Routledge has recently released Daniel T. Kline's collection Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages
(2014) in a more affordable paperback edition.
I originally posted on the book in 2013. This post serves as an update.
Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages
https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Gaming-Re-imagines-the-Middle-Ages-1st-Edition/Kline/p/book/9780415630917
Edited by Daniel T. Kline
Routledge
298 pages
Purchasing Options:$ = USD
Paperback: 9781138548572
pub: 2018-02-05
$51.95
Hardback: 9780415630917
pub: 2013-08-06
$160.00
eBook (VitalSource) : 9780203097236
pub: 2013-09-11
Description
Digital gaming’s 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 Ages challenges 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 gaming—where neomedievalism no longer negotiates with any reality beyond itself and other medievalisms—creates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts.
Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages demonstrates that the medieval is more than just a stockpile of historically static facts but is a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.
Table of Contents
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. White
Part 2: Gaming Re-imagines Medieval Traditions
2. "Best and Only Bulwark": How Epic Narrative Redeems
Beowulf the Game - Candace Barrington and Timothy English
3. Systematizing Culture in Medievalism: Geography, Dynasty, Culture, and Imperialism in
Crusader Kings: Deus Vult - Jason Pitruzzello
4. The Portrayal of Medieval Warfare in
Medieval: Total War and
Medieval 2: Total War - Greg Fedorenko
5.
Gabriel Knight: A Twentieth-Century Chivalric Romance Hero - Angela Tenga
Part 3: Case Study 1 –
World of Warcraft
6. Coloring Tension: Medieval and Contemporary Concepts in Classifying and Using Digital Objects in
World of Warcraft - Elysse T. Meredith
7. Sir Thomas Malory and the Death Knights of New Avalon: Imagining Medieval Identities in
World of Warcraft - Kristen Noone and Jennifer Kavetsky
8. Accumulating Histories: A Social Practice Approach to Medievalism in High Fantasy MMORPGs - Jennifer C. Stone, Peter Kudenov, and Teresa Combs
9. "Awesome Cleavage": The Genred Body in
World of Warcraft - Kim Wilkins
Part 4: Case Study 2 –
Dante's Inferno, The Game
10. The Game's Two Bodies, or the Fate of Figura in
Dante's Inferno - Bruno Lessard
11. Courtly e-Violence, Digital Play: Adapting Medieval Courtly Masculinities in
Dante’s Inferno - Oliver Chadwick
12. Shades of Dante: Virtual Bodies in
Dante's Inferno - Timothy J. Welsh and John T. Sebastian
13. The Middle Ages in the Depths of Hell: Pedagogical Possibility and the Past in
Dante's Inferno - Angela Jane Weisl and Kevin J. Stevens
Part 5: Theoretical and Representational Issues in Medieval Gaming
14. We Will Travel by Map: Maps as Narrative Spaces in Videogames and Medieval Texts - Thomas Rowland
15. Author, Text, and Medievalism in
The Elder Scrolls - Michelle DiPietro
16. Technophilia and Technophobia in Online Medieval Fantasy Games - Nick Webber
17. The Consolation of Paranoia: Conspiracy, Epistemology, and the Templars in
Assassin's Creed,
Deus Ex, and
Dragon Age Harry J. Brown
Part 6: Sociality and Social Media in Medieval Gaming
18. Casual Medieval Games, Interactivity, and Social Play in Social Network and Mobile Applications - Serina Patterson
About the Series
Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture
This series is our home for innovative research in the field of digital media. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into this subject as its influence and significance grow into the twenty-first century.
About the Editor
Daniel T. Kline is Professor of English at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, USA.
