For better or worse, video games have become one of the most prominent ways that modern students interact with and form assumptions about the Middle Ages. Since the earliest days of the industry, video game developers and players have shown a consistent interest in depicting the period and living out medieval fantasies. Today, the popular distribution platform Steam hosts over 8,300 games tagged as "Medieval" within their catalogue. Due to a frequent lack of meaningful engagement with the Middle Ages in K-12 education, many undergraduate students taking their first course in Medieval Studies likely hold preconceived notions shaped by games such as Assassin's Creed, Total War, and Crusader Kings. While this media drives students to medieval classes, such assumptions may reinforce counterproductive narratives about the period, given that online gaming communities often perpetuate the discriminatory opinions of a vocal minority of white male gamers. This paper examines how educators can grapple with these video game medievalisms and proposes ways to use gaming to expand such casual understandings of the past. The first section considers the modern state of medieval gaming through a quantitative analysis of the top ten percent of "medieval" games on Steam and surveys conducted in online communities on Meta and Reddit to better understand how developers and gamers make use of the Middle Ages. Having analyzed this ecosystem, the second half of the paper suggests methods to use game-based learning to encourage a richer and more nuanced understanding of the period. This will leverage both pedagogical experiences from Benjamin A. Bertrand and Emily Varker's work crafting a prototype interactive fiction game “Countess: The Price of Rule” for her Master’s thesis examining different methods of fictionalizing historical figures.
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