Abstract
This article describes the use of the materiality of the medieval book as a trope of medievalism in neomedieval games. It argues that the materiality of the hybrid writing/printing book culture evoked in these games does not correspond with any given historical period, not even the late 15th-century technical transition from writing to print culture; instead, the games synthesize a variety of details from separate historical periods into a coherent neomedieval book culture that supports player immersion. The player's relationship with this neomedieval book culture is fostered through representations of the materiality of the medieval book, though this materiality can be represented in images or in text, in the game environment or in the user interface. Handling manuscripts and deciphering texts is an important component of the fantasy sought by the audience of neomedieval role-playing games.
While some medieval video games strive to simulate medieval history, especially its warfare, San Nicolás Romera et al. (2018) identify a related category they call “hybrid” video games. These games are not only medieval in the sense of being inspired by the historical middle ages but also medieval in the sense of being inspired by medieval literature, its dragons and sorcerers and quests (pp. 522–523). According to San Nicolás Romera et al., these hybrid games are both more popular and more enduring than historicizing ones like Crusader Kings (p. 523). In the introduction to a collection examining this phenomenon, Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages, Daniel T. Kline calls these “hybrid” games neomedieval, concerned more with “truth-of-coherence” in the game world than “truth-of-correspondence” with any historical middle ages (2013, p. 6).
Though these games do not seek to simulate medieval history, the “truth-of-coherence” of these game worlds nevertheless rests on the tropes of medievalism identified by M. J. Toswell (2012), that is “knights; heroes; swords; vast landscapes with castles and forests and mountains; handmade artifacts; treasure-hunting; quests; witches and warlocks; various representations of the Other, including giants, elves, dwarves, and so on … medieval weaponry and armor; magic” (pp. 69–70). As Toswell's list is intended to be evocative rather than exhaustive, Michelle DiPietro seeks to supplement it, arguing that the medieval book itself can also serve as a trope of medievalism.
DiPietro hails the books present in the video game series The Elder Scrolls as its greatest claim to medievalism, describing the “veritable book culture” created across its games (p. 202). She asserts exceptionalism to the series, differentiating the books in The Elder Scrolls with their “realistic-looking leather covers with interactive capabilities, visibility on bookshelves, and accru[al of] weight in one's ‘inventory’” from those in another neomedieval game, Dragon Age: Origins (2009), in which books are “quickly relegated to the ether of the user interface” (BioWare, 2009; DiPietro, 2013, pp. 202–203). DiPietro's interest lies more in the styles and narratives of the books in The Elder Scrolls than their materiality—she draws fruitful comparisons with medieval texts—but her observations about the look and visibility of the books provide an impetus for a larger study of the materiality of the medieval book in video games, which this paper undertakes.
Although DiPietro seeks to elevate The Elder Scrolls above Dragon Age: Origins (2009), the series actually participates in a larger trend. The inclusion of the codex as a symbol in what Toswell calls the “useful shorthand” of medievalism is shared across neomedieval (also known as high-fantasy) role-playing games (RPGs). In order to examine this larger trend, this study will analyze three video game series in the neomedieval RPG genre rather than focusing on a single series like DiPietro. The three series studied here are Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls (Bethesda Game Studios, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2006, 2011), CD Projekt Red's The Witcher (CD Projekt Red, 2007, 2011, 2015), and Electronic Arts’ Dragon Age (BioWare, 2009, 2011, 2014).
These three series were chosen for this study because they all include multiple games and were developing and releasing games during roughly the same span of years (2006–2015). Since the three series share a genre and an audience and influence each other over the course of their development, studying them together will highlight the shared design decisions by which each series constructs a neomedieval fantasy world, though the game worlds in which each series takes place are unrelated. Examining these design decisions will contribute to the greater project of studying medievalism in video games (Kline, 2013).
