Above, for example, I have used the medieval political term “realm” (meaning “kingdom” [7, Definition 1]) to name the abstract, conceptual space of the digital, following a usage first attested in the 18th century [7, Definition 4]. There are many other words for organizing information in digital computation, which are similarly first attested in medieval texts [8], including, for example, “organization” [9, “organizatio, s.v.,” Definition 1], “information” [9, “informatio, s.v.” Definition 3], “digital” in its sense of counting (Figure 2) [10], “protocol” [11], “hierarchy” [12], the “virtual” ([9] “virtualis, s.v.”), “program” ([9] “programma, s.v.,”), and “code” [12].

In the early-modern period, European thinkers asserted that they were part of a “Renaissance” or “rebirth” of ancient Greek and Roman thought, as they set aside the scholastic Latin and Arabic-language commentaries on the philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle written by medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Ibn Sina to engage directly with the original Greek texts. The largest and most obvious exception to this larger trend is found in the disciplines of mathematics and computation, where Arabic-derived terms and concepts such as “algebra,” “algorithm,” “average,” and the Arabic system of numerals survive into our present day. No wonder, then, that the technology of the computer still signifies to modern users as “medieval”: the technology may be modern but the structures and systems of thought that the technology models were formatively articulated in the Middle Ages.

In a classic essay on popular “medievalism” [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21] in the 20th century, Umberto Eco observes that the Middle Ages are the point of origin for the material world that European nations and their settler-colonial offshoots presently inhabit [22]. In the English-speaking world, the institutions of not only the monarchy but also of parliament, the common law, and the university all begin in the Middle Ages. The English language itself was first written down in the medieval period, and one would be hard-pressed to identify an important text by a Greek or Roman author whose earliest known copy is not a medieval manuscript

In the English speaking world, the institutions of not only the monarchy but also of parliament, the common law, and the university all begin in the Middle Ages.

While the Middle Ages is an important point of reference for virtually all aspects of modern “civilization,” the culture of computing stands out for how enthusiastically it has embraced its memories of medieval European culture. Computers have taken older material technologies and techniques for data communication and storage, and they have made them virtual, commonly representing the underlying analogy to its users through an “icon”: a file directory is still represented by an image of a manila folder, the save function is still represented by an image of a 3.5 in floppy, and so on. In medieval videogames, we find the iconography of medieval romance—with its knights, wizards, damsels, monsters, ruined castles, and dangerous caves—serving to represent in a more general and abstract sense what the experience of inhabiting a virtual world of digital technology feels like. Gibson’s [23] classic grail-quest novel Neuromancer, whose name is a play on the term “necromancer” ([9] “necromantia, s.v.”), is a noteworthy and far-from-isolated example of how useful this medieval symbolic vocabulary has been for modeling what we imagine our experiences of computers could become.

One useful starting point for investigating the long-standing medievalism of digital culture is the end of World War II. Jagoda [24] has identified two coemergent phenomena in this period that informed the development of videogames. The first is the development of economic “game theory,” extrapolated from military wargaming to shape global politics during the Cold War and after. The second is the invention and refinement of the modern general-purpose digital computer, beginning with ENIAC in 1945 and continuing in dedicated labs housed in universities such as MIT and Stanford and in private companies such as IBM and AT&T. By 1946, computers were also being used for medieval studies “digital humanities” projects, including the collaboration between IBM and the scholar Roberto Busa to develop a digital concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas [25]. Meanwhile, Tenen [26] has also surveyed how computers drew on linguistic and cultural knowledge in early efforts to develop AI, integrating Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar models with the models for generating stories developed for pulp fiction in books following Polti’s [27] Thirty-six Dramatic Situations to try to teach computers how to tell stories, as a starting point for more complex and human-like modes of contemplation generally.

 

Figure 3.D&D party campaign artwork, EnvakEnkaqti, DeviantArt January 22, 2022.

It is no wonder, then, that from the date of D&D’s original release in 1974, it was enthusiastically adopted by the community of computer designers and users, whose quick movement toward “home-brew” adaptations and revisions [32] express a productive ambivalence about the “official” rules that are strikingly similar to the productive ambivalence shown by computer programmers toward the Unix operating system, first released by AT&T only one year earlier in 1973, and similarly subjected to relentless tinkering that similarly precipitated community schisms and rapprochements. In 1976, D&D enthusiast and ARPANet programmer Will Crowther combined his enthusiasm for fantasy adventure gaming with his skills in FORTRAN to create a text-based “interactive fiction” [33] that would later be expanded and revised by another programmer Don Woods into what is now known as Colossal Cave Adventure [33], [34]. Fantasy adventure games have been a mainstay of digital artistic production ever since, whose inexhaustible upper limit on “realism” has been a major driver in the commercial market for more powerful processors and so a major spur for advances in computer science more generally.

