Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages [Hardcover]

Digital gamings cultural significance is often minimized much in the same way that the Middle Ages are discounted as the backward and childish precursor to the modern period. Digital Gaming Reimagines the Middle Ageschallenges both perceptions by examining how the Middle Ages have persisted into the contemporary world via digital games as well as analyzing how digital gaming translates, adapts, and remediates medieval stories, themes, characters, and tropes in interactive electronic environments. At the same time, the Middle Ages are reinterpreted according to contemporary concerns and conflicts, in all their complexity. Rather than a distinct time in the past, the Middle Ages form a space in which theory and narrative, gaming and textuality, identity and society are remediated and reimagined. Together, the essays demonstrate that while having its roots firmly in narrative traditions, neomedieval gamingwhere neomedievalism no longer negotiates with any reality beyond itself and other medievalismscreates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts. Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Agesdemonstrates that the medieval is more than just a stockpile of historically static facts but is a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.

Introduction: All Your History Are Belong to Us : Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages Daniel T. Kline  Part 1: Prehistory of Medieval Gaming  1. The Right to Dream of the Middle Ages: Simulating the Medieval in Tabletop RPGs William J.WhitePart 2: Gaming Re-imagines Medieval Traditions  2. Best and Only Bulwark : How Epic Narrative Redeems Beowulf the GameCandace Barrington and Timothy English  3. Systematizing Culture in Medievalism: Geography, Dynasty, Culture, and Imperialism in CrusadlSA