Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #MAMG20
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1 #MAMG20 Welcome all! I’m a historian who works on perceptions of the crusades in the modern era. I increasingly think that games – along with films & TV shows – can be considered as a primary source for forming what the crusades are thought to be. How so? 
2 #MAMG20 The crusades and crusaders are common features of medievalesque digital games. Crusading in games, however, usually consists of bitesize ‘icons’, or tropes, of crusader medievalism. Icons, because they stand symbolically for larger sets of meanings.
3 #MAMG20 @t_winnerling has talked about the development of a ‘historicised iconography’ for historical games more broadly, and we see this with the crusades. Crusading is disassembled into icons & deployed in games – in fact, across modern mass media entertainment.
1| #MAMG20 Hi everyone from Ionian University Greece, and we are going to talk about a game in Byzantine era. “Akritas” A joint work of HILAB/ISDLAB, in the context of ANTIKLEIA (antikleia.gr) project, with a pinch of teaching history (elementary and high school).
2| #MAMG20 If you spend your school years in Greece you probably hated Byzantine history. Byzantium was always presented a little bit too theocratic, too much conservative, too much… boring. What if we could change this for students? What if students found Byzantium interesting?
3| #MAMG20 Remember Stephen Poole “The purpose of a video game … to offer the gift of play”. So this is what we want the students to do. Play and may be this way get more interested in Byzantine history. So who was Akritas (Ακρίτας)? Who were Akrites (Ακρίτες)?
1 #MAMG20 Historical settings in games are being perceived as authentic if they correspond with the image of history players and creators have. In case of the Middle Ages, these images often date back to medievalism of the 19th century rather than actual historical research.
2 #MAMG20 Experiencing history as authentic is closely linked to von Rankes’ claim to tell history ‘as it really was’. If images of the MA are considered as ‘true’, they were reproduced and solidified in cultural memory, which then again condition personal and cultural identity.
3 #MAMG20 J. Assmann calls cultural communication ‘identity concrete’. Therefore, identity is connected to spaces of memory (Erinnerungsräume/Zeitinseln). Certain fortified images of history can be such spaces. Questioning those spaces can be perceived as an attack on identity.
1 #MAMG20 Historical games are designed & function as Historical Problem Spaces. The HPS is a media-sensitive, design-focused analysis & design framework I have been developing over the past 8 years. (journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/historical…)
2 #MAMG20 Main point: the problem space designers choose to design (whose problem space?) will greatly affect how the game presents historical topics. I'll try to show that w/ three games w/ HPS about medieval politics: Age of Empires 2; Medieval 2 Total War, & Crusader Kings 2
3 #MAMG20 HPS Components: *Player agent w/ some power and a *goal, operates within *virtual space, containing *elements that enable and/or constrain player. Thus player adopts goal-oriented *strategies & behaviors, & makes *choices. All shaped by *genre conventions.