While the Middle Ages is an important point of reference for virtually all aspects of modern “civilization,” the culture of computing stands out for how enthusiastically it has embraced its memories of medieval European culture.

When I tell friends and colleagues about the research question behind this piece, “Why has the culture of computing always been so deeply interested in the Middle Ages?” they commonly ask: “Is it because of white supremacy?” I believe that this common guess is correct but only insofar as it names the stakes of my question. As I have already said, Eco makes a compelling argument when he suggests that the medieval period provided the basic material architecture of the white supremacist institutions and identities that the citizens of European nations and settler-colonial nations still inhabit. The way we remember this period and its aftermath reflects directly on our myths of national origin and so on our desired national destinies [22]. Accordingly, medieval studies have had a long and shameful history of complicity in the codification of white identity. For example, the first scholars studying the medieval “Old English” or “Anglo-Saxon” language of literature such as Beowulf explicitly argued that their work would uncover the origins of the modern white “Anglo-Saxon” race [35], [36].

Given the reactionary politics of major constituencies in so-called “gamer culture,” most notoriously attested in the “#gamergate” controversy of 2015 [37], it is clearly the case that many gamers like medieval games because the Middle Ages provide white identities with their mythic point of origin. However, at the same time, the entire occasion of the #gamergate controversy was the growing diversity of game enthusiasts, and diversity has only grown in the decade since. The question, then, is what precisely are the deeper symbolic structures of thought developed through memories of the medieval period alongside the invention of modern white identities that continue to shape the white supremacist “algorithms of oppression,” [38] what is the precise relationship between those structures and the conventions of adventure videogames mandating that their heroes ought to wield swords and cast spells on their way to saving princesses, and why precisely do the games that result appeal so widely to players of all identities and subject positions?

In my ongoing work on this topic, I am investigating how the experiences of anxiety and depression can provide a useful starting point for finding answers to these questions. In his 2004 book Postcolonial Melancholia, the theorist Gilroy [39] argues that the resistance to multiculturalism in Britain after 1957 can be explained in emotional terms as an inability of the white majority to acknowledge, much less mourn, the “death” of the British Empire. Given that many studies have found a correlation between violent political extremism and mental illness in youth of all identities [40], we may also argue that the melancholia built into the violent extremist ideology of white supremacy is an aspect of its appeal to depressed and anxious youth. Given that white supremacists believe that marginalized folks pose a threat to their very existence and marginalized folks know that white supremacists pose a threat to theirs, what is it about medieval fantasy adventure videogames that make them so appealing to both groups? Why have the fandoms of these games been for almost a decade a major front in an ongoing culture war among the youth? A major factor appears to be the increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents from all demographics in the last 20 years, which has attended the “gamification” of culture through digital social media [41].

A striking aspect of the diverse corpus of commercially and critically successful medieval videogames from the last decade or so—ranging from Dark Souls (From Software 2011) to Monument Valley (Utsuo, 2013) to Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) to Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017; Figure 4) to Slay the Princess (Black Tabby, 2023)—is that more often than not they focus on anxiety, depression, and traumatic repetition as their major narrative themes. Since the early 1980s, the word “geek” has meant “a person who is extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers or related technology” ([7] “Geek, s.v.,” Definition 1.c.). This meaning is clearly closely associated with another, somewhat broader meaning first attested on university campuses in the mid-20th century: “An overly diligent, unsociable student; any unsociable person obsessively devoted to a particular pursuit” [7, Definition 1.b]. The semantic range of the term reflects how, for both historical and cultural reasons, information and computing technologies have always been associated with the experience of subjective alienation and the corresponding symptomology of anxiety and depression, of which obsessive-compulsive disorder is a well-known example (e.g., [42]). Not unrelatedly, the popular medievalism of the so-called “goth” subculture—overlapping with the subculture of computer programmers—is thought to correlate with depression and self-harm (e.g., [43], [44], [45], [46], [47], and [48]). These studies reflect the popular intuition that the modern heirs of the “gothic” neo-medievalism practiced by the Romantic and Decadent artists and authors (for whom, we should note, “gothic” was an art-historical period term that meant “medieval”) must share the melancholic temperament so valorized by those esthetic movements [49].

 

Figure 4. Screenshot, Hellblade: Sensuas Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), Sergio Baldiviezo, Flickr, uploaded November 8, 2018.

Whether computers and gamified social media have been the cause of the recent rise in anxiety and depression, computers have certainly provided in games an increasingly dominant artistic medium for expressing the feelings associated with these symptoms, and using iconography to express these emotions has drawn from our memories of the European Middle Ages. As our population has become more anxious, more depressed, and more dependent on computers to communicate, it has also become more and more fascinated with medieval fantasy worlds. This is a very strange trend to have inspired so little comment.

Stephen Yeager is a Professor of English at Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada. Email: stephen.yeager@concordia.ca.

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