Accessing Videogames for Medieval Studies Course Plans: Four Points of Entry

From Crowther and Wood's 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure to the top games of 2024, the virtual worlds of videogames have been commonly set in worlds based loosely or closely on European history and literature dated 500-1500 CE. Modern subjects have long instrumentalized the symbolic vocabulary of medieval history and romance for representing to themselves the embodied, affective experience of inhabiting virtual, mediated environments, which videogames have also taken up as one of their major subjects. Studying this medievalism in videogames does not only provide instructors and students with a way of accessing medieval history, but also with a way of contextualizing the importance of that history in relation to a major twenty-first century expressive form. This essay identifies four points of entry for instructors, including the narrative concept of adventure, the interrelationship between videogame death and the gothic, and the lore recorded in the rogue archives of videogame fandom.