This article aims to analyze the design decisions of the games in representing the materiality of the medieval book for the player as part of the neomedieval gestalt of the game setting. To this end, in the first subsection, I will introduce the three games’ settings and describe the material book culture they depict, reconsidering DiPietro's conclusions in light of all three series. Then, in the latter two subsections, I will draw on Hawreliak's methods for analyzing video games through multimodal semiotics (2018) as I consider the games’ approach to representing the materiality of individual objects in two different semiotic modes: still image and text. Multimodal studies allow us to consider multiple communicative or semiotic modes and the ways they influence each other when used in conjunction (Jewitt, 2014a, 2014b; Kress, 2005, 2009; O’Halloran, 2004; Schmidt & Bateman, 2011). Hawreliak brings multimodal studies together with game studies because video games “rely upon the communicative resources of a wide array of modes” (2018, p. 6) which makes multimodality “particularly useful for tackling the semiotic and rhetorical complexity of videogames” (2018, p. 15). As I will argue, when these high-fantasy RPGs invest in the materiality of the medieval book as one of the building block tropes of medievalism, they aim to evoke rather than strictly to simulate the material experience of the medieval book and its auxiliary materials. The games rely on multiple semiotic modes to evoke materiality for the player—that is, both image and text play a role in producing the player's experience of the book in the neomedieval game world.
Medieval Materiality in the Game Setting
The three game series chosen for this study share a genre and each constructs a neomedieval fantasy world. The Elder Scrolls takes place on a continent called Tamriel inhabited by humans, standard fantasy races like elves and orcs, and beastfolk like Argonians (reptilian) or Khajiit (feline); the divine entities of Tamriel's two pantheons play major roles in the games’ storylines; a player designs their own unique character to play, choosing among the many fantasy races of the inhabitants. The games of The Witcher are based on the novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and take place in a world inhabited by elves, gnomes, dwarves, humans and supernatural predators like werewolves and vampires; the eponymous character, the Witcher, is a magically enhanced warrior tasked with defending citizens from these supernatural predators; in The Witcher games, players play as the main character from the novels, Geralt of Rivia. The Dragon Age games are set in a world named Thedas inhabited by elves, dwarves, humans, and a large horned race called the Qunari; in Thedas, using magic requires contact with a magical plane called the Fade, inhabited by spirits and demons, and the high risks associated with doing magic drive much of the games’ plot; in Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), players design their own unique characters to play and in Dragon Age II (2011), players play as a scripted character, a human named Hawke. While the game settings differ in some respects, all three series draw from Toswell's tropes of medievalism, taking place among castles and knights, magic and supernatural creatures; all three series also include leather-bound codices, scraps of parchment, wax seals, quills and ink, and other trappings of medieval book culture in their fantasized neomedieval worlds.
As DiPietro notes, the book culture in The Elder Scrolls is one of “mixed messages on book production,” including both evidence of a robust writing culture and of publishers for the in-game books (p. 203). Though DiPietro suggests these mixed messages point toward the technological transition to printing in the late 15th century, the simpler explanation is that the coexistence of parchment and paper, of printing and writing, in these game worlds is one of convenience rather than an attempt to correspond with the late 15th-century technological transition. Just as costumes and music from many different centuries and cultures coexist without comment at a typical Renaissance Faire, multiple technologies of the book coexist in a neomedieval game world.
Like The Elder Scrolls, both Dragon Age and The Witcher games include references both to paper and parchment/vellum. The distinction is not made explicit, and one might fear that the games had gone the way of the Harry Potter books in treating parchment as if it were merely a particularly high-grade paper rather than highly-processed animal skin. Writing supports are never so important to the plot of the games that the distinction becomes relevant but in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) players can dismantle found parchment into the crafting material leather, used for crafting armor. This affordance, while it stretches—so to speak—the imagination as far as the reversibility of the parchment-making process goes, at least reveals knowledge of the animal origin of parchment.
