Reviewed by: Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel T. Kline Andrew B.R. Elliott daniel t. kline, ed., Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xiii, 298. isbn: 978–0–415–63091–7. $125. With Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages, Kline and his various contributors have collectively fired the first volley in what will be, one hopes, a new and exciting [End Page 145] chapter in medievalism. However, the book is important not only because it is the first in this new subfield, but also because it is excellent in itself; the contributions are well-argued and clear, the collection has been carefully assembled and edited, and the whole contains a wide range of consistently insightful chapters. William J. White opens the collection with an interesting study of the emergence of video games by examining tabletop RPGs as the early forerunners of medieval videogames. While some might perhaps take issue with the implicit suggestion that video games are a mere extension of tabletop versions, this suggestion is not really his point, and his argument neatly brings out the themes often established as tropes of the medieval video game and ‘part of a broader fantasy and science fiction theme that is itself a component of geek culture’ (15). Candace Barrington and Timothy English’s essay on Beowulf offers an example of the best kinds of scholarship that are on offer in this new field. Rather than lamenting the inaccuracies (which are to be expected in a game based not on the poem but Zemeckis’ 2007 film), the essay instead examines why such changes were made and looks at players’ motivations and the narrative needs established by the gameplay. Their approach sidesteps tired old debates about fidelity and accuracy, examining instead how an Old English epic can be updated and made relevant to twenty-first-century audiences. In their ability to relate theoretical approaches, such as gender theory, to debates taking place in online fantasy worlds, Stone, Kudenov, and Combs also offer a remarkable contribution. Their imaginative analysis of the performance of gender roles in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Play Games) reveals that, rather than challenging gender normativity, a deeply engrained application of traditional (though wholly imaginary) chivalric gender roles has been transferred to a very modern forum. As they argue, ‘high fantasy MMORPGs are designed to support medievalist notions of courtly love and romance’ (114), which are played out in assumed gender roles according to the player’s avatar (irrespective of the actual gender of the player). However, the standout chapter of the whole collection is Serina Patterson’s study of the ways in which social gaming’s use of the Middle Ages on Facebook, Twitter, and mobile devices integrates a memory of the period and incorporates it into users’ everyday lives. Patterson’s argument that casual medieval games ‘form pseudomedieval worlds’ (245) ‘that serve a variety of social and emotional needs’ (254) draws out a subtle argument that it is not merely a clique of hard-core gamers who ‘re-imagine the Middle Ages,’ but rather that to some extent we all engage with digital games and their various medievalisms. One minor criticism, which is in fact common to most books which open up new fields, is that from the outset several of the essays adopt a defensive mode and use their introductions to emphasize the importance, relevance, and scholarly justifications of studying videogames. Over time this posturing becomes a little repetitive, since not only is it likely that anyone having bought the book is already sympathetic to such approaches, but also, given the quality of both contributors and editor, it quickly becomes apparent that there is great scope for this kind of analysis. A second minor criticism is the perhaps inevitable repetition and disproportionate emphasis on certain games over others. It is perfectly logical that, with something [End Page 146] like 10 million subscribers, World of Warcraft should warrant a whole case study with 4 chapters devoted to it, but similar weight is given to Dante’s Inferno, a less obvious candidate and a game which even Welsh...
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