There is a growing trend within the Neo-Medievalist to see video games as tools for teaching as well as a way to explore the modern perception of medieval. Last year at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo I attended to sessions on Video games and Medievalism. One was a hands on event where among other things WoW, Guild Wars, The Guild, and more medieval building sim games than you can shake a stick at. The second session was a more traditional academic sessions with papers being presented. A very interesting one was about how certain medieval simulation games claim to be ‘historical accurate’ when often the historical accuracy gets lost to playability, and how is companies are going to push a game to be used as a teaching tool need to be more careful about how they present themselves.
In that vain I also just submitted (on the deadline no less) a paper proposal on King’s Quest as a Medieval Romance Epic (or Chason de geste). Some of you out there probably remember this Adventure game from the ’golden days’ of that genre. If you haven’t go pick up the King’s Questcollection it’s only 20 bucks or less(or if you look on line there are three remakes of the first three games with updated graphics and vocals). I’m not going to go into my paper here, but if anyone is interested I will put up my proposal for you the reader to take a poke at.
On a side note its vast becoming obvious I’m not a history major but a Medievalist English major with grammar issues.