Writing culture is strong across all three settings. In The Elder Scrolls, many available books are explicitly labeled manuscripts. Scribe is a recognized profession and one of the in-world books is specifically about a scribe and his enchanted quill. Scribes are just as prominent in The Witcher, sending the player on quests to procure feathers for improved quills, and temple libraries employ scribes to copy and illuminate volumes. In Dragon Age: Origins (2009), players can find generic manuscripts as random loot to be sold to vendors for cash in addition to specific books labeled manuscripts; one of the religious texts encountered is explicitly an “illuminated” copy. In Dragon Age II (2011) a writing desk takes pride of place in the player's house and in the epilogue of Dragon Age: Origins (2009), a researcher is reported to have distributed his cult research to scholars in manuscript form. Writing culture is entrenched in these games, especially in the case of religious institutions copying sacred documents, but also in the prevalence of professional scribes.
Printing exists alongside this writing culture, as DiPietro notes. Not only do books name their publishers but printed broadsheets announce the player character's most recent exploits in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006). Both Dragon Age and The Witcher games also include references to printing technology and infrastructure alongside the robust writing culture. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), a list of prisoners and their sentences lying on a desk in a prison includes an entry for a man “imprisoned … for printing and distributing pamphlets slandering the Redanian nation.” Players can also encounter two different editions of a book, the “Ducal Chronicle.” The available excerpt from the first edition introduces the ducal couple and their two daughters. The second edition, released after the eldest daughter's exile, shows the same excerpt with all mention of the eldest daughter expunged. Not only does the printing press exist nebulously in the setting, but the practice of editing and errata is also present and contributes to narrative building. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), one of the player character's companions is a popular author whose book “Hard in Hightown,” a noir-flavored crime novel, appears all over the setting and can be discovered chapter by chapter. Other characters refer to the novel as a “penny dreadful.” An entire minor questline revolves around tracking down a “hack writer” who has been releasing unauthorized sequels.
Given the penny dreadful's 19th-century origin and that of noir fiction in the middle of the 20th century, the appearance of these details in Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) cannot be said, like the mere presence of printing in a game setting, to contribute to a depiction of late-15th-century technological transition. As with other elements in neomedieval games, player familiarity is more important than strict historical accuracy: anachronism is permissible as long as it enhances immersion (Alcázar, 2011, p. 320; Venegas Ramos, 2020, p. 6). With player immersion as the ultimate goal, the burden of historical simulation can be cast aside in favor of amusing storylines and evocative design using both paper and parchment, both manuscript and print.
Medieval Materiality in the Game Asset
The transition in nomenclature from “computer game” to “video game” marks the importance placed on image as the essential semiotic mode in video games. Assets—the artistic representations of creatures, environment, and objects in the game world—are expensive to create and require the work of specialist artists; most importantly, their design is always an interpretative process mediated by human experience and therefore attuned to the affective elements of design (Hawreliak, 2018, p. 52). Danish author Per Mollerup's explanation of pretense design, that is, a design that intentionally diverges from the object's purpose, is useful in thinking about the asset design used in video games. Mollerup (2019) argues that the appearance of a designed object is rooted in symbolism and aesthetics, a sort of visual rhetoric. In this visual rhetoric, rhetorical logos becomes the object's functional design, ethos the elements of the design that reassure users about its being made competently, and pathos the affective elements of the design (p. 32). Pathos is as important in the design of the image assets in games as it is in the stories told through gameplay: immersing the player in the game world requires an appeal to emotions.
In the case of medieval materiality, evocative image asset design leans on the scroll, the wax seal, the writing support yellowed by age, the cracked leather binding of a book, the lettering made by a flat nib, and other signs that the book culture in question is different from our modern one. The most enduring example of these symbols at work can be seen in inventory icons. Inventory icons, a very small and therefore comparatively inexpensive image asset, have played this role since the earliest The Elder Scrolls games in the 1990s. In the player's inventory, a scroll icon might represent a map, a codex might represent a history book, and a blank page might represent a sketch found while exploring; these icons provide relatively little visual detail but still serve to differentiate the materiality of game objects from that of their modern counterparts. In later games, these same objects might be further represented—a map can be consulted, a book read—through separate, more detailed assets accessed by clicking on the inventory icon.
Some objects might afford interaction in the game environment, that is, when interacting with the world rather than consulting the contents of one's backpack or inventory. In The Witcher series, available quests in visited towns are communicated via a notice board, hung with posters and notes, some official, some personal. A player can walk up to the notice board and click on assets representing notes in order to be presented with their text and add that quest to their journal. The assets themselves only represent the quest notes since they are intentionally illegible, but the method of interacting with them is more immersive than clicking on inventory icons and the assets themselves are far more detailed, showing uneven paper edges, stains, age spots, creases, and calligraphy. The representation of quests on a board in the game environment was popular enough with the shared audience of the games that Dragon Age: Origins (2009) uses the same conceit and a “mod” (fan-made software that can be added to modify a game) exists for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2014) that represents its quests on a notice board asset taken from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011; Talbot, 2021).
Even though The Elder Scrolls does not natively include notice boards, its final and most popular game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2014) represents all textual media with image assets in the game environment in addition to icons in the inventory. The text—in a suitably antiquated but legible font—of each document is projected on an image asset. The image asset for closed journals, in particular, is notable for its distinctive envelope flap and fastening. Each of these texts, provided they are longer than a single opening, can be paged through. In practice, the number of pages remaining shown in the asset is always the same: the projected text has changed but the image asset is repeated. That said, the image asset is also very detailed, showing the texture variation of parchment. Some assets for letters, those from nobles generally, have red wax seals. Some of the books have blind-stamped leather covers or gold leaf details.
However many details may be included in the assets, however, the purpose is always the player's experience rather than fidelity to a historical object or materiality. Venegas Ramos’ (2020) description of the same phenomenon in video game cities highlights the tradeoffs made in representing historical objects and places in video games: They are meaningless cities. They only make sense inside the narrative and the present [sic] of the ludo-fictional world of the game. The cities are the chest of a hidden treasure. There is no infrastructure. They are so bound to the present that, once the player has abandon [sic] them, they will be swallowed by the earth or the sea. (p. 4)
In addition to inventory icons and objects in the game environment, a game's user interface (UI), that is, the buttons and information pages a player uses to interact with or learn information about the game, can also evoke the materiality of the book. A game's UI can be particularly evocative because, as Barr et al. (2007) explain, a game's UI “mediates all conduct in the game world” (pp. 180, 191–193). The UI of The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) places the Load Saved Game and Start New Game buttons on an ornate scroll; a similar asset is used in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) except this time the scroll is shown to be sitting on a table with a candlestick and glass bottles holding it flat. The game journal, that is, the part of the UI recording what the player character has done so far and what quests are still pending, in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002) appears projected on an image asset of a book. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), the player's inventory list is projected on an image asset of a clipboard and notifications about new quests appear on ornate paper decorated with a border in a style reminiscent of woodblock prints. The Witcher (2007) is a notable departure from this trend: only area maps have the appearance of drawings on parchment. The trend of book UI culminates in that of Dragon Age: Origins (2009), in which UI elements including lore, inventory, map, and quest journal all appear as entries in a single book.
The book UI is, in Rune Klevjer's (2019) phrase, an interactive depiction rather than an object in a virtual environment. Like a chess piece, however detailed, is still a representation of information about the game (king at D4) and its exact position on the board (centered on D4 or not) does not matter, the book UI evokes rather than embodies player inventory, journal, and found documents (pp. 736–739). The book UI trend in these games from the 1990s to the 2000s is a form of skeuomorphic design, though not an uncomplicated example of that design philosophy. The point of skeuomorphism at its most basic is to make a design look familiar to a new user so that the affordances of that design are clear (Mollerup, 2019, p. 122). As Mollerup explains, skeuomorphism “denotes something false and connotes something true. A Mac computer's trash bin icon denotes an analog trash bin (false) and connotes ejection (true)” (p. 52). Calling the book UI skeuomorphic is not incorrect—it denotes a codex (false) and connotes reading information (true)—but it stops short of describing it completely. Does designing a UI that resembles a medieval book actually make it look familiar to a new user? The book UI is at once familiar in its codex form and exciting in its evocation of foreign materiality.
By 2011, with the release of new games in all three series, the book UI had been replaced by the more minimalist and flat design philosophy then gaining prominence in digital design (“Skeuomorphism is dead, long live skeuomorphism,” n.d.). With the exception of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), whose strong emphasis on image assets has been mentioned above, the later games do not rely on image assets for books nearly as much. The materiality of the medieval book is still very present in these later games, however, despite the minimalist turn in the interface; the materiality is merely evoked using a different semiotic mode.
Medieval Materiality in the Imagination
The continuing popularity of text-based interactive fiction, an early type of computer game still relevant because of Twine (twinery.org) and similar tools streamlining its creation, demonstrates the richness of text as a semiotic mode. Text evokes images from the player's imagination without prescribing specific details (Hawreliak, 2018, pp. 46–47). As effective as images can be in evoking materiality, they are expensive to produce and have diminishing returns when the created asset has limited relevance to the plot of a game. As Venegas Ramos notes, it is common to constrain explorable world space in a historicizing video game in order to maximize detail density and player immersion (2020, p. 2). The same kind of tradeoff is relevant in decisions about image asset creation. Where an image is insufficient or expensive as a semiotic mode, text is a viable alternative.
Textual media encountered in-world (letters, diaries, notes, novels) are a common storytelling tool especially in RPGs, even when those RPGs are set in the present or future rather than in the middle ages. A character exploring an abandoned ship might find an alien captain's communication terminal left open or a college student might find her roommate's diary (Hawreliak, 2018, p. 47). High-fantasy RPGs are no exception: players in these games also encounter textual media. While in The Witcher series, some notes may first appear as assets on notice boards, and in Dragon Age: Origins (2009) the text is projected on the book UI, both series generally serve the text of these ephemeral written documents to players in dialogue boxes without a visual cue that one text is written in a book, another on a torn page, a third as graffiti carved into a wall. 2 Inventory icons for the texts might show a miniature codex or scroll or scrap but the text itself is not projected on an image. Instead, the game encourages the player to imagine the object behind the transcription in the dialogue box.
Though the games provide no detailed assets for them, these texts are differentiated from each other through their titles and descriptions. In Dragon Age: Origins (2009), the player is tasked with finding a grimoire for a companion. The player never sees the grimoire represented in the game environment as an asset: it goes straight from a wooden chest into the player's inventory, where it is represented by a codex icon. The player's access to its materiality is in its description: “a heavy grimoire, bound in black leather.” In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), players encounter many short texts, including a “Water-damaged letter,” a “Torn piece of paper,” “Notes written in a shaky hand,” “Loose scraps of paper,” a “Letter written on elegant stationery,” and “Heavily faded notes by Hieronymus on the witcher Elgar.” The inventory icon may in fact have no relationship with the materiality of the object described in the title: “Water-damaged letter” and “Loose scraps of paper” are attached to an inventory icon of a codex, though icons for loose pages are available. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), though all found texts are projected on image assets, in the case of the “Ruined trailbook” or “Tattered journal” the description of the object supplements and contradicts the standard image asset for a book. 3 Thus the visual sign of the inventory icon or the book image asset is eclipsed by the textual sign of the description. The player's imagination supplements the game's assets.
The materiality of found objects is not only present in their titles; the body text served in the dialogue boxes can also contribute to constructing the player's imagined material experience. Even if no expense were spared and individual assets were tailored to each text, the need for accessible and legible text would complicate the visual representation of, say, a lunatic's mad scribblings. In both Dragon Age and The Witcher games, the length of found texts is reduced by making note that some parts are illegible, implying that they could not be transcribed. Of course, this enables heightened narrative tension when the looked-for detail happens to be obscured, but these patches of illegibility also inform the player's imagination of the material object as a unique document with its own provenance history. In Dragon Age: Origins (2009), a found journal has been annotated by a previous reader: these annotations are appended below the text of the journal under “(Scribbled in corner).” A minor questline involves tracking down a forger after finding multiple copies of his spurious book on magic and reading the excited comments in the margins by a series of hoodwinked scholars each convinced they have found a groundbreaking source. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), an advisor gives the player a copy of a novel with her own marginal annotations. In serving all in-game textual media on image assets, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2014) loses some flexibility in representing the many kinds of possible marks on a page.
The use of text to supplement image assets in these games reveals that the materiality of the medieval book the games strive to represent is not only the appearance of yellowed parchment, leather bindings, or wax seals but also the experience of interpreting ambiguous handwriting or speculating about annotations. Rather than historians who perform heroics, those historian detectives of popular literature and film (De Groot, 2016, pp. 60–65), the player characters of these games are instead empowered to become heroes who, in passing, perform the work of historians in interpreting documents and artifacts.
Conclusion
Neomedieval games evoke the middle ages using the tropes of medievalism, including quests, magic, knights, and in this case, the materiality of the medieval book as a marker of its otherness. Using the medieval book and its auxiliary materials as a trope of medievalism does not mean corresponding with any given historical period, not even the late 15th-century technical transition from writing to print culture; instead, the games synthesize a variety of details from separate historical periods into a coherent neomedieval book culture that supports player immersion. The player's relationship with this neomedieval book culture is fostered through representations of the materiality of the medieval book, though this materiality can be represented in images or in text, in the game environment or in the UI. Image assets of books both increase player familiarity in representing the form of the codex and also excite players with the opportunity to interact with foreign materials and textures. Players who encounter found texts as bearers of narrative and who are given the opportunity to evaluate the provenance and trustworthiness of documents play historians even as they play heroes. Handling manuscripts and deciphering texts is an important component of the fantasy sought by the audience of neomedieval RPGs.
While this paper has followed Venegas Ramos (2020) in discussing “player immersion” as the goal of the design decisions about how to represent the materiality of the medieval book, a more nuanced discussion of user experience with respect to video game aesthetics would take into account the inherent slipperiness of the word “immersion” (Hawreliak, 2018, pp. 130–133) and the range of entertainment reactions (Possler & Klimmt, 2023). The modal dissonance produced when the image asset does not match the textual description of the artifact (e.g., “Water-damaged letter”), requiring the player to supplement the asset with their imagination, may provoke analytical rather than intuitive processing which, though not immersive, may nevertheless generate a hedonic entertainment experience (Possler & Klimmt, 2023, p. 150). Likewise, while this article has focused on the semiotic modes communicating the materiality of the medieval book and their coherence or dissonance with each other, a larger multimodal study could consider the interaction of more semiotic modes in the video games with their representations of the medieval book, for instance, the dissonance created by sound effects playing when new entries are added to a UI that purposely resembles a physical journal.
The description of the inkwell object on the wiki for The Elder Scrolls offers a shrewd summary of the place of materiality in evoking the medieval book for players and building a neomedieval game world: “Inkwell is a miscellaneous item in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It has no value or use, other than for aesthetics” (“Inkwell [Skyrim],” n.d.). The inkwell has no value (cannot be sold to vendors in the game world) and no use (has no affordances of giving as a gift, using as a crafting material, or other interactions with game mechanics) but its aesthetic value is more than enough reason for its inclusion in the game, for the expense involved in creating its image asset. What the neomedieval RPG offers players is not just the excitement of interacting with nonplayer characters, of completing quests, of fighting monsters, of performing magic, but also of inhabiting an inviting foreign world and interacting with its material culture, including its book culture.